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“Written by an eminent criminologist, this book provides students with one
of the field’s most thoughtful and comprehensive surveys of the extant
criminological literature. Students will certainly enjoy reading Dr
Walklate’s offering and instructors will greatly appreciate its pedagogical
value. I highly recommend this book to anyone who teaches introductory
criminology courses.”

—Walter S. DeKeseredy, Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social

Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of
Sociology, West Virginia University, USA

Criminology: The Basics is written by one of the most respected

criminologists working in Britain today. In this extended and updated third
edition, Walklate discusses old controversies and new fields of inquiry with
considerable aplomb. The book is written in an accessible but intellectual
rigorous style that is perfectly suited for undergraduate students keen to
learn more about the history of our discipline, its current state of play and
what the future may hold for criminology as it becomes more intellectually
diverse and global in its reach. Every criminologist should own a copy.

—Simon Winlow, Professor of Criminology, Teesside University, UK, and

Director of the British Society of Criminology Critical Criminology
Network

Criminology: The Basics provides an excellent grounding in criminology

for those new to the discipline. The latest edition is a comprehensive and
engaging introductory text, which has its strengths in both the accessibility
of the discussion for new students, and the ability to capture various
complexities and debates, encouraging the reader to think critically through
the lens of a ‘Criminological Imagination’. This book is one that is likely to
be returned to again and again.

—Claire Fox, Senior Lecturer in Criminology and BA Criminology

Programme Director, University of Manchester, UK

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CRIMINOLOGY

Criminology is a discipline that is constituted by its subject matter rather

than being bound by an agreed set of concepts or way of thinking. This
fully updated third edition of Criminology: The Basics is a lively and
engaging guide to this compelling and complex subject. Topics covered
include:

• the history and development of criminology

• myths about crime and offenders
• the search for criminological explanation
• victims of crime and state crime
• crime prevention, cybercrime, and the future of crime control
• criminology and intersectionality

This edition also includes new sections on genocide, terrorism, cultural

victimology, and Westo-centric thinking.

Concise and accessible, this book utilises chapter summaries, exercise

questions, and lists of further reading to provide a perfect introduction to
this subject.

Sandra Walklate is Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University

of Liverpool, UK, Professor of Criminology at Monash University,
Australia, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Justice, QUT, Australia.

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The Basics

ANIMAL ETHICS
TONY MILLIGAN

ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION
JAMES S. BIELO

ARCHAEOLOGY (second edition)

CLIVE GAMBLE

THE BIBLE AND LITERATURE

NORMAN W. JONES

BRITISH POLITICS
BILL JONES

CAPITALISM
DAVID COATES

CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
MURRAY RAE

FINANCE (third edition)

ERIK BANKS

FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY
SANDIE TAYLOR

JAPAN
CHRISTOPHER P. HOOD

LANGUAGE (second edition)

R.L. TRASK
NARRATIVE
BRONWEN THOMAS

POETRY (third edition)

JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT

THE QUR’AN (second edition)

MASSIMO CAMPANINI

SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS AND DISABILITY (second edition)

JANICE WEARMOUTH

SPORT MANAGEMENT
ROBERT WILSON AND MARK PIEKARZ

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CRIMINOLOGY
THE BASICS
THIRD EDITION

Sandra Walklate

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Third edition published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 Sandra Walklate

The right of Sandra Walklate to be identified as author of this work has

been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.

Second edition published by Routledge 2011

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Walklate, Sandra, author.
Title: Criminology: the basics / Sandra Walklate.
Description: Third edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge,
2016. |
Series: The basics | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016011640 | ISBN 9781138803435 (hardback) | ISBN
9781138803442 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315753706 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Criminology.
Classification: LCC HV6025 .W353 2016 | DDC 364—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011640

ISBN: 978-1-138-80343-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-80344-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-75370-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Aldus and ScalaSans

by codeMantra

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Contents

List of figures and tables

Preface and acknowledgments

1 What is criminology?
Introduction
What is crime?
The emergence of criminology as a discipline: The European connection
The criminological other
The development of criminology as a discipline: The American
connection
Summary
Victimology: The holocaust connection?
The victimological other
Summary
Criminology, criminological perspectives, and Harold Shipman
Psychiatry and crime: Inside the subconscious mind
Psychology and crime: The search for individual differences
Sociology: Outside the criminal mind
Feminism, serial killers, and masculinity
Summary: What have we learned?
Conclusion: Thinking critically
Exercise
Recommendations for further reading

2 Counting crime
Introduction
Official information about crime: Criminal statistics
The three ‘R’s: Recognising, reporting, and recording
Official information about crime: Criminal victimisation statistics
 The fourth ‘R’: The respondent
Criminological research knowledge
Making sense of the ‘fear of crime’: Meaning and understanding
Self-report studies
Other records
Summary
Counting ‘invisible’ crimes
The problem of comparison
The problem of attrition and the ‘justice gap’
Summary and conclusion
Exercise
Recommendations for further reading

3 How much crime? Challenging myths about crime, offenders, and

victims
Introduction
Dispelling myths about crime
Crime and everyday life
Felson’s fallacies
How much crime?
The nature and extent of crime: Ordinary crime—‘crime of the streets’
How much crime? Crime behind closed doors
The nature and extent of crime: ‘Crime of the suites’
Example 1: The Bhopal disaster 1984
Example 2: The war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib prison
Example 3: The Rwandan genocide 1994
Summary and conclusion
Exercise
Recommendations for further reading

4 The search for criminological explanation

Introduction
A word on theory and explanation
Rational choice theory
Social control theory
 Relative deprivation
How do these different theories perform in relation to the evidence?
Looking at the evidence: The question of gender
Hegemonic masculinity and crime
Looking at the evidence: Finding a place for state crime?
A word on cultural criminology
Summary and conclusion
Exercise
Suggestions for further reading

5 Thinking about the victim of crime

Introduction
What does the term ‘victim’ mean?
Understanding the patterning of criminal victimisation
Lifestyle and criminal victimisation
Patriarchy and criminal victimisation
Hegemonic masculinity and criminal victimisation
Understanding the impact of crime
Victims and the criminal justice process
Why do some victims get more attention than others?
Hate crime and genocide
Is there scope for a cultural victimology?
Summary and conclusion
Exercise
Recommendations for further reading

6 Crime, power, and global relations: An introduction to critical

criminology
Introduction: The rich get richer and the poor get prison
Crimes of the suites: Problems of definition
Nelken’s ambiguities
Exercise
Criminal victimisation and crime of the suites
Summary
How has criminology attempted to explain crimes of the suites?
 Marxist criminology
Radical criminology
Critical criminology
Criminology and crimes of the suites: Happy or unhappy bedfellows?
Terrorism: A topic of substance for critical criminology?
Summary and conclusion
Exercise
Suggestions for further reading

7 A question of justice
Introduction
What is justice?
Natural justice
Due process
Crime control
Social justice
Exercise
Criminal justice systems
Criminal justice: Underlying principles
Criminal justice: Discretion
Summary
Criminal justice and victims: Therapeutic justice
Exercise
Conclusion
Exercise
Further reading

8 Crime prevention and the future of crime control

Introduction
What does prevention mean?
Trends in crime prevention
Offender-centred strategies
Victim-centred strategies
Environment-centred strategies
Community-centred strategies
 Integration strategies
Structural dimensions to crime prevention: Crime of the streets, crime of
the suites, and crime behind closed doors
Crimes behind closed doors: Community, gender, ethnicity, and crime
prevention
Gender and crime prevention
Ethnicity and crime prevention
Summary
Structural dimensions to community crime prevention: Crime of the
suites
Crime prevention: From the local to the global
Conclusion
Exercise
Suggestions for further reading

9 Developing your criminological imagination

Introduction
Growth in crime? Growth in criminology?
Criminology, criminal justice policy and global trends
Criminology and risk
Criminology and westo-centric thinking
Criminology and intersectionality
Conclusion
Recommendations for further reading

Glossary of terms
Bibliography
Index

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LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

1.1 Different understandings of what crime is.

1.2 A typology of serial killing: based on the work of Holmes and Holmes
(1998).
2.1 How to make sense of findings on the fear of crime: elderly women.
2.2 How to make sense of findings on the fear of crime: young males.

Tables

1.1 Differing views on Harold Shipman

3.1 Self-identified ethnicity (numbers) of the prison population (Adapted
from Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System, A Ministry of
Justice Publication Under Section 95 of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act,
November 2013, p. 100)
4.1 How do different theories match with the evidence?

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Third edition

This book is intended to introduce both the lay reader and the prospective
student to the issues and dilemmas that exist within the discipline of
criminology. As hopefully the reader will discover, criminology is not an
easy or a straightforward area of analysis to distil into one basic format. It is
not like politics or sociology. They are disciplines whose basic concepts and
ways of thinking (like political institutions, concepts of justice, or voting
behaviour in the case of politics, or the structure of society, social class or
questions of identity in the case of sociology) are agreed upon by those
working within them. The debates that exist within those disciplines reflect
how to make best sense of the polity on the one hand or society on the
other. Criminology is different. It is an area of analysis that is not
constituted by an agreed upon set of concepts or ways of thinking but is
constituted by its subject matter: crime. As a result, psychologists,
sociologists, lawyers, and politicians all claim to have something to say
about crime but they do not all speak the same language or necessarily
share in the same understanding of what counts as crime. So trying to offer
a ‘basic’ introduction to an area of analysis like this is neither easy nor
straightforward.
There is, of course, another difficulty here if the reader thinks about the
question of what counts as crime. Whilst those interested in politics,
sociology, or psychology can talk to each other across cultures (language
difficulties notwithstanding) because they share in a common understanding
of their discipline, criminologists do not find that so easy because what
might be criminal in one country is certainly not in another. As a result, the
problems for the discipline and the policies that might flow from the focus
of the discipline in different countries can vary enormously. A book like this
cannot capture all of this diversity. This book is written by someone who is
most familiar with the discipline of criminology as it has unfolded in the
U.K. over the last 30 years, and as a consequence, it is inevitably Anglo-
centric. In addition, because the author works within a sociological frame of
reference and has spent much of her time working with and on victims of
crime, that too structures what has been included and excluded from what
might be considered ‘basic’. The reader should therefore read the pages that
follow with these issues very much in mind. All of these observations
notwithstanding, it is certainly hoped that the reader gets a sense of the
challenges offered by criminology as an area of investigation. A challenge
that should at a minimum leave the reader with a sense that common sense
and media presentations of crime, the criminal, and the victim are often
misplaced, but hopefully with much more than this. The overall intention is
to encourage the reader to think critically about what it is that the media and
politicians have to say about crime and in thinking critically, to tempt you
to read, or study further, about the issues that this book raises for you. If
you are reading this book to look for answers then you will be disappointed!
My thanks go to the anonymous reviewers who offered comments on the
second edition and who took the time and the patience to offer me valuable
feedback on its strengths and weaknesses. Their independent comments
have proved to be invaluable in putting this edition together. I would also
like to acknowledge the support of Hannah Catterall and Tom Sutton at
Routledge who waited patiently for the delivery of this third edition. The
faults that remain are my own.
Professor Sandra Walklate
Clawddnewydd
March 2016

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1 WHAT IS CRIMINOLOGY?

The purpose of this chapter is to get a sense of criminology as an academic

subject. In order to do this we shall explore some features of the origins of
the discipline and how those features still influence what it is that
criminologists do, and do not do, today. In particular, this chapter will
explore popular media images of crime and offer good reasons as to why
those images are misplaced when compared with the historical development
of criminology, and its sister discipline, victimology. This exploration will
help us understand how the boundaries of the discipline have been set and
who is included and excluded by those boundaries. At the end of this
chapter we shall use a case study, that of the U.K. serial murderer Harold
Shipman, to establish the extent to which the boundaries of criminological
and victimological knowledge can help us make sense of behaviour like
this.

INTRODUCTION

Before it is possible to say what criminology is, it is important to have some

understanding of what it is not. Disciplines like politics, sociology,
economics, or psychoanalysis are held together by some common
agreement on their subject matter. In the case of politics, an understanding
of different political processes; for sociology, the structure of society; for
economics, the nature of economies; or in the case of psychoanalysis, the
individual psyche. This common agreement gives these disciplines their
central focus regardless of the social or legal context in which they are
practiced. Of course, that social or legal context may add variety to the
kinds of analyses those various disciplines offer but the conceptual and
analytical frameworks within which the disciplines operate remain very
similar. The same cannot be said for criminology. Criminology is inevitably
a different creature since in some respects its focus is dependent upon how
crime itself is brought into being in different social and legal contexts. So
what might be understood as crime, and as criminal, in France may vary
from how that is understood in the United States. Appreciating and
understanding the importance of differences like these is the central
challenge of a book of this kind for both the author and the reader. There is,
however, another challenge. This lies within the potential influence of
contemporary media images of crime. How the media represents crime,
what constitutes crime and the criminal, and what the criminologist actually
does can be, and frequently are, different. A key issue arises then around
understanding the extent to which such media images gel with what we
think we ‘know’ about crime and what criminologists ‘know’ about crime.
The subject matter of crime is a very popular source of entertainment.
Indeed for many people what they see on the television or what they read in
the newspapers is their only source of information about crime since,
despite variable crime rates over the last 30 years or so, most people most
of the time have no experience of their own about crime or the criminal
justice process. This makes media images of crime potentially very
powerful especially in equipping individuals with ideas about what it is that
criminologists do. However, the presence of Sherlock Holmes, Inspector
Poirot, crime scene investigators (“CSI”), other ‘detective’ stories, and the
forensic psychologists, (“The Mentalist” and so on) popularised in the
media notwithstanding, what these people claim to do, how crime is dealt
with in ‘real’ life, and what criminologists actually spend their time doing
are quite distinct activities. In particular, criminology is not concerned with
ways of catching criminals. That is the work on the one hand of a good
police officer and on the other a good supply of information from the
general public. Criminology is much more concerned with explaining the
cause(s) of crime. However, how it does so will very much depend on what
kind of criminologist you are and what kind of theory you choose to work
with. In Chapter 4 we shall discuss the role that theory plays in
characterising different criminology.
Paul Rock (1986), a British sociologist, once described criminology as a
‘rendezvous’ subject. This is a way of trying to capture a sense of what, if
anything, binds criminologists together. Put simply, it is the subject matter
of crime. Why make an issue of what seems to be fairly obvious? Of course
criminologists are interested in crime. However, exploring this obvious fact
is what makes criminology as an area of investigation somewhat different
than other areas of investigation. Psychologists, for example, explore how
the mind works, sociologists are interested in social structures, economists
in economic systems, historians are interested in how what happened in the
past can help us better understand the present, and so on. Each of these
different disciplines is characterised by the boundaries between them and
how they go about their business in relation to what it is that they study: the
past, society, the mind, the economy, etc. However, within these boundaries
they can all be interested in crime. So what binds criminologists together is
that they share an interest in the same subject matter, crime, but importantly
they do not necessarily share the same way of thinking about how to study
that subject matter. So criminology, as Rock said, is a meeting place for
people with different ways of thinking about crime. It is multidisciplinary.
So it is possible to find psychiatrists, historians, sociologists, psychologists,
lawyers, and economists who all claim the label ‘criminologist’ but might
be looking at the question of crime though very different lenses.
Criminology, as a consequence, is characterised by debate. There are very
few things that criminologists agree upon. One thing, however, that they
may all share concerns about is what it is that we understand by crime. How
is crime to be defined?

WHAT IS CRIME?

Again, this seems an obvious question to ask. We ‘all know’ that crime is
behaviour that breaks the law. However, is it so straightforward? Even the
Sage Dictionary of Criminology (2006) makes it clear that what we mean
by ‘crime’ is highly contested. So what might that contest look like? If we
take law breaking behaviour as the starting point for our understanding of
what we mean by crime, and thereby what it is that criminologists study,
then this raises at least three issues.

• First, if it is the law that defines what it is that is criminal this clearly
separates what we mean by the criminal from the rather more
emotional use of the term. This in some respects is a useful starting
point though it is not without its problems. The term criminal can, on
the one hand, prejudge the guilt or innocence of the offender, and on
the other it can also tap into notions of ‘wickedness’ or ‘evil’ doing. In
these respects, it may be more helpful to say that criminologists are
interested in law breaking behaviour. However, this definition is in
 itself problematic because it gives a status to the law as though this
were above social processes that lie behind the formation of the law,
for example, levels of tolerance and acceptability of different
behaviours. This is clearly not the case.
• So, second, making what is and is not legal the defining characteristic
of what it is that criminologists study places the law at the centre of the
criminological stage. The law defines what is and is not a crime.
However, it must be remembered that over time laws change. Some
behaviours are newly defined as criminal (law breaking) others are
decriminalised (defined as non-law breaking). (Think, for example,
about the changing legal status of ‘being gay’ over time and in
different places). This being the case, the key question that follows is
what processes produce such changes? Moreover, who influences such
changes and how are they implemented? Is it an understanding of these
processes that produces an understanding of crime? This is quite a
different question than a psychologist interested in crime might ask.
They might be much more interested in what kinds of personality types
predispose some individuals to engage in criminal behaviour. Such
behaviour might occur, of course, regardless of the actual content of
the law but may nevertheless be problematic (this is what sociologists
call ‘deviant’ behaviour).
• However, there is a third difficulty in taking the law as defining what
is crime. If this is taken as the defining characteristic of the criminal,
does that mean that criminologists then can only legitimately study
those who have been found guilty of transgressing the law? For many
criminologists, this kind of position would prove to be highly
problematic given its inherently narrow focus on those individuals who
have been caught and successfully prosecuted.
• Following on from this, a fourth problem might be the extent to which
crime has a reality above and beyond the processes that bring crime
into being: the law and the criminal justice process. This has led some
criminologists to argue that because this is so variable in different
social contexts crime has no real meaning outside of those contexts.
For them, sometimes referred to as zemiologists, harm matters more
than crime and we shall return to this later in this book.
So from this discussion it can be seen that what counts as crime and thereby
what criminologists study is neither consistent nor uniform. Moreover, if
the focus of criminology is law-breaking, then this will vary from country
to country and over time. Putting all of this together with the different ways
in which people think about what counts as crime, we can identify at least
six different understandings of what crime is.

Figure 1.1 Different understandings of what crime is.

Figure 1.1 illustrates some of the different ways in which crime can be,
and has been, defined by criminologists. As can be seen, they each in their
different way take the law as a starting point for their understanding of
crime but only the legal understanding takes the criminal code as the
definitive start. Figure 1.1 also illustrates the way in which these different
definitions harness different understandings of what Henry (2006: 78), a
North American criminologist, has called the determining elements of
crime. He suggests that there are three:
 1. Harm (nature, severity, extent of the act committed, and/or the kind of
victim the act has been committed against).
2. Social agreement or consensus (the extent to which there is social
agreement that the victim has been harmed).
3. Official societal response (whether or not there is a law that specifies
the act committed as a crime or not and how those laws are enforced).

So far from being straightforward, defining what crime is can be quite

complex. This complexity arises as a result of a number of questions being
muddled up; what crime is, who the criminal is, and what it is that
criminologists study. (Moreover, Henry’s definition above introduces
another dimension to what it is that criminologists study: the victim of
crime, see also below.) Some of this complexity relates to the fact that this
is a multidisciplinary area of concern and some of it reflects the historical
focus that criminology has had in trying to formulate a general theory of
crime. As a consequence, it is possible to define the subject matter of
criminology in different ways. For example:
Coleman and Norris (2000: 13–14) identify the subject matter of
criminology in the following way:

• An attempt to measure the extent of crime and offenders

• An analysis of the causes of crime
• Understanding how laws are formed
• Understanding how laws are applied
• Understanding issues around punishment
• Crime prevention
• Exploring the impact of crime on victims
• Exploring public attitudes and media presentations of crime

As can be seen, this is quite a wide-ranging list of topics. Newburn (2007:

6) focuses this list by defining criminology as:

• The study of crime

• The study of those who commit crime
• The study of the criminal justice and penal systems
On the other hand, Walklate (2007: 14) defines the key features of
criminology in a different way. She states criminology as a discipline is:

• Held together by one substantive concern: crime.

• It is multidisciplinary so it is important to understand the conceptual
apparatus with which a particular criminologist might be working.
• Criminologists disagree with each other especially over how to ‘solve’
the crime problem; they nevertheless are concerned to offer some
advice on policy.
• What criminologists do sometimes resonates with common sense
thinking about crime but often challenges that thinking.
• All of these features of criminology need to be situated within societies
increasingly preoccupied with crime, risk and insecurity.

If we put these lists together, then it is clear to see that the discipline itself,
if it has claims to such a title, is not only wide-ranging but also highly
stimulating and frustrating in the debates that it generates.
In this book we shall be taking primarily a sociological orientation to
understanding criminology and in so doing we will cover issues that include
problems of measurement, understanding the victim of crime, and looking
at the relationship between criminology and crime prevention amongst
other issues. However, there is one over-riding concern that is implicit to all
of the lists above and in much of criminology. That concern is with trying to
identify and understand the causes of crime.
As Figure 1.1 implies, the importance of formulating a general theory of
crime has led different versions of criminology to resolve the question of
what is crime in different ways, pointing to not only its multidisciplinarity
but also to its theoretical diversity. This emphasises the highly contested
nature of the discipline and what it is that criminologists study. In an effort
to unravel some of this complexity, we shall now consider the history of
criminology in more detail. In order to do that, it is important to appreciate
and understand a central feature that has underpinned much criminological
work: positivism.

THE EMERGENCE OF CRIMINOLOGY AS A DISCIPLINE:

THE EUROPEAN CONNECTION
Criminology, like many other academic disciplines, was driven by the
concerns of the post-Enlightenment period. This was a time in history when
the natural sciences were embraced as constituting a better knowledge base
than religion for understanding and controlling nature (which Bacon, a
philosopher of science, defined as female and a point to which we shall
return in understanding criminology). In their wake, the social sciences
followed suit in looking for ways to better manage (read: control) social
problems. Post the French revolution and Industrial revolution, Auguste
Comte, a French social theorist, was particularly influential in formulating
an early version of sociology (that he called social physics) whose role he
saw as exerting a positive influence on society. This is one way of
understanding the term positivism that was to have so much of an influence
on the emergence of criminology as a discipline.
In criminology positivism has been, and still is, very powerful in defining
what it is that criminologists do and do not study. Criminology embraced
Comte’s understanding of positivism and its historically significant links
with policy in wanting to manage social problems. Criminology also
embraced a more philosophical understanding of positivism in its efforts to
model itself on the natural sciences. That understanding of positivism, a
concern with measuring the appearance of things and on the basis of that
measurement formulating universal explanations of them, was to provide
criminology with the evidential base on which to assert its influence on the
policy-making process. This gave early criminology three central
characteristics: differentiation, pathology, and determinism.

• Differentiation refers to the desire to measure the differences between

individuals and their behaviour.
• Pathology refers to the process of assigning abnormality to those
differences.
• Determinism reflects a concern with understanding how factors
beyond the control of human beings affect their behaviour.

These ideas underpin the work of one of the most famous and influential
criminologists of the nineteenth century, the Italian prison psychiatrist,
Cesare Lombroso.
Lombroso is probably best described as a criminal anthropologist whose
work was very much influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s
theory of evolution has one key law: the law of biogenetics. This law states
that every organism revisits the development of its own species within its
own developmental history. Hence, the human embryo goes through various
stages of development before reaching its humanoid state. However, not all
organisms reach the state predicted by their biological origin; sometimes
there are abnormalities. Darwin referred to this as a state of ‘atavism’: a
throwback to an earlier stage of development. These ideas in general, but
the notion of atavism in particular, appealed to Lombroso in his efforts to
understand and explain the criminal. This emphasis resulted in a strand of
thought referred to as biological positivism.
Whilst working in the prison environment, Lombroso made systematic
observations of prisoners. He noted that criminals shared a number of
common physical attributes: sloping foreheads, receding chins, and
excessively long arms are a few of them. On the basis of these observations,
he constructed four criminal types: the insane, the opportunist, the
passionate, and the born criminal, all of whom shared differently in the
characteristics he observed but only one of them, the born criminal,
constituted the true atavistic type. In other words, what Lombroso was
doing was borrowing Darwin’s ideas and applying them to his observations
in order to offer a general explanation of criminal behaviour. Criminals
were criminals because they were throwbacks to earlier biological forms
that were manifested in physical or mental attributes and resulted in
criminal behaviour.
However odd these ideas might sound in contemporary terms (and it
should be noted that some people would still agree with them) it should be
remembered that these ideas led to rather more liberal interpretations of
punishment. These criminals may be different (differentiation), may be
abnormal (pathology), but they were subject to forces outside of their
control (in this case determined by their biology) and therefore
imprisonment might be a more appropriate punishment than execution, for
example. Moreover, Lombroso’s work set an important agenda for
criminology the legacy of which can still be felt contemporarily in two
ways; first, in the continuing presence of biological positivism and second
in ideas around who is, and who is not, likely to be criminal: the Criminal
Other. These ideas were particularly pertinent in constructing
understandings of female criminal behaviour as we shall see. Looking to
biological explanations of human behaviour is, of course, not peculiar to
criminology and much work through the early part of the twentieth century
took biology as its general starting point for the explanation of all kinds of
behavioural and mental abilities. Indeed, other criminologists, following
Lombroso produced a range of different understandings of the relationship
between biology and crime. For example, some focused on body type and
criminal behaviour, some on the relationship between chromosomal
abnormalities and propensity for criminal behaviour (especially violent
crime), others on understandings of the relationship between personality
type (as an innate feature of a human being) and criminal behaviour, and
more recently some have made observations on the variations in brain wave
imaging available from neuroscience and criminal behaviour. All of which
share in common with Lombroso the three concerns of differentiation,
pathology and determinism.
Perhaps one of the most influential expositions of this kind of work, in
the policy arena in recent years has been the work of the North Americans
Wilson and Herrstein. Their book Crime and Human Nature published in
1985 argued that there were three factors that contributed to criminality: an
individual’s constitution (i.e. their biological make up), the social and
psychological reinforcers they were or were not exposed to (reflecting a
particular understanding of the process of socialisation) and their
conscience (how guilty they felt or did not feel in relation to their
behaviour). Whilst more complex than the ideas of Lombroso of a century
before, biology is still clearly present. Indeed some have argued that the
work of Wilson and Herrstein provided the intellectual support for the rise
in the use of imprisonment as a punishment in the United States from the
late 1980s onwards. The importance of this biological legacy, however, lies
in our understanding of who is assumed to be criminal and who is not. Put
another way, biological positivism puts some crimes and criminals at the
centre of the criminological agenda and ignores others. This is sometimes
referred to as the construction of the ‘Criminological Other’. We shall
explore this more fully.

THE CRIMINOLOGICAL OTHER

On the face of it, biological positivism tells us quite clearly that the criminal
is different than us, and that those differences are observable and
measurable. However, there is a deeper understanding of who this
(different) criminal is clearly derivable from the work of Lombroso. That
understanding can be constructed if we revisit the ideas of Darwin for a
moment. The biogenetic law referred to earlier has some assumptions
deeply embedded within it. Put simply, for Darwin the pinnacle of
evolutionary development is the white, Caucasian, heterosexual male.
Women for Darwin, for example, were closer to nature (because of their
childbearing capabilities) and were therefore less advanced than men. He
went so far as to say that they suffered from ‘arrested development’ because
of their biology. So when Lombroso came to study the female offender with
his colleague Ferraro, they took this presumption as their starting point, i.e.,
that women were arrested in their development in some way. So if the male
criminal was a throwback (that is, atavistic) in Lombrosian theory, the
female criminal suffered a double biological blow. Already suffering from
arrested development through being female, she was also a throwback
(atavistic) as an offender: a real monster! The female offender then is
doubly deviant. This is part of the deeper structure of the Criminal Other
that has left its mark on criminology as a discipline and suggests boundaries
about who can and cannot be criminal.
Of course, what is also embedded in the work of Darwin and Lombroso
are wider anxieties associated with the intellectual climate of the nineteenth
century, a time of huge social, economic and political upheaval. However,
the assumptions rooted in these anxieties are still to be found in our current
everyday thinking. This is thinking that reflects a tendency to divide the
world into two; male/female, normal/abnormal, rational/irrational,
culture/nature. These are some of the divides familiar to us. In the context
of biological positivism within criminology, this kind of divide presumes
that the difference between men and women, for example, are natural
differences; given by nature and that women, by definition, are less well
developed than men. As a result, women form part of the Criminological
Other, that is, marginal to the concerns of the discipline and outside of its
understanding. Biological positivism reflects a deeply rooted assumption
that the criminal is always male. However, this is not the only version of
positivism to have had a profound effect on the discipline. Sociological
positivism, that we shall discuss next, substitutes the social for the
biological and creates a different, though connected, image of who is and
who is not likely to be a criminal and therefore a focus of concern for the
discipline.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRIMINOLOGY AS A

DISCIPLINE: THE AMERICAN CONNECTION

If biological positivism has its origins in European anxieties of the

nineteenth century, sociological positivism (as developed within
criminology) had its origins in North American anxieties at the turn of the
twentieth century. In that setting, it would be difficult to deny the
importance of the Chicago School of Sociology in setting this differently
oriented agenda for criminology.
For the first three decades or so of the twentieth century, the United
States experienced massive social and economic change that was
particularly marked by immigration. During this time the larger towns in the
United States, and in this respect Chicago was no different than many
others, grew rapidly both in terms of population and in terms of their local
economies. Sociologists at the University of Chicago, influenced by the
work of Comte and Durkheim, another French social theorist, were
concerned with understanding the patterning and impact of that social
change and also with developing policies to manage the worst effects of it.
Two of them, Park and Burgess, sociologists working at the University of
Chicago, developed a social ecological model of the growth and
development of Chicago as a way of making sense of what they observed
taking place. This model became known as the concentric zone theory of
the city. These theorists argued that just as it was possible to identify
patterns in the processes of adaptation made to the environment by animals,
so it was possible to identify patterns in relation to the growth and
development of the city. In this way, they identified a series of circles
radiating from the city centre with each circular zone having different social
and economic characteristics and the people living in those areas adapting
differently to those social circumstances.
So different patterns of statistical data gathered from the different zones
of the city demonstrated the different modes of adaptation to the social and
economic circumstances that people were presented with. From this kind of
analysis, particular attention was focused on the zone of transition, the one
nearest the city centre. This was the area in which new immigrants to the
city settled (as it was inexpensive and near to places of work) but it was
also the area that seemed to manifest the most social problems (according to
official statistics) from incidences of ill health to crime. The existence of
these problems in this area was explained by the social ecologists as being
the result of the highly mobile and transitory nature of social life there that,
in itself, bred impersonal and fragmentary social relationships. In this way
all kinds of social problems including crime were given a social origin. This
social origin was called ‘social disorganisation’. Herein the beginnings of
sociological positivism within criminology are to be found.
According to the Chicago School, social disorganisation was the root of
all social problems including crime. This term was intended to reflect the
ways in which the problems of immigration and migration produced
communities in which there were competing social values. This competition
led to the breakdown of accepted ways of behaving making way for
different ones, and in the process of change, produced abnormal
(pathological) social conditions. This was especially the case in the ‘zone of
transition’ that in more contemporary times came to be known as the ‘inner
city’. Concern over the relationship between living in the ‘inner city’ and
crime has continued from the 1930s until the present. The labels people
have used to demonstrate this concern have changed, sometimes talking
about disadvantaged communities or frightened communities, or socially
excluded communities. All of these labels are bound together by one
presumption; that it is the structure of the local community (or more
precisely the lack of structure) that shapes the local crime rate rather than
the propensity or otherwise of any individual to commit crime.
This view of crime offers us a different picture of the Criminological
Other. In this view, the middle classes are the other; outside of the discipline
and outside of its understanding. The criminal is always working class, or
perhaps more accurately, part of the underclass, and most likely not only
male but also a member of an ethnic minority. These are the people who
live in and comprise the problematic communities for both policy and
politics. Though such communities are not as socially disorganised as the
Chicago School would have us believe, they are, and have been,
nevertheless defined as problematic. These groups are separated out in this
version of positivism from the rest of society on the basis of their culture,
not their nature.
 Summary
So it can be seen from these two different trajectories of the emergence
of criminology as a discipline, positivism, both biological and
sociological, has had a profound effect on not only how the discipline
conducts its business, but also by implication what the discipline has
been concerned with in the conduct of that business. Taking these
influences together criminology, as a discipline, has been historically
defined by its concern with young, male, working class criminal activity.
This does not mean that there have not been criminologists who have
concerned themselves with middle class crime (or more generally the
‘crimes of the powerful’; this issue is taken up later in this book) or who
have been keen to address female criminal behaviour. There have been. It
does mean, however, that the way in which much of that concern has
been constructed has to be understood in the light of the central focus of
the discipline as outlined here. This is a theme that we shall return to on
more than one occasion as we endeavour to uncover an understanding of
what criminology is about.
However, it should also be noted that much contemporary
criminological policy and political debate in and around crime and the
crime problem have been much more concerned with addressing the
victim of crime. Indeed, in order to appreciate the contemporary nature
of criminology, it is just as important to understand some of the features
of its sister discipline, victimology, as it is to understand the more
mainstream discipline of criminology itself. So we shall now pay some
attention to the story of the emergence of victimology as an arena of
academic and policy debate.

VICTIMOLOGY: THE HOLOCAUST CONNECTION?

The origins of victimology are usually located in the work of Von Hentig
and Mendelsohn. They were two émigré lawyers cum criminologists who
worked in the United States in the late 1940s. Like many other like-minded
intellectuals of the late 1940s and the 1950s who found themselves in the
United States as a consequence of the Second World War, they were
perplexed by the events that had happened in Germany. This led Von Hentig
and Mendelsohn to think about the dynamics of victimisation, though being
lawyers how they understood those dynamics was very much at the level of
the individual and very much informed by their legal training. It is also
possible to see the influence of early criminological thought reflected in
their work.
Both of these theorists were concerned with developing ways of thinking
about the victim that would enable the victim to be differentiated from the
nonvictim. In other words, both were clearly suggesting that there is a
normal person that when the victim is measured against them, the victim
falls short. In order to achieve this kind of understanding, they each
developed victim typologies. Von Hentig’s typology worked with a notion
of ‘victim proneness’. He argued that there were some people, by virtue of
their structural characteristics, who were much more likely to be victims (in
this case, of crime) than other people. These he identified as being women,
children, the elderly, the mentally subnormal, etc. (He had 13 categories in
all.) Thinking about this categorisation critically, it is possible to see that
Von Hentig thought the normal person was the white, heterosexual male.
Similar presumptions to those of Lombroso discussed earlier, though Von
Hentig does not suggest that there is a ‘born victim’ that parallels the idea of
a ‘born criminal’. Von Hentig’s ideas have been influential and are most
keenly identified in the concept of ‘lifestyle’ that has informed much
criminal victimisation survey work. (See below.)
Mendelsohn adopted a more legalistic framework in developing his
typology. His underlying concept was the notion of ‘victim culpability’.
Using this concept he developed a 6-fold typology from the victim who
could be shown to be completely innocent, to the victim who started as a
perpetrator and during the course of an incident ends as the victim.
Arguably his typology is guided by what might be considered a reasonable
or rational way of making sense of any particular incident in the context of
the law. Given the law as a starting point, it is possible to suggest that his
understanding of reasonable also equates with that which the white,
heterosexual male would consider to be reasonable. This is especially
demonstrated in the later work that was generated from Mendelsohn’s ideas,
in which victim culpability is translated into ‘victim precipitation’ as we
shall see with the work of Amir (1972) discussed below.
 From these beginnings the concepts of lifestyle and victim precipitation
have formed the core of much traditional victimological work and illustrate
what Miers (1989: 3) has called a positivistic victimology.
This he defined as:

The identification of factors which contribute to a non-random pattern

of victimisation, a focus on interpersonal crimes of violence, and a
concern to identify victims who may have contributed to their own
victimisation.

The parallels with criminology are clear. Within positivistic victimology

there is a similar emphasis on measuring differences, seeing those
differences as being somehow abnormal, and looking for explanations of
those differences that lie outside of individual choice.
It is interesting to note that during the 1980s and since, both in the United
Kingdom and North America, the victim of crime became much more
‘politicised’ (see, for example, the work of Miers, 1978 and Williams,
1999). In others words, the victim of crime has been used increasingly as a
symbolic reference point for policy makers and politicians in justifying
criminal justice policy and usually policy of the more punitive kind. Part of
this process has also involved the recognition within each of these criminal
justice systems that they could not solve the crime problem, but what they
could do was make people feel better about what had happened to them. In
this way, the victim of crime, and associated victim movements, have
achieved quite an important and powerful influence within the policy arena.
But who are these victims of crime?
The development of the criminal victimisation survey in the United
States in the late 1960s, and used in the United Kingdom since the first
British Crime Survey conducted in 1982, and internationally since 1989,
has been an important tool in both measuring the nature and extent of
criminal victimisation, and goes some way towards identifying who the
victims of crime are. The criminal victimisation survey, derived initially
from the lifestyle model of understanding the likelihood of becoming a
crime victim, asks a general sample of the populations questions about how
they spend their time, their experiences of crime, their attitudes towards the
police, where and when they are afraid of crime, amongst other issues. On
the basis of the data sets that this process provides, it is possible to say that
the group of people most likely to be criminally victimised is the young
adult male who goes out drinking two or three times a week, and those least
likely to be criminally victimised is the elderly female. (Some of these
issues are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5.)
There are a number of conundrums hidden within general findings of this
kind not least of which is the fact that young males are the least likely to
express fear of crime and elderly females are the most likely to express such
fears. Much criminological effort has been put into making sense of this
which is not of central concern here (see Chapter 2). However, suffice it to
say that issues such as exposure to risk on the one hand and levels of
vulnerability on the other play a part in understanding findings such as
these. The role of the media in portraying pictures of criminally victimised
elderly women as though these were the most likely targets of criminal
victimisation are not helpful. This is a clear example of the way in which
criminological (or more accurately in this case, victimological) knowledge,
stands in stark contrast to media images. Contradictions such as these offer
us one way of exploring the question of who comprises the Victimological
Other along the same lines as we explored the Criminological Other
discussed above.

THE VICTIMOLOGICAL OTHER

Given that much of contemporary criminal justice policy within what we

might call the Western Anglo speaking nexus (i.e., North America,
Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) appears to be
preoccupied with images of the crime victim, it will be useful to develop
our understanding of the assumptions that frequently underpin such images.
Victimology, like its sister discipline, criminology, has played its part in
contributing to those assumptions and it is these that it is important to
unpick.
As the previous discussion has intimated, early victimologists followed a
similar line of thinking to that of the early criminologists. They tried to find
ways of marking out the differences between victims and nonvictims. In
doing this, both Von Hentig and Mendelsohn used different kinds of
measuring sticks but each in their different ways drew implicitly on the idea
that the white, heterosexual male was the norm (i.e., the nonvictim) against
which victims were to be measured. For example, nowhere in Von Hentig’s
classification of 13 victim types is the white, heterosexual male mentioned,
thus reflecting the assumptions from which he was working. These
assumptions went largely unchallenged until the 1970s and the publication
of Amir’s work, Patterns of Forcible Rape. In this work, Amir applied the
concept of victim precipitation, derived from the work of Mendelsohn, to
the crime of rape, and came to the conclusion that 19% of recorded rapes
that formed part of his study could be deemed ‘victim precipitated’. This
conclusion did not go down well with the growing feminist movement of
the 1970s which was vociferous in its criticism of Amir’s work. It argued
that his use of the concept of ‘victim precipitation’ was not too far removed
from saying that ‘women asked for it’.
This critique of Amir, of course, connected with the wider discomfort that
many feminists also felt (and still do feel) with the use of the term ‘victim’
in relation to women in general. The concept of ‘survivor’ is much preferred
by feminists because this captures the positive strategies women employ to
live their day to day lives given their inherent structural powerlessness
rather than the passive acceptance implied in the concept of victim. (This
concept is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.) Here began a relationship
between feminism and victimology that has always been one full of tension.
However, the incursion of the feminist challenge to victimology (and it has
to be said criminology) has also been an important source for the
development of both disciplines.
What feminist work did was not only offer a different conceptual
apparatus with which to understand women’s lives in general, but also it
applied that apparatus to the crimes that affected women’s lives: mainly
rape and ‘domestic’ violence. Of course, in the 1970s the understanding of
‘domestic’ violence looked somewhat different than it does contemporarily,
and it has to be said that both criminology and victimology as academic
areas of study have benefited greatly as a result of feminist work that
clearly put both of these issues on these respective academic agendas. There
have, however, also been other gains and losses in this process. A clear gain
has been that, in addition to putting particular crimes on the academic
agenda, feminism also contributed to making visible the extent to which
crime was predominantly a male occupation. And moreover, that much of
that male crime was committed against women. Herein lays a loss. This
equation, male = criminal, female = victim, became a double-edged sword
resulting in hiding male victimisation and to a certain extent female
criminality. Arguably the end result being the construction of the white,
heterosexual male as the Victimological Other: that which cannot be
spoken.

Summary
The increasing policy interest in the victim of crime has widened the
agenda for how criminologists spend their time and the kinds of
questions they might be interested in. From the discussion above it can
be seen that feminism has played its part in extending this agenda
significantly. So much so, that in the contemporary context it would be
difficult for any academic criminologists to deny the importance of
gender as a key factor in predicting engagement in criminal behaviour
and as a key factor in understanding response to victimisation. Though as
the previous paragraph suggests, the question of understanding men’s
reaction to victimisation is not as central to criminological concerns as
their propensity to engage in crime. In conclusion then it might be fair to
say that whilst the (working class) male, and given the likelihood that
people from ethnic minorities are much more likely to find themselves at
the lower end of the social hierarchy, this also invariably means the
working class, ethnic minority male, is highly visible as the criminal,
they are much less visible as the victim. Hence in the terms of this
chapter: the Criminological Other is for the most part middle class and
female, the Victimological Other is the white and ethnic minority,
heterosexual male.
The purpose of this book is, of course, to unpick the implications of
the last statement in much more detail, but it is hoped that this statement
has also introduced the reader to another important aspect of academic
criminological work that makes it very different from media images of
crime, the criminal, and the victim. That is its commitment to exploring,
in a critical and sometimes provocative manner, common sense
knowledge about crime. The importance of critical analysis is perhaps
best demonstrated through the use of a case study and we shall do this
here by considering the case of the U.K. serial killer Harold Shipman.
Serial killing is a popular subject matter for films and television series,
 so this case study will help us think about what criminologists from
different disciplinary backgrounds might offer as an explanation of
Shipman’s behaviour as opposed to mediated representations. It will also
help us think about the Criminological and Victimological Other that we
have discussed in this chapter thus far.

CRIMINOLOGY, CRIMINOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES,

AND HAROLD SHIPMAN

Harold Shipman was a general medical practitioner in Hyde, a suburb of

Greater Manchester, England. In January 2000 he was convicted of the
murder of 15 of his patients though it is clear that the inquiry that was set
up to investigate how that could have happened believed that they had
evidence that he had murdered somewhere in the region of 200 patients
throughout his medical career. By far the majority of his victims were
elderly females. He was found dead in his prison cell, having committed
suicide, in January 2004 never having admitted to the acts of which he had
been found guilty. Shipman’s case raises all kinds of interesting questions
for the criminologist and lay-person alike and much of that interest lies with
the question of motivation: why did he do it? After all, he certainly did not
fit the usual criminological type; far from being poor, and a member of an
ethnic minority, he was a well-established medical practitioner, in a well-
respected and well-rewarded job, who appeared, for the most part, to solicit
good opinions from his patients. Before we go on to explore this question of
motivation, it will be useful to define a serial killer.
Serial killers are predominantly male. Whilst there have been some
historically notorious female serial killers from Lucretia Borgia to Eileen
Wuornos, 95% of known serial killers are male. It is also often assumed that
sex is a key driver for the male serial killer. This does not necessarily mean
a desire for conventional sexual activity, but serial killers are known to
have, either in the act of killing, or before, or after, used this as a means of
expressing their particular sexual proclivities. In addition, to qualify as a
serial killer, there must be three or more victims. This makes them different
from spree or mass murderers, who may kill more than three people but
who tend to do so all at the same time. Serial killers usually have a ‘cooling
off’ period between murders, which obviously makes the question of
motivation all the more interesting. Lastly, it is often the case that serial
killers become more and more adventurous in their killing activities, often
resulting in a killing in which it seems apparent that they ‘wanted’ to get
caught.
Much of what is known about serial killers, some of which is embedded
in the statements in the previous paragraph, has come from the killers
themselves. In the course of them being caught, arrested, and incarcerated,
and then subject to interrogation and psychiatric investigation, much has
been learned about the motivation for this kind of criminal behaviour; so
first of all we shall consider the relevance of psychiatry to the case of
Shipman.

PSYCHIATRY AND CRIME: INSIDE THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

Holmes and Holmes (1998) have put a good deal of that data together in
such a way that they have been able to construct a typology of serial killing.
Based on this typology it is possible to suggest that Harold Shipman fits
into the last type. The problem here is, however, that he never admitted to
any of his crimes and never allowed himself to be subjected to psychiatric
investigation, so this conclusion has to be pure guess work. Nevertheless,
psychiatry is often considered to be the best place to start in making sense
of serial killers, and following this tradition the inquiry that was set up to
investigate how he managed to commit so many murders invited a team of
psychiatrists to offer some analysis of him. So we shall draw upon some of
their observations here.
Figure 1.2 A typology of serial killing: based on the work of Holmes and
Holmes (1998).
Many of Shipman’s patients report him as having a very good ‘bedside
manner’, especially with the elderly. However the inquiry report also
comments that he was aggressive, conceited and arrogant as well as
dishonest. In the words of the inquiry report, ‘he was a consummate and an
inveterate liar’. The psychiatrists consulted by the inquiry team suggest that
these personality traits may be indicative of someone who is rigid and
obsessive, who may have difficulty in expressing their emotions and may
also suffer from low self-esteem. They also suggest that he may have felt
threatened when unable to control events and so reacted in such a way as to
assert control. They also go on to hypothesise that he may have gained a
‘buzz’ from the association with death, and, given the addictive pleasure of
this may have had a ‘need’ to kill with his final act of forging the will of his
last victim (the only case in which there was any obvious indication of a
possible financial reward) representing a ‘subconscious’ desire to be caught.
The reader can get a good feel from this summary of responses to the
Shipman case both as to how a psychiatrist might begin to make sense of
his criminal behaviour and the extent to which that sense fits, or does not fit
with the typology, outlined above. The question of control and hedonism
both feature in these opinions but as has been said before, the puzzle
remains because Shipman refused to talk. Other psychiatric approaches
have made much of his relationship with his mother: he watched her die
from cancer as a 17-year-old youth, and of his relationship with his wife,
who remained loyal to him throughout. However, again, nothing can be said
definitively on either count, with his wife also, thus far, having refused to
talk about their relationship. So psychiatry, in this case, can offer us some
clues, but no answers. But what might a different discipline do with Harold
Shipman?

PSYCHOLOGY AND CRIME: THE SEARCH FOR INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Psychologists are generally concerned with searching for explanations

through an understanding of particular factors that might predispose one
individual to commit a crime rather than another individual. Such factors
can vary from establishing the presence of a mental disorder, a particular
personality type, having suffered some physical or mental trauma in
childhood, or other ‘triggers’ like job loss, the break-up of a relationship
and other stressful situational factors. However, one branch of psychology
that has become increasingly popular in recent years is ‘evolutionary
psychology’ and it is that way of thinking about murder that we shall use
here to illustrate how a psychologist might approach the Shipman case.
Evolutionary psychology suggests to us that human beings not only adapt
to their environment as biological beings (that is, they evolve) but that such
adaptations also occur at a psychological level. Such psychological
adaptations reflect the importance of the processes of natural selection
perhaps and, put more simply, the survival of the species. As such survival
processes are highly dependent on continued propagation so sex constitutes
a key motivator for human action in general, but male action in particular.
Thus, for the evolutionary psychologist two processes drive male
behaviour: sexual jealousy and sexual rivalry. Both are seen to be the
mechanisms whereby access to women is secured and male power is
maintained both over women and between men. It must be remembered that
this analysis is not arguing that men choose rationally to behave in this way
but that these drivers reflect ancestral adaptation of the psyche to both
biological and social conditions. How might this kind of approach apply to
Shipman?
If you consider the patterning of the murder statistics, they indicate that
the majority of murderers are male, and that the overwhelming majority of
serial killers are male, with their victim likely to be a female intimate or
another male friend in the case of murder and in the case of serial killing
most likely to be female. As a result it is possible to see that the over-riding
principle of ‘male sexual propriety’ can make some sense. But how does
that apply to individual cases? It has to be said that there have been some
notorious male serial killers to whom the sexual motive can clearly be
applied, albeit that the expression of that sexuality might be considered
distorted. Dennis Nielson, Peter Sutcliffe in the United Kingdom, and Ted
Bundy in the United States are just a few names to whom the sexual motive
might be assigned and in each of these cases the issue of male sexual
propriety might also make some sense. However, in the case of Harold
Shipman there has been no obvious evidence of a sexual motive nor was
there any evidence of sexual expression unless that was in the form of some
deep seated necrophilia. Yet, by far the majority of his victims were female.
So there remains something to be understood here in relation to sex but
what that looks like the evolutionary psychologist does not seem to be able
to help us with very much. At this juncture it might be useful to consider
how a sociologist might understand him.

SOCIOLOGY: OUTSIDE THE CRIMINAL MIND

It might be odd to consider how a discipline like sociology, concerned as it

is with understanding the nature and impact of social structures in society,
helps us to understand pathological behaviour like serial killing, yet it is
important to remember that individual behaviour is not constructed in a
vacuum: it takes place within particular social and cultural contexts.
Coleman and Norris (2000: 108) suggest that sociology can cast some light
on serial killing by asking questions such as:

• Why do there seem to be more serial killers in one society than in

another?
• If the incidence of serial murder is changing over time, why is this?
• Why do particular societies at particular times focus on particular
problems (such as serial murder) and see those problems in particular
ways?

These are good questions for a sociologist but a sociologist will also think
about how the particular socio-cultural setting in which serial killers have
found themselves might have contributed to the kind of crime they
committed and who the victim of such crime might be.
In the case of Harold Shipman, such a view would pay just as much
attention to the social characteristics associated with the position in which
he found himself as much as seeing those characteristics as part of his
individual personality. So, if we revisit the comments made about his
personality above, for example, his arrogance, this might have been given
particular expression to as a result of his training in the medical profession
and the social characteristics more generally associated with that
profession. Moreover, his desire to play ‘master of ceremonies’ at the scene
of some of the murders he committed could also be attributed to the social
expectations associated with the role of the medical profession in which
being in control and taking control are divided by a fine line. Of course, his
access to his murder ‘weapon’, drugs, is wholly explicable by reference to
his profession, and the effectiveness with which he remained free from
suspicion for so long is again totally explicable by reference to his chosen
profession. If we turn to his choice of victim, mostly elderly females living
on their own, this too can be explained by reference to his profession. The
doctor/patient relationship is one that is not only confidential it is also
rooted in trust: another concept around which there are all kinds of social
expectations. The fact that people commented on his ‘bedside manner’ in
relation to the elderly in particular, adds to the importance of understanding
the social processes that both facilitated his activities and enabled him to
remain above suspicion. Of course, they do not explain his individual
motivation, but they do help us understand the processes whereby his
activities could take place.

FEMINISM, SERIAL KILLERS, AND MASCULINITY

The last perspective we shall consider with respect to Harold Shipman

derives from feminism. As this chapter has already suggested, feminism has
asked many hard questions of criminology and victimology, and in asking
those questions has had some influence on encouraging both areas of
analysis to think differently about the problems with which they are
concerned. In the context of criminal behaviour, it has encouraged
criminology to think about the maleness of the crime problem. This has led
some analysts to think about the question of masculinity.
In a well-noted piece of work, Cameron and Fraser (1987) were
concerned with making sense of Peter Sutcliffe, known in the early 1980s in
the United Kingdom as the Yorkshire Ripper. In this analysis, they argue
that the central project of masculinity is the search for transcendence; the
struggle to master and control nature. This expresses itself in masculine
sexuality in three ways; through performance, penetration and conquest.
These expressions do not necessarily have to be present in the actuality of
the sex act, nor do they have to be expressed in the acts of serial killers
(though for some all elements are present in both settings) but in the context
of murder they can be understood as part of the ultimate act of
transcendence: the holding of another person’s life in the balance. In
Cameron and Fraser’s analysis, the thrill of this kind of control is the
ultimate achievement of the masculine project: the ultimate sign of
masculinity. This understanding of the nature of masculinity leads us to
think about the thrill, control, excitement that Harold Shipman might have
associated with his behaviour, not as a pathological expression of himself as
a man, but more as an extension of what we might call normal forms of
masculinity in modern society. In this view, Shipman’s behaviour is
‘merely’ an extension of the (masculine) search for control in a rapidly
changing social world.

Summary: What have we learned?

Table 1.1 Differing views on Harold Shipman

Discipline Focus Helpful on

Shipman?
Psychiatry The subconscious mind Maybe
Psychology Mental differences and psychological No
evolution
Sociology Structural conditions and social Yes
expectations
Feminism Masculinity Yes
It will be clear from Table 1.1 that this is the author’s assessment of the
contribution that each of these different ways of thinking about crime
might make in helping us understand the case of Shipman. The reader
may come to a different conclusion. However, in the absence of Shipman
now being able to cooperate with any psychiatrist, and thus far the
unwillingness of any of his family to engage in the same kind of
cooperation, there is little else left for us to work with. However, the
importance of exploring this case study was to:

• Demonstrate the diversity within criminology and between

criminologists.
• Illustrate the way in which that diversity leads to different ways of
thinking about crime and criminals.
 • Highlight the importance of understanding not only the criminal but
also the relevance of thinking about the victim in the commission of
crime.
• To show the differences between criminological approaches to
crime and the criminal and more journalistic and/or media analyses
of crime and the criminal.

The last point should be particularly noted. In none of the analyses

offered above have the terms ‘villain’ or ‘Dr Death’ or ‘evil fiend’ been
used. It might be that individual criminologists might have such opinions
about Shipman as an individual, but such terms do not constitute part of
how a criminologist might make sense of Shipman’s behaviour. Such
opinions are left to others. However, and perhaps of most value in terms
of the project of this book, the Shipman case does illustrate for us some
of the conventional boundaries of both crimonology and victimology,
and the importance, in studying this subject, to challenge those
boundaries.

CONCLUSION: THINKING CRITICALLY

This chapter has been concerned with introducing the reader to some basic
features of criminology as a discipline, to be aware of the historical
development of those features and their contemporary relevance. In the
process of doing this, the reader has been introduced to two important ideas:
the Criminological Other and the Victimological Other. These ideas are
intended to encourage the reader to think critically about the traditional foci
and boundaries associated with each of these areas of analysis. For
example, in our discussion of the Criminological Other, it was argued that
criminology has spent much of its time and effort on thinking, researching
and writing about the lower class, predominantly ethnic minority male,
leaving the white middle class male and virtually all women free from the
criminological gaze. These latter two groups and women in particular,
constitute the Criminological Other: they are outside of the discipline’s gaze
and also, for the most part, outside of the policy gaze. This does not mean
that women do not commit crime (we all know they do) or that middle class
men do not commit crime (again, we all know they do and Shipman
constitutes a very good case in point). Moreover, there are criminologists
who study both. However, it does mean that these groups, and their
behaviours, are in the background, not quite wallpaper but certainly not
constituted as the criminological problem, in the same way in the discussion
of the Victimological Other it was argued that men were outside of our
understanding of victimisation, and women, especially elderly women, were
quite central to the conventional victimological gaze. As it happens, the
centrality of elderly women fits very well with the Shipman case, but it
should be remembered that they were not victims of reckless, young,
working class males as media images might suggest, but victims of a well-
respected, white, middle class male whom they trusted.
So, in conclusion, it is just as important for the prospective student of
crime and criminology, not only to think critically about the media
presentations of crime, but also to think critically about how criminologists
and policy makers make sense of such behaviour, by always asking who is
included here, who is excluded, and why. These are themes that we shall
return to in the chapters to follow. In the next chapter, we shall consider the
different sources of knowledge available to criminologists about crime.

EXERCISE

As a way of encouraging the reader to ‘test out’ your own critical thinking,
read the following resume of a recent case in France (presented below) and
make a note of your answers to the questions that follow.
In January 2008 the Societe Generale Bank in France announced a
trading loss of 4.9 billion euro ($6.8 billion) attributed to the activities of
one trader, Jerome Kerviel. In October 2010, Jerome was found guilty of
breach of trust, forging documents and computer hacking and was ordered
to five years imprisonment (two years suspended) and to repay the losses to
the bank. After several appeals his conviction was upheld in October 2012.
However, in March 2014 a French High Court upheld the prison sentence
but rescinded the order to pay the money back. He was released from prison
in September 2014 and ordered to serve the rest of his sentence wearing an
electronic tag and under evening curfew. He has since regained employment
in systems security. In his defence it is reported that, in taking bets on the
future direction of the markets, he took no money for himself but was
motivated to boost his bonus and to make money for the bank. His defence
also suggested that the bank turned a ‘blind eye’ towards his activities.
You can use the Internet to search for more information about this case
should you wish to, but in the light of the above:

1. What do you think:

i) a psychiatrists would make of his behaviour?

ii) a psychologist?
iii) a sociologist?
iv) a feminist?

Reflect in the different ways these perspectives have been used in relation
to the Shipman case to inform your answers.

2. In what ways, if at all, does this case challenge or confirm the idea of
the criminological other?
3. Who, if anyone, was the victim here?
4. What other issues does this case lead us to think about in terms of what
counts as crime and what criminologists might be interested in
studying?
5. This is an example from France. How common do you think these
kinds of experiences might be in other jurisdictions?
6. How well do you think you have done?

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER READING

In the book edited by Hale, C., Hayward, K., Wahidin, A., and Wincup, E.
(2013 3/e) Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press) the chapter by
Wayne Morrison on ‘What is Crime’ is particularly challenging and
illuminating and should encourage any reader to think critically. Similarly,
the introductory textbook by Tim Newburn (2013 2/e) Criminology
(London: Routledge) affords a useful overview of the issues (and others)
discussed in this chapter. This also comes with online resources for those
who purchase it.
OceanofPDF.com
2 COUNTING CRIME

Can we count crime? If so, how is that done? This chapter considers these
questions and the sources of information available to criminologists to
answer them. The chapter focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of these
different sources of information. We shall also consider some of the other
main ways in which criminologists attempt to know things about crime in
the course of doing their research. The central purpose of this chapter is to
encourage and develop the critical thinking that we ended with in Chapter
1. So at different points in this chapter you will be asked to engage in
exercises that are intended to facilitate this.

INTRODUCTION

Clearly there are different ways in which we can know things about crime;
personal experience, as an offender, as a worker in the criminal justice
system, or as a victim of crime. These are all different sources of
knowledge about crime. What we know of the experiences of members of
our family or friends is another area on which we might base our
knowledge. The information provided by the media, whether as news or
fiction, is yet another source of information about crime. Indeed, this latter
source, given the wide range of crime-related television programmes
available to us is, contemporarily, probably the most likely source of our
knowledge. In addition to these sources of information, there are two other
important sources of information about crime. Firstly, there are the official
statistics on crime, patterns of punishment, and who the victims of crime
are. Secondly, there are the research findings of criminologists. Soothill et
al. (2002: 24) listed these different sources of information in the following
way:

• Direct experience of crime

• Mediated experience
 • Official information
• Research knowledge

All of these, they are keen to point out, are partial sources of information.
Our experiences will tap different aspects of the crime problem; the media
tend to work with particular stereotypes of criminals and how crimes might
be solved, official information only addresses those aspects of the crime
problem that have come to the attention of the criminal justice system, and
criminological research tends to be focused around specific crimes or
specific problems. However, if we are to understand what criminology is
and what it is that criminologists do, then it is important we put aside what
we think we know about crime from our direct experience or our mediated
experience and focus attention on official information and research
knowledge. This chapter, then, will first of all focus its attention on the
strengths and weaknesses of these two sources of information.

OFFICIAL INFORMATION ABOUT CRIME: CRIMINAL

STATISTICS

The first country to gather national statistics on crime was France. This
started in 1826 with the first published analysis of those statistics presented
by Adolphe Quetelet in 1842. Crimes recorded by the police have been
published in England and Wales since 1876 and in the United States since
1930. So whilst some official data about crime has been available for some
time now, some of the problems that are associated with ‘official’
information remain the same. As Quetelet himself commented, ‘our
observations can only refer to a certain number of known and tried
offences, out of the unknown sum total of crimes committed’. This is often
referred to as the dark figure of crime: all those criminal events that are
unknown to anyone except the offender and the victim. However, before we
go on to explore the implications of this comment; we need to think about
what kinds of data sources are considered ‘official’ and how it is possible to
access them.
The Office for National Statistics (www.ons.gov.uk) publishes all kinds
of data including a wide range of data relating to crime. However, they are
not the only source of official information. The National Offender
Management Service (www.gov.uk/government/organisations/national-
offender-management-service) is an important resource for all kinds of
information about the (public) prison system and offender management,
more generally, and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate’s of Constabulary,
Probation and Prisons also produces statistics on a quarterly and yearly
basis. Each police force produces its own annual report and since the 1998
Crime and Disorder Act, local authorities in England and Wales are required
to produce reports on crime and crime reduction. All of these sources of
information (and this list is not exhaustive) are publicly available either
from places like Her Majesty’s Stationers Office or, more easily and readily
for many people, over the Internet. In addition, a good place to start for
information about crime is the Home Office’s own website
(www.homeoffice.gov.uk) and their associated research and statistics
department and the Ministry of Justice (www.justice.gov.uk). However,
these sources of information, for the most part, take as their starting point
incidents that have been reported to the police and are recorded as crime by
them, and take as their finishing point what has happened to the offender
should they have been caught. There are other policing organisations, like
for example, the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence Police,
and the UK Atomic Energy Authority Police. These agencies also record
offences, but their records will not necessarily be included in criminal
statistics unless there has been a prosecution. The same could be said about
the Inland Revenue in respect of tax evasion and the work of the Customs
and Excise departments in respect of failure to pay Value Added Tax. So it
is already possible to see that the comment made by Quetelet in 1842 is still
pertinent today.
Similar data sources exist in the United States and Europe. In the United
States, Uniform Crime Reporting was introduced in 1929 and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation was given the responsibility of collecting,
publishing, and archiving these statistics across all 17,000 policing
jurisdictions in 1930. Now a visit to www.fbi.gov offers access to a wide
range of reports on crime and policing in the United States. There are
annual reports of Crime in the United States (CIUS), Hate Crime Statistics,
reports on Law Enforcement Officers Killing and Assaults, Bank Crime
Reports, and terrorist incidents. Moreover, it is possible to get statistical
information on crime in Europe through the European Community
(EUROSTAT) and the Council of Europe. The majority of countries in
Europe also collate their own information on crime reported to the police,
the resources allocated to the criminal justice system, and their respective
prison populations.
In all of these data sources it is important to note that there is a difference
between the number of offences recorded and the number of offenders
recorded. For example, a burglar (one offender) may have been tried and
convicted for burglary (and will therefore count as one statistic probably in
the prison system) but may have admitted to 20 or 30 burglaries (offences),
which will appear as 20 or 30 different offences in the crimes known to the
police statistics. Recognising this helps to understand two important
features of all the data sources mentioned above:

• Not all recorded offences have an identifiable offender.

• Not all offenders who are assigned to an offence are tried and
convicted.

In other words, all criminal justice systems ‘suffer’ from what is called an
‘attrition rate’. It is sometimes useful to think of these statistical records as
being the end product of something like the London or the New York
marathon: a lot of people start but they do not all finish. We shall go on to
discuss the different pit stops where crimes, criminals, and victims drop out
of this race in due course.
So it would certainly be fair to conclude that there is a good deal of
official information readily available, especially over the Internet about
crime, though not all of this information may necessarily be presented in the
same way. Statistics in England and Wales present a raw picture of the
numbers of incidents whereas other jurisdictions, like Canada, for example,
offer figures calculated to represent the likely rate of something happening
per 100,000 adults and children in the population. Each method of
presentation can be used to convey different messages about the nature and
extent of crime that needs to be thought about fairly carefully. This is an
issue we shall come across again when we look at the problems of
measuring different kinds of crimes in Chapter 3 and in making
comparisons at the end of this chapter. The question is at this juncture then:
how useful is this information? Quetelet was quick to observe the partiality
of the information available to him in the 1840s. Has the situation improved
at all? What do official statistics actually tell us?
THE THREE ‘R’S: RECOGNISING, REPORTING, AND
RECORDING

All the statistics referred to above, whilst numerical in their form, are the
end product of fairly complex social processes. As Chapter 1 highlighted,
for an act to be labelled criminal then there has to be a law that prohibits
that behaviour. So, the first stage in this process might arguably be the
country in which the act was performed since what is considered criminal
(unlawful) in one country may not be the same in another country. So, from
a point of view the first issue of recognition is that the act or behaviour
must be defined as unlawful. However, this is not the full story of the
problem of recognition. Behaviour may be unlawful, but the person who
witnesses the behaviour may not recognise it as such. There are different
reasons for this. It might be as a result of lack of knowledge of the law on
the part of the witness or the victim, or it may be as a result of them being
so used to certain things happening (like violence in the home or racial
harassment) that they do not define the behaviour as criminal, or they may
recognise the act as criminal but consider it not serious enough to report
(like petty vandalism, for example). However, having recognised an act as
criminal and decided upon its seriousness, the next stage for the witness or
the victim is to report the incident to the police. Somewhere in the region of
80% of incidents recorded by the police in England and Wales are reported
by members of the public. So, again, it is important to understand reporting
behaviour.
There are a number of reasons why individuals may or may not report
criminal behaviour to the police. As an exercise you might like to consider
the following scenario and think about whether you would report what you
have witnessed to the police and the reasons for your reaction.

Your next-door neighbour is a young woman with three children. You

know her partner to be out of work but actively seeking employment
and he also has a reputation for getting violent. You happen to see her
one day in your local supermarket out shopping though she does not see
you. As you move closer to her you observe her put a packet of meat
containing two pork chops underneath the baby’s blanket in the pram.
She goes to the checkout and pays for the other items she has in her
basket but does not pay for the pork chops.
So what would you do? What do you think the issues are here, in addition to
the law breaking behaviour?
Some of the things that stop people reporting incidents, like the one
above are:

• They think it is too trivial an offence.

• They do not think there is a victim.
• They do not want to get involved.
• They would not want to go to court to give evidence against a
neighbour and suffer the possible recriminations and/or threats that
might result.
• They do not trust the police to do anything.

In addition, of course, some people would report this to the store with the
result that the police would be involved. Hopefully what this has illustrated,
however, is that reporting crime is not a simple or a straightforward process
and the willingness to report does seem to vary with the kind of crime under
consideration. For example, people are much more likely to report a
burglary or a car theft (especially if they want to make an insurance claim)
than they are violence or theft from the person especially if that person is
known to them. Having reported an offence to the police, the next issue is
whether it is recorded as an offence.
Not all offences that are reported to the police end up as recorded crime,
that is, become part of the crime that is counted within the official statistics
under discussion here. Variation in recording behaviour can, again, be the
product of a number of different processes. Although the police have a
statutory duty to record criminal behaviour, they also have considerable
discretion over whether a particular incident is deemed serious enough to
demand more detailed attention, and as a consequences have resources
allocated to it. So, for example, a dispute between neighbours may have
involved some criminal damage on the part of one party to the dispute that
could be resolved by the police officer noting that ‘advice was given’ rather
than necessarily pursuing a charge of criminal damage. Such an outcome
obviously depends, to a certain extent, upon how the aggrieved party wants
to pursue such an incident. A good deal of the time people report incidents
to the police wanting the police to stop what is happening rather than
necessarily wanting to pursue criminal charges. On other occasions, of
course, it may be that the police have targeted particular behaviour, like
drinking after hours in licensed premises. In these circumstances, the police
may apply discretion in the interests of meeting the target of clamping down
on this kind of activity. Moreover, different police forces may have different
targets for different kinds of criminal behaviour and this is another
ingredient in understanding the different patterns of recorded criminal
behaviour across different jurisdictions.
The potential importance of understanding differences in recording
behaviour is especially important if you are trying to use official statistics to
say something about whether crime is rising or falling, that is, crime trends.
There are (at least) two issues to think about here. The first is about
understanding the law at the time at which the crimes were being recorded
and whether, over time, the legal definition of a crime has changed or
remained the same: some behaviour may be newly defined as criminal and
others may be decriminalised, that is, may become legal. This in and of
itself will feed into the statistics. The second concerns whether there has
been any recommended changes in how an offence is to be defined, and
acted upon, over time. For example, the introduction of the Final Warning
scheme for young offenders under the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act (in
England and Wales) removed from the police the potential of using informal
warnings as a way of dealing with some behaviours with the result that
some things are now recorded that once may not have been.
In addition there are factors external to the recognising, reporting and
recording process that feed into the official statistics on crime. Inflation, for
example, can result in many more offences of criminal damage as the value
of property increases, but the monetary value attached to the offence of
criminal damage remains the same. Hence, there will be more offences of
criminal damage. Moreover, if we continue with this line of thinking and
apply it to the statistics relating to the later stages of the criminal justice
process—how many offenders are caught, how many cases prosecuted, how
many found guilty, what they are sentenced to, how many people go to
prison—it is possible to see that there is both a problem of attrition (the
numbers get smaller) and a problem of discretion (which behaviours get
chased and which do not) at potentially every stage in the process. The
reasons for this may look different at different points in the criminal justice
system, but given that it is a system with limited resources, even if it were
possible it would be very unlikely that all cases would be pursued with the
same vigour or with the same success.
The picture of crime presented by official statistics is therefore never a
complete picture of the crime problem. This lack of completeness is well-
known and well-recognised by criminologists and as a consequence
encourages a very careful reading of such statistics. Historically,
criminologists have referred to this as the problem of the ‘dark figure’ of
crime. Put another way, what about all that criminal behaviour that we do
not know about? All that behaviour that is not recognised, not reported and
not recorded? How might we find out about the ‘dark figure’ of crime?

OFFICIAL INFORMATION ABOUT CRIME: CRIMINAL

VICTIMISATION STATISTICS

Criminal victimisation statistics are generated by conducting a sample

survey of the general population (whether they have been a victim of crime
or reported a crime, etc.) and asking this sample of people about their
experiences of crime and the criminal justice system. The first survey of
this kind was conducted in the United States in the late 1960s and since that
time this way of gathering information about the ‘dark figure’ of crime has
proved to be increasingly popular. The use of the sample survey to uncover
people’s experiences of crime, aided by the statistical techniques that make
possible generalisations from a sample of the population, assumes that this
method can actually count people’s experiences of criminal victimisation.
So it is important to examine this assumption to begin with.
The criminal victimisation survey concerns itself with measuring
criminal incidents for which there are clearly identifiable victims. As a
consequence, it focuses attention on asking people questions about crimes
against them as individuals and crimes against their property. So, because of
the need to identify the victim and the difficulties of doing so, for example,
of say, Inland Revenue returns, it tends to ignore this kind of criminal
activity. A more accurate representation of the criminal victimisation
surveys would be to say that they provide an additional source of
information about those kinds of crimes most likely to be reported to the
police and recorded by them. They are therefore useful for making
comparisons with police statistics in estimating the extent of specific
incidents. However, that comparison is not necessarily a perfect one.
Criminal victimisation surveys tend to work with definitions of incidents
that are close to the legal definition; in other words, they work with
understandings of events that could be defined as illegal and thereby
punished. These are not necessarily those events that are defined illegal and
thereby punished. As a result, there is always some slippage between the
evidence that the criminal victimisation survey operates with and that
contained within the statistics of crimes known to the police.
Despite this kind of inherent difficulty, criminal victimisation surveys
have proved to be very popular for policy makers and politicians in making
assessments about the nature and extent of what we might call conventional
crime: crimes against the person and crimes against property. The first
criminal victimisation survey was conducted by the Home Office in
England and Wales in 1982. They are now conducted regularly. In addition,
such surveys are conducted in the United States, Canada, and Australia.
They are not so popular in continental Europe but international criminal
victimisation surveys have been conducted in Europe in addition to other
countries across the world. However, as sources of data, criminal
victimisation surveys face the problem of the fourth ‘R’: the respondent.

THE FOURTH ‘R’: THE RESPONDENT

The social survey as a research instrument generally has problems with

respondents; summed up simply as the problems of getting people to talk to
you. However, criminal victimisation surveys suffer from particular
problems above and beyond this because of their interest in wanting to
match people’s experiences of crime with the records of the criminal justice
system. Empirical testing has shown that it cannot always be assumed that
whilst crime might be seen as an important and impactive event as far as
politicians and policy makers are concerned, the same cannot be said for
members of the general public. People do not always remember what has
happened to them and may, of course, not always want to tell an interviewer
about their experiences. The following are some of the respondent problems
associated with the criminal victimisation survey:

• People ‘forget’ especially when an event involves someone they know.

 • People may not ‘know’, that is, recognise what has happened to them
as criminal (same problem as above.)
• People remember inaccurately.
• People remember incompletely.
• People include events not relevant to the time period of the survey.
(This is referred to as the problem of telescoping.)
• People may not share in the same definition of an event as the survey.
(This problem is probably at its most acute with respect to questions
around violence.)

Given that the criminal victimisation survey is intended to offer us a more

complete picture of the nature and extent of crime, it is important to be
aware of how and under what circumstances these respondent problems
have a greater or a lesser effect on the kind of data these surveys produce.
For example, some of these problems have been shown to have their
greatest impact on understanding the nature and extent of ‘domestic’
violence that has resulted in the development of more sensitive data
gathering techniques and questions. Such respondent difficulties
notwithstanding, criminal victimisation surveys have become a very
important source of information for criminologists and others concerned
with mapping the changing nature of the crime problem.
From the discussion thus far then, the reader should be aware that making
sense of ‘official’ data on crime is a very subtle process with two inherent
problems.

• There is a big difference between crimes known to the police and the
‘dark figure’ of crime.
• There is a big difference between crimes made visible in these
counting processes and those that remain invisible (for example,
offences associated with defrauding the tax system or health and safety
at work legislation).

Nevertheless these sources of data, provided that we are aware of their

limitations, do provide criminologists and policy makers with a ‘good
enough’ picture of the kinds of crimes that people routinely worry about,
especially crimes against their property. There is, however, another source
of information about crime. That is the information produced by
criminologists themselves as part of their research.

CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH KNOWLEDGE

Criminologists, like other social scientists, use a whole range of different

methods to explore the issues that interest them. It is usual to divide these
methods into two broad categories; quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative methods encompass using the official statistics discussed
above and subjecting them to further, often more in-depth, statistical
analysis as well as social surveys. Qualitative methods encompass those
kinds of research techniques that do not lend themselves so readily to
statistical analysis such as in-depth interviewing or a range of different
observational methods. This is not the place to explore the strengths and
weaknesses of these different methods of investigation since those strengths
and weaknesses are not peculiar to the criminological use of them. What is
important to understand about the production of criminological research
knowledge is whether there is a match between what it is that a
criminologist is trying to find out and the method he or she has chosen to
investigate this. Put in more abstract words, this is the question of
understanding the relationship between criminological theory and
criminological method. In understanding the importance of this and its
relationship with what it is that we know about crime, we shall discuss two
issues here: meaning and understanding. Each of these will be explored
through the example of making sense of the ‘fear’ of crime.

MAKING SENSE OF THE ‘FEAR OF CRIME’: MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING

Criminal victimisation surveys discussed above have, since their inception,

asked all kinds of questions about people’s experiences of crime. In
addition, those questions have also covered such issues as what people will
and will not do in the evening and whether they feel safe in their own
homes after dark because of crime. Questions such as these have become
the fairly standard and routine way in which official statistics have
attempted to measure the changing nature of the fear of crime. These
statistics have repeatedly produced the finding that whilst elderly females
are the least at risk from criminal victimisation, they are the most fearful of
it, and whilst young males who go out drinking two or three times a week
are the most at risk from criminal victimisation, they express the least fear
of it. There are different ways to make sense of these findings. Those
different ways highlight the problem of meaning. The two figures that
follow illustrate a number of different hypotheses all of which might make
sense of why elderly women are fearful and young males are not. Take a
look at these and think about them.
The reader might like to consider which of these ways of making sense of
the fear of crime statistics presented in Figures 2.1 and 2.2 (and the lists are
not exhaustive) make sense and which do not. However, the important point
about the lists is that they each make sense of the same data in different
ways. This is the problem of meaning. The way in which a criminologist
might choose between these different ways of making sense of this data
would be related to the theoretical perspective and/or concepts they think
are the most helpful to them in this process. This is the problem of
understanding.

Figure 2.1 How to make sense of findings on the fear of crime: elderly
women.
Figure 2.2 How to make sense of findings on the fear of crime: young
males.

In each of the lists of propositions, there are clues as to how the problem
of meaning and the problem of understanding are connected to each other.
For example, if we take propositions 3 and 4 from Figure 2.1, both of these
propositions shift the meaning of the statistics by introducing a new
concept. In other words, they ask us to think about how fear might be
connected to something called vulnerability. Of course, in order to
understand whether this is a meaningful thing to do, we would need to do
some more research that takes us beyond these statistics. We would need to
do some qualitative work: that is, spend some time talking in-depth with
elderly females as a way of trying to establish whether when they talk of the
fear of crime, are they talking about fear of crime or is this just a shorthand
way for them to talk about other things that concern them? In a similar way,
if we consider propositions 3 and 4 in Figure 2.2, these shift the meaning of
the statistics by introducing the concept of masculinity. (We shall discuss
this concept more fully in Chapter 4.) So again, it would be necessary to do
some more empirical work to establish whether the concept of masculinity
offered a more meaningful way of making sense of (understanding) the
statistical evidence available from official statistics.
Criminological research, then, introduces another dimension to what it is
that we know (and do not know) about crime and its impact. That
dimension stresses the importance of thinking about the different ways it is
possible to make sense of the findings that are made available to us:
returning us to the importance of thinking critically. Such critical thinking
about the relationship between theory, data, and meaning raises at least four
questions that the reader might like to think about when considering any
research findings:

1. What theory or concept is being applied here? Is there an alternative

that might be useful?
2. How has the data been gathered, by whom, and what are the strengths
and the limitations of it?
3. How close have the researchers been to the issue they are
investigating?
4. How has the data and the theory been connected, by whom, and for
what purpose?

Criminological research offers the opportunity to think more theoretically

and more critically about what the various sources of official statistics say
about crime and its impact. However, before we move on it will be useful to
say something briefly about two other ways of getting some information
about criminal behaviour: self-report studies and other records.

SELF-REPORT STUDIES

The self-report study is the technique of asking samples of the general

population to report, in confidence, whether they have committed any
offences. This method has been used particularly as a way of trying to
measure the nature and extent of young people’s offending behaviour and it
has been used in particular to access an understanding of the kinds of things
young people who are still at school get up to. These studies are one way of
getting a picture of the estimated 97% of offending behaviours that never
secure a conviction or a caution from the criminal justice system and as a
consequence do not feature in those statistics at all. Researchers who use
this method find that young people do admit to offending behaviour with
boys more likely to report violent behaviour than girls. However, girls too
report more offences than would appear to come to the attention of the
criminal justice system. One of the main problems with this method of
accessing information about crime is whether what is being measured, and
as a consequence what is being reported, would actually qualify as a crime
if it had been reported to the police. Therefore, some care should be taken in
making sense of the findings of such work. Nonetheless, it is the case that
the self-report method does give us some limited information about the
nature and extent of offending behaviour.

OTHER RECORDS

Criminologists interested in the kinds of crime that often remain hidden

from the criminal justice system, like for example white collar crime,
discussed in Chapter 7, frequently resort to various other data sources that
might help them draw a picture of the kind of crime they are interested in.
Under this heading it is possible to list records such as those of the health
and safety at work executive, businesses’ private records on theft at work,
the records of private security firms, and so on. These records will suffer
from many of the same problems as more ‘official’ statistics, but they can
nevertheless prove to be a very useful data gathering starting point. As
Chapter 7 will illustrate, and as is discussed below, accessing information
about this kind of criminal behaviour is difficult and sometimes requires
quite imaginative thinking in order to explore the kinds of behaviours that
might be equally criminal as that recorded in police statistics.

Summary
So, official sources of information about crime and criminological
knowledge are not perfect but what makes them different from personal
experience and mediated experience is their efforts to offer a consistent
and systematic picture of the crime problem. Some of that picture will
resonate with our personal experiences some of the time and some will
resonate with what we learn through newspapers and television
representations of crime. However, despite the problems inherent in
official statistics and the problem of grasping the meaning of those
statistics and thereby being able to understand them, in order to be a
criminologist it is clearly important to move beyond personal anecdotes
and media representations. Having said that, it is apparent from the
discussion here, it is much easier to count some crime more than others.
 In other words, some crimes are much more visible than others. So, in
order to complete the picture on counting crime, we shall now consider
some of the problems associated with crimes that are not so visible to us.

COUNTING ‘INVISIBLE’ CRIMES

Victor Jupp, Peter Francis, and Pamela Davies (1998), all criminologists in
the United Kingdom, identify what they call ‘seven features of invisibility’
associated with particular kinds of criminal behaviour. In order to
understand what kind of crime is counted and what kind of crime is difficult
to count, it will be useful to consider the features that these authors identify.
These features are all understood in the negative, that is, invisible crimes
are those about which there is no knowledge, there are no statistics; as a
result, criminologists fail to include them in their theories, thus there is no
research on them and because policies fail to address them it follows that
there is no control over them, no politics, and hence no panic about them
and the consequences they might have. Some aspects of this invisibility
have already been mentioned in this chapter. For example, the relative
absence of statistics on tax evasion in official statistics on crime is largely
accounted for by the fact that such incidents are only recorded in the official
statistics if a prosecution has been proceeded with. In other words, the
criminal offence of tax evasion, depending upon the nature and extent of it,
can be dealt with by agreement between a tax inspector and the offender.
There are, however, other offences that occur on a routine daily basis that
are also never recorded in official statistics on crime.
Perhaps the reader might like to think about all that behaviour related to
the workplace, the taking of stationary for personal use, making personal
telephone calls from the office, the use of building supplies and materials in
one’s own home, insider dealing in the finance world, etc. All of these
activities are theft in different forms but because some behaviour is seen to
be ‘acceptable’ in some working environments, it rarely features as part of
criminological knowledge and certainly never becomes part of the criminal
statistics. Much of this kind of criminal activity has not been a main cause
of concern of criminology or criminologists (though some criminologists do
specialise in trying to explore this kind of criminality despite the difficulties
involved). This has resulted in little theoretical interest in it and, as a
consequence, little research. Add to these problems the difficulties of
controlling such behaviour (if that were possible), and if it were
controllable, the lack of political will to address it as a problem, (the
‘banking crisis’ of 2008–2009 might be worth considering here) there is, as
a consequence, no panic, that is, no public awareness or concern about such
behaviour as a social problem. All of these factors, then, contribute to the
crimes that are seen, measured, and thereby become the focus of politics
and policy and, of course, conversely contribute to those crimes that are not
seen, not measured, and are not the central focus of the work of the criminal
justice system. These questions of invisibility are returned to in detail in
Chapter 7. However, before we go on to review the key issues of this
chapter, one problem remains. That problem is the problem of comparison.
If there are so many caveats associated with the general information
available about crime and criminal victimisation, how is it possible to
compare the rate of crime now with say 10 or 20 years ago which
newspapers frequently do? Moreover, how is it possible to compare crime
rates in different countries?

THE PROBLEM OF COMPARISON

It is possible to engage in comparisons about crime in a number of different

ways. The two most common are to compare the present with the past and
to compare one society’s crime problem with another’s. Much political
rhetoric when talking about crime frequently assumes that there is some
‘golden age’ of the past when things were different which is usually taken
to mean better. We are all used to newspaper headlines that report crime as
‘soaring out of control’ and even when there is some statistical evidence
that the incidence of some kinds of crime is actually falling, effort is usually
made to highlight those criminal behaviours on the increase. Violent crime
is a useful tool that is frequently used to capture these kinds of issues.
Thinking about whether things were better in the past depends on how far
back in time you want to go. Historians of crime tell us that in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the world was a much more violent
place given the relative absence of policing and an acceptance of the rule of
law. This is probably epitomised by the fact that responses to crime were
also much more violent with capital punishment being used much more
often for a wide range of criminal offences. However, when people talk of a
time when things were better, they are often not thinking about 200 years
ago but about how they think things used to be in their area when they were
younger. Some of this is, of course, about seeing the past through ‘rose
tinted spectacles’ but some of it is also about people’s levels of tolerance of
different behaviours changing during a time when social life has changed
very rapidly. For example, Internet crime did not exist 20 years ago, yet
now fraudulently accessing people’s bank accounts over the Internet is
something that worries people who use such services. So as social life
changes tolerances may change, the things that people worry about may
change; making the past look very attractive. All of which can be
compounded by what the evidence may or may not be saying. This, of
course, is the point at which making sense of what the evidence might be is
further complicated not only by the four ‘R’s discussed above but also by
the law itself.
Changes in the law, and practices associated with how the law may or
may not be enforced make any meaningful discussion of whether crime has
gone up or gone down very difficult if not impossible unless a way is found
to ‘factor in’ the likely impact of such changes. Little of this kind of
‘factoring in’, however, takes place in media coverage of crime statistics or
political rhetoric and sometimes not in criminological work either, yet
awareness of its importance does mean that comparing the present with the
past has to be done with caution. That said, the myth of a ‘golden age’ is
significant as it taps into social and individual nostalgia reminding us of the
importance of cultural processes and their contribution to our understanding
of what constitutes the problem of crime. The importance of culture also
features in some of the difficulties in trying to compare the problem of
crime across different societies.
Some time ago David Nelken (1994), a criminologist, argued that the
future potential of criminology lay within the importance of being able to
conduct comparative research. His argument pointed to the increasing
impact of transnational crime and in seeking to combat it more needed to be
known about how different countries operated legally, politically, and
culturally, before any preventive agenda might be put in place. In raising the
importance of this kind of crime, not only for criminology but also for
national political and economic policies, he drew attention to what might be
learned from such comparative work and the problems inherent in engaging
in it. These problems can be summarized in one question: What do we
compare? Thus subsuming a wide range of possible ‘levels’ of comparison
designed to seek out similarities, differences, the value of concepts, the
applicability of explanations, the working of criminal justice systems, an
understanding of cultures, to name a few. There is considerable debate
within the criminological literature as to the appropriateness of focusing on
the similar or the different, but what shall be evident to the reader as the rest
of this book unfolds is just how difficult it is to make those comparisons
and as a consequence just how difficult it might be to ‘borrow’ policies
from one socio-cultural context and apply them in another.

THE PROBLEM OF ATTRITION AND THE ‘JUSTICE GAP’

On a number of occasions in this chapter the problem of matching crimes

reported to criminal victimisation surveys, to those reported to the police,
with those recorded by the police, with the number of offenders finally
prosecuted by the criminal justice system has been pointed to either
implicitly or explicitly. Put simply in the process from reporting a crime to
recording a crime to prosecuting a crime to securing the guilt or innocence
of a defendant, the numbers get smaller and smaller. This is referred to as
the problem of attrition. There are, however, two issues here that are often
conflated with one another. The number of crimes counted gets smaller at
every stage of the criminal justice process for all kinds of crimes for a wide
range of different reasons from there not being enough evidence to
prosecute, to witnesses failing to turn up to give evidence, to police officers
making a decision that the incident reported does not count as a crime. This
problem has received particularly detailed attention in relation to crimes of
sexual assault and has been subjected to especial close interrogation by
feminists concerned with crimes committed against women. Indeed there is
a good deal of evidence to suggest that internationally the problem of
attrition in relation to crimes of sexual assault is particularly acute. This
problem of attrition is different from what is referred to as the ‘justice gap’.
This latter problem is more concerned with the issues associated with
bringing an offender to justice; that is, securing a conviction.
There are clearly difficulties here especially when an offender
(defendant) might be brought before a court and despite the evidence
against them a jury finds a ‘not guilty’ verdict. This ‘justice gap’ raises quite
different questions than the problem of attrition and has become a space in
which voices for the increased presence of the victim within criminal justice
systems has emerged. (This is taken up in much more detail in Chapter 7.)
There is also another sense in which the term ‘justice gap’ is used. This
refers to access to justice. For example, who can and who cannot afford to
employ a lawyer to defend them. Access to justice in this sense has become
an increasingly acute problem in countries like the United Kingdom, for
example, in which public funding for legal aid has been cut back as part of
the wider cutback in public expenditure under conditions of austerity.
At this juncture it might be worth taking some time to think about the
following questions:

• Why might feminists be so concerned about the problem of attrition in

cases of sexual assault?
• What can be learned about how the criminal justice system operates as
a result of documenting and thinking about the problem of attrition?
• Should criminologists be concerned about the problem of attrition or
the justice gap? If so why? If not, why not?
• These are useful questions to return to particularly after you have
considered the issues raised in Chapter 7.

Summary and conclusion

What is known and not known about crime and criminal victimisation
comes from a number of different sources: our own knowledge and
experiences, what we learn from the media, what we can find in official
statistics of various kinds, and what can be found in criminological
research. Each of these different sources of information are useful and
important, but for the criminologist of central importance is to establish a
systematic and meaningful understanding of the nature of the crime
problem. This means being sensitive to and critical of the strengths and
the weaknesses of the various data sources that are available to count
crime. In being sensitive and critical, a criminologist is also concerned
with being aware of what is made visible and invisible in those data
sources and how different theories or concepts might lead to a better
 understanding of both the nature and impact of criminal victimisation.
For the criminologist it is important to test their theories and
understandings against the data to ensure that they make sense, that is,
that they are meaningful. The importance of this will become apparent
when in the next chapter we go on to explore what it is that we know and
do not know about the nature and extent of crime and which offenders
are made visible by the processes of data collection that we have
discussed here.

EXERCISE

Throughout this chapter some reference has been made to and use has been
made of the Internet as a useful tool for gathering information about crime.
Some of you may already be quite familiar with using Google as a search
engine for information, for example. However, it should always be
remembered that Internet sites vary enormously in the quality of the
information they offer. Indeed they can vary along lines very similar to
those associated with the sources of data discussed in this chapter: official,
unofficial, campaign groups, and personal opinion. So choose one crime
that interests you and see what you can find out about its nature and extent
from:

1. Official websites; like for example, www.ons.gov.uk or www.fbi.gov

or The United Nations Crime and Justice Information Network
(www.ungjin.org).
2. Unofficial website: like those associated with victim support
organisations, violence against women groups, or professional
associations like the American Society of Criminology, the British
Society of Criminology, the European Society of Criminology or the
World Society of Victimology. Many of these professional association
webpages have a wide range of links to research groups of different
kinds and their work.
3. Personal blogs.
4. Newspapers also offer their own archive of material on the web and
these too can provide you with useful links to other sources of data.
Comment on each of these sources of data in the light of the issues that we
have discussed in this chapter:

• Recognizing
• Reporting
• Recording
• Respondent
• Comparison
• The ‘justice gap’

Reflect on what you have learned as a result.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER READING

For a sound and well-theorised exploration of the issues discussed in this

chapter, see Tim Hope (2013, 3/e) What do crime statistics tell us? In Hale,
C. et al. (eds.). Criminology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press). If you are
interested in engaging in your own research, take a look at L. Caulfield and
J. Hill (2014) Criminological Research for Beginners (London: Routledge).
For the adventurous looking for a more advanced discussion, a must read is
Mike Maguire’s chapter ‘Criminal statistics and the construction of crime’
in the fifth edition of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2012) edited by
M. Maguire, R. Morgan, and R. Reiner (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
For the even more adventurous, there is a very thoughtful discussion of the
problem of attrition explored by Sylvia Walby, Jo Armstrong, and Sofia
Strid entitled ‘Developing measures of multiple forms of sexual violence
and their contested treatment in the criminal justice system’ in J. Brown and
S. Walklate (eds.). (2011) The Handbook of Sexual Violence (London:
Routledge).

OceanofPDF.com
3 HOW MUCH CRIME?
Challenging myths about crime, offenders, and victims

This chapter will build on what we have learned from Chapter 2 by taking a
look at what the various data sources discussed there can tell us about how
much crime there is. It is hoped that having read Chapter 2 the reader will
be well aware of the difficulties involved in trying to assess the nature and
extent of crime. However, you will remember from Chapter 1 that
criminology is a ‘modern’ discipline and that means that part of its intent as
a discipline is to provide the kind of information that might better inform
how to deal with the problem of crime. So, it is necessary to form some
picture of the nature and extent of this problem despite the inherent
difficulties in trying to do this. It is also important to remember that part of
the role of criminology is to offer a critical assessment of what is
understood as crime. In this chapter we shall be taking our understanding of
this critical role further by thinking about the nature and extent of crime
under three general headings; crimes of the streets, crimes behind closed
doors, and crimes of the suites. As with Chapter 2, the reader will be asked
to think about different questions as they become appropriate in our
exploration of the question: how much crime?

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 2 it was acknowledged that people have access to different kinds

of information about crime. In that chapter, the reader was encouraged to
compare and contrast the information they had about crime with the kinds
of information that criminologists might work with. In this chapter, the
reader is going to be encouraged to compare and contrast their own
information with criminological knowledge a little further through trying to
put together an answer to the question: how much crime? Answering this
question, hopefully, will also involve challenging some of the myths that we
all possess about crime, victims and offenders. So by the end of this chapter
the reader should have an understanding of the problems of trying to assess
how much crime there is, and as a result should also (hopefully) have a
better understanding of who offenders and victims are most likely to be. In
addition, building on the problems of comparison discussed at the end of
Chapter 2, the reader should also have a picture of what the problems are
for criminologists trying to understand what these issues look like in
different societies. However, before we take any of this any further, it will
be useful to have a sense of some of the common myths around the problem
of crime. One place to start will be to try to dispel mass media images of
crime and offenders.

DISPELLING MYTHS ABOUT CRIME

On May 18, 1964 in Margate, a seaside resort in the United Kingdom,

‘mods’ and ‘rockers’, two clearly identifiable (through dress, mode of
transport, and general self-presentation) teenage groups clashed on the
beach. The nature and extent of that clash was subject to considerable
debate; however, what was clear was that the media played an important
role in contributing to how people thought about what went on that day (a
public holiday) and what might ensue on subsequent such holidays. Stan
Cohen, a U.K. criminologist, was later to describe this response as a ‘moral
panic’. The notion of ‘moral panic’ was first used by Howard Becker, a
North American sociologist, who used it to refer to the concern about and
response to the use of drugs in the United States. As an idea it was
developed in much more detail in Stan Cohen’s book Folk Devils and
Moral Panics (which was a detailed study of the response to the ‘mods’ and
rockers’ in the 1960s) published in 1972. In this study, Cohen describes a
moral panic as the way in which the police, politicians, but especially the
media, respond to a problem such that the nature of a problem is so
exaggerated the effect of which is to generate concern and anxiety out of
proportion with the actual nature of the problem itself. In Cohen’s view, this
is what happened in the United Kingdom in the 1960s in relation to the
‘mods’ and ‘rockers’. The concept of ‘moral panic’ as he developed it, and
the role of the media in generating such panics, has become a central
feature of much sociological and criminological research since then.
 How the media influences our understanding of crime is a highly debated
topic. The nature of that debate is reflected in (at least) three different
questions that criminologists might ask:

1. Does exposure to media images of crime and violence cause people to

engage in similar behaviour? (The ill effects debate.)
2. Does the media work with unfair stereotypes about offenders and
victims and so heighten fears and anxieties? (The moral panic debate.)
3. What role do the media play in how crime is consumed as popular
culture? (The cultural criminology debate.) (Cultural criminology is
picked up again in the next chapter)

Whilst there are different answers to each of these questions, they all
assume that the media does have a role to play in contributing to the kinds
of perceptions the general public may, or may not have, about crime, how
much of it there might be, the impact it has on the victim, the
appropriateness of the response of the criminal justice system, the discovery
of ‘new’ crimes, and so on. Moreover with the advent of the Internet as an
important source of information about all kinds of behaviours and events,
the role of mediated information about crime is arguably more acute. So,
the precise nature of this role is unclear but given the powerful images that
the media has at its disposal, to deny it has some importance would be
foolhardy. However, how accurate these portrayals are in comparison with
what it is that is known about crime (the facts), as opposed to that which is
interpreted, constructed as a story, or considered newsworthy (the
narratives) is a moot point. Much criminological work is concerned with
bridging the gap between the ‘facts’ and the ‘narratives’. One way of
bridging this gap and challenging some of the myths and images of crime,
victims, and offenders, is to consider a current and widely accepted view
that crime is a real problem for people in everyday life.

CRIME AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Marcus Felson is an influential North American criminologist whose book

Crime and Everyday Life was first published in 1994 and is now in its fifth
edition. This work is very much concerned with conveying the ordinary,
everyday nature of the experience of crime and the approach adopted within
it has come to be known as the ‘routine activity approach’ to understanding
criminal behaviour. (We shall be discussing the importance of this work
again in Chapter 4.) However, in order to establish the case for accepting
that much crime and criminal behaviour is routine, mundane and ordinary,
Felson suggested that challenging mass media images was a good place to
start. In the fourth edition of this book he identifies nine fallacies about
crime. We shall start with a brief review of four of them since they are the
most relevant to the discussion here.

FELSON’S FALLACIES

1. The dramatic fallacy

Media images of crime lead us to believe that crime and its impact is far
more dramatic that it really is. Portrayals of murder are a good example of
this. In media representations, murders are frequently constructed as highly
complex affairs, perhaps driven by jealously in response to some domestic
outrage. Indeed, some murders are like this but this is by no means
commonplace. As Felson and Boba (2010) point out, most murders result
from a petty quarrel and in the United States in particular are a product of a
‘gun too near’ and a ‘hospital too far’. You might also like to reflect upon
the discussion of Harold Shipman in Chapter 1 and in the light of this
‘dramatic fallacy’. However, it is not only the portrayals of particular kinds
of crime that are given dramatic license. The same drama is attributed to the
role played by the criminal justice professionals from the Sherlock Holmes
factor in detective stories to the drama of the crown court and the ‘comedy’
of prison life. As we shall see, and as Felson contends, most crime and most
of the work done within the criminal justice system is not like this. It is very
ordinary and mundane.

2. The ingenuity fallacy

This fallacy presumes that criminals are far cleverer than they really are.
Felson argues that much crime that comes to the attention of the criminal
justice system is not committed through daring or ingenuity but as a result
of opportunity and/or petty vandalism. For example, burglars tend to
commit crimes in circumstances that offer them relatively easy access and
little chance of getting caught. Shoplifting is made more or less easy
dependent upon the design and layout of the store. Criminal damage does
not take intelligence. Someone involved in email-based Internet fraud is
ultimately reliant upon the recipient giving them the information with
which to complete their criminal act. Though it is a moot point as to the
extent to which ingenuity is a prerequisite for some aspects of financial
fraud, for example. Felson goes on to argue that assuming that criminals are
clever leads people to think that there is more organised and centrally
controlled criminal activity than there really is. However, the central
message might be that whilst the victim of a crime might want to make
sense of what has happened to them by attributing ingenuity to the criminal,
and this might make good media copy, most crime is ordinary and
committed by ordinary people.

3. The age fallacy

Felson suggests that most media images leave people with the impression
that victims and offenders are much older than they actually are. In the
United Kingdom, this is especially the case in relation to street crime and/or
burglary. Newspapers frequently make headline stories from particularly
violent attacks on the elderly, especially elderly females. Such things do, of
course, happen, but as we shall see most offenders and most victims of
petty theft, robbery and acts of violence are young people, more often than
not young males.

4. The constabulary fallacy

This fallacy assumes that the police in the first instance, and other branches
of the criminal justice system in the second, know more about crime and
can do more about crime than they actually do. Again, it is a view of the
criminal justice process, often driven by media constructions, that creates
an image of crimes being solved and of the wrong doers being brought to
justice. As the previous chapter has demonstrated, the criminal justice
system only becomes aware of those crimes that have been reported, or are
the result of some police pro-activity. In addition, not all crimes get solved!
 Having considered some of Felson’s fallacies, the reader might like to
think about the following questions:

1. To what extent do some of the fallacies discussed above match with

your own views of crime, victims and offenders?
2. What do you think has influenced your views?
3. Does what you read in the newspapers and see on the television
influence your views? If so, why or why not?

As has already been said, some criminologists have spent a good deal of
time trying to work out what kind of influence the media has on people’s
ideas about crime; asking questions, for example, as to whether the media
make people worry about crime more. That kind of question is not of
central importance here. What is important to appreciate is that the
information we get from the media is one source of information about crime
for all of us, and in the absence of being a victim of crime or an offender or
working within the criminal justice system, it is an important source of
information. It is that kind of information that is often translated into
‘common sense’ (what we all ‘know’) as opposed to ‘good’ sense (what is
actually the case). One of the tasks of criminology and the criminologist, as
has been stated elsewhere in this book, is to subject such ‘common sense’,
and the influences on it, to theoretical and empirical investigation. So, in the
rest of this chapter, we shall be concerned with comparing the fallacies
discussed above with what it is that the data sources that were discussed in
the previous chapter tell us about crime.

HOW MUCH CRIME?

Those of you who have already read Chapters 1 and 2 should be aware of
some of the problems in trying to answer this question. Nevertheless,
politicians and policy makers regularly make decisions on the assumption
that such a question can be answered. In order to make this assumption, it is
necessary to do three things:

1. Use the same data source consistently.

2. Be aware of any shortcomings within the data production process.
 3. Suspend any doubts about the possibilities of measurement.

However, the extent to which policy makers and politicians do any of these
things is questionable. Moreover, it is important to remember that such data
sources make some crimes more visible than others, and as a consequence,
some criminal behaviour is much more visible than others. Thus, in trying
to offer a picture of how much crime, it is also important to think about
what kind of crime is being talked about. For our purposes, we shall pay
attention first of all to the kind of crime that Felson assumes informs the
fallacies discussed above: the routine crime. This might loosely be referred
to as ‘crime of the streets’. Later in this chapter we shall consider other
dimensions to the crime problem by discussing what might be called ‘crime
behind closed doors’ and ‘crimes of the suites’, a distinction that will be
used in subsequent chapters in this book.

THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF CRIME: ORDINARY

CRIME—‘CRIME OF THE STREETS’

A common starting point for criminologists trying to answer this questions

is the British Crime Survey (now called the Crime Survey of England and
Wales, CSEW), more accurately described as a criminal victimization
survey as discussed in Chapter 2. The first point to make here is that despite
the fact that these surveys are conducted in the same way using the same
central stock of questions, the findings from these surveys are not always
presented in the same way. These differences in presentation sometimes
reflect what is considered to be politically appropriate and sometimes what
are considered to be the key policy issues at any particular point in time.
However, the interested reader might like to access a number of the
summary statements of the findings from CSEW from different years and
think about how and why those findings have been presented in the way
that they have. This should more than illustrate one of the problems of
comparison discussed in Chapter 2.
As an example, consider the following short summary from the Statistical
Bulletin published in October 2015 by the Office of National Statistics:
 Latest figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW)
for 2014 ‘estimated 6.9 million incidents of crime against households
and resident adults (aged 16 and over) in England and Wales. This is a
7% decrease compared with the previous year’s survey, and the lowest
estimate since the CSEW began in 1981’. It goes on to report that this
fall in crime as only statistically significant for theft. It also reports a
2% increase in crime recorded by the police but goes on to comment
that this might be a result of ‘improved compliance with national
recording standards, leading to proportionally more crimes reported to
the police being recorded by them’.

The paragraph above summarizes just a couple of the main findings from
crime statistic reports freely available from ons.gov.uk. As a criminologist,
what kinds of questions does this summary alert you to?

1. Make a list of the ways in which this data supports your own
knowledge about crime, victims, and offenders.
2. Make a list of the ways in which this data does not support your own
knowledge about crime, victims, and offenders.
3. Think about these lists and the questions that were raised in Chapter 2
about the problems associated with gathering data about crime and
make a few notes on what problems there might be (if any) with the
findings cited above.
4. Make a list of what you think is particularly striking about the
differences between your lists and think about what those differences
might actually mean.

If we accept the accuracy of the data above, it generates a number of further

questions for the criminologist. For example:

• Why is some crime falling?

• Why is some crime stable?
• Why are there differences and how might they be explained?
• Is there a relationship between the confidence of the public in the
police and different reporting behaviours that might be reflected in this
data?
• What about the recording practices of the police?
This list of questions is obviously not complete but they are the kinds of
questions a criminologist might ask. However, in addition, a criminologist
is interested in who the offenders are, and the data above does not help with
that kind of question.
Knowledge about offenders is clearly dependent upon what we know
about those people who are caught and admit to committing crime. This
accounts for a small proportion of all offending behaviour. Detailed
knowledge about offenders in England and Wales is not as easily available
as information of criminal victimisation of the kind outlined above. It is
possible to find out how many people are in prison for what kind of
offences and it is possible to find out about those offenders and offences
broken down either by the sex of the offender or the ethnicity of the
offender. Since 1991, it has been a legal requirement that such statistics for
England and Wales are produced on an annual basis, but it is often up to the
researcher to establish the way in which these figures may or may not be
related to each other. They are certainly not produced in the same readily
available and easily accessible format as the criminal victimisation figures.
However, as an example, prison statistics consistently show that people
(both men and women) from ethnic minorities comprise those found in
prison in rates disproportional to the presence of those same ethnic minority
groups in the population as a whole. So from June 30, 2008 to June 30,
2012, the ethnic composition of the prison population was as shown in
Table 3.1.
On the basis of this kind of data (the full report is available from
www.justice.org.uk):

• How might a criminologist begin to explain the differences between

these figures especially between those of people from ethnic minorities
as compared with white people within the criminal justice system?

Table 3.1 Self-identified ethnicity (numbers) of the prison

population(Adapted from Statistics on Race and the Criminal
Justice System, A Ministry of Justice Publication Under Section
95 of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, November 2013, p. 100)

White Black Asian Mixed Chinese or Not Total

Other Stated/Unknown
2008 60,196 12,557 5804 2691 1354 592 83,194
2012 61,867 11,281 6335 3159 960 2446 86,048

• How might some of the statistics discussed here be a reflection of high

profile policy changes? (Think here about how ethnic minority might
be measured, why the big increase in ‘not stated/unknown’?)
• What about the other differences in these statistics between ethnic
minority groups?
• Any more issues in the figures above worthy of comment?

The disproportionate representation of people from ethnic minorities,

especially black people, in the figures above is a source of constant concern
for criminologists. As Maguire (2002: 363) states, drawing on data such as
this and other criminological studies:

Taken overall . . . the social characteristics of people who are arrested

and processed by the criminal justice system – and particularly
offenders who are eventually sent to prison – present a very different
pattern from that found in the general population. There are many more
males, young people, black people, poor people, poorly educated
people, and people with disturbed childhoods than one would find in a
random sample.

As we shall go on to consider in Chapter 4, one of the issues for

criminology is to explain why this is the case but as we shall see this pattern
in relation to ordinary crime or street crime is not unusual to England and
Wales. You might want to consider the extent to which the same issues and
the same patterns emerge in the data sources available from the FBI or
Eurostat. By implication, some of the questions that could be asked about
the nature and extent of crime in England and Wales might also apply to the
United States or elsewhere in continental Europe. Yet the reader should also
be sensitive to the problems of comparison and think about the following
questions:

1. Are the time periods being referred to in these data sources the same
and does this matter?
2. Are the crimes referred to defined in the same way? Does this matter?
 3. Are the legal frameworks being referred to the same and does this
matter?
4. Is crime perceived to be the same kind of social problem? If so, where
might this be the case and for whom?
5. Are there any similarities in these figures you have unearthed between
England and Wales, the United States and Europe? Are they worth
commenting on? How would we make sense of them?

Preempting some of the discussion that we shall have in Chapter 4 on

explaining crime and Chapter 7 in relation to justice (where the issue of
institutional racism that might underpin some aspects of the figures
discussed above is considered in more detail), the reader might like to
consider the extent to which the differences and similarities that you have
identified can be explained by any of the propositions below offered by
Pease (2002) a U.K. specialist in crime prevention:

1. Psyche: offenders have different ways of thinking and relating to the

world.
2. Opportunity: offenders offend because the opportunity presents itself.
3. Structure: offending behaviour is a result of people’s different
experiences and life chances as a result of where they find themselves
in relation to the social hierarchy.

List the reasons you have for agreeing or disagreeing with any of the
propositions above and keep your list on one side until you have finished
reading this chapter. You might also want to revisit this list when you have
read Chapters 4 and 7.
This discussion has thus far focused on the nature and extent of what
might be called street crime or that kind of crime that comes most readily to
mind when thinking about Felson’s fallacies with which this chapter began.
However, to complete our answer to the question, how much crime, we
need to look at other ways of thinking about and defining the crime
problem: what we have rather loosely called here crime behind closed doors
and crime of the suites. First of all, we shall consider some of the issues
relating to crime behind closed doors.
HOW MUCH CRIME? CRIME BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

This heading is one way of trying to capture all the potentially criminal
behaviour that goes on in the home or within institutions that because of
their location, and the fact that it is the kind of behaviour that frequently
occurs between people who are well-known to each other, is not very often
reported to the police or anyone else. As a consequence this kind of crime is
relatively invisible. It also constitutes an important part of the ‘dark figure
of crime’ discussed in Chapter 2. In more recent years, there has been an
increasing awareness of this kind of crime and as a result more and more
criminologists now consider this kind of crime to be an important topic on
which criminology should have something to say. However, before reading
this section you might like to think about the following issues:

• Think about the idea of the home as a safe haven. How accurate is this
idea? What kinds of myths does this idea help perpetuate about where
and when crime occurs and who by?
• What kind of crime would you include as being ‘crime behind closed
doors’? (Make a list of the kinds of behaviours that you would fit
under this heading.)
• Who do you think is the most likely victim of this kind of crime and
why?
• Who do you think is the most likely perpetrator of this kind of crime
and why?
• To what extent do your answers to the last three questions fit or fail to
fit with the idea of the home as a safe haven?

The contemporary criminological interest in ‘crime behind closed doors’

owes a great deal to the influence of the feminist movement. Whilst much
feminist work was conducted outside of the discipline of criminology,
especially in the 1960s and 1970s, and was concerned with campaigning for
women’s rights, that work also played a part in drawing attention to the
amount of violence perpetrated by men against women. Feminism and
feminists did not necessarily put this level of violence within the framework
of the law (that is, they were not concerned with it as crime, but as a
manifestation of patriarchy), the documentation of the extent of such
violence coined here as ‘crime behind closed doors’ played its part in
putting such violence on the criminological agenda. So the phrase ‘behind
closed doors’ is intended to capture the kind of criminal behaviour that is
less likely to be recognised as such, by the victim in particular, and as a
consequence less likely to come to the attention of the criminal justice
system. The kinds of crimes that might be included under this heading
which criminologists have paid attention to are rape, domestic violence,
child abuse, and elder abuse. Space dictates that it is not possible to cover
all of these issues in great detail; however, it is important to say something
about each of them. First a note on understanding the data associated with
the kinds of crime under discussion here.
In order to assess how much crime there might be behind closed doors, it
is important to appreciate that different studies use different ways of
measuring this kind of crime and as a consequence paint a different picture
of the extent of it. Feminist informed studies, because their central concern
is with women’s experiences of patriarchy, often use what is referred to as
prevalence measures. In other words, they ask questions about women’s
experiences over their lifetime. Studies concerned with measuring the
nature and extent of crime, like for example criminal victimisation studies,
use what is referred to as incidence measures. In other words, they measure
how many incidents of particular crimes have happened to individuals
during a particular specified time period. This is so victimisation findings
can be more accurately compared with the number of crimes that are
actually recorded. In addition, prevalence studies sometimes let the victims
define their own experiences as being criminal, whereas incidence studies
frequently use definitions informed by what the law would say was
criminal. These different ways of measuring the same kinds of events
produce very different pictures of the nature and extent of these kinds of
crimes. Indeed, work conducted by Sylvia Walby (2015) and colleagues
based at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom indicates that the way
in which the recording practices of the CSEW in creating a cut-off point for
the number of repeat victimisation of violence recorded by that survey
results in an overall reduction in the measurement of violence in general
and violence against women in particular. If we add to these problems of
measurement the questions raised by Sandra Walklate (2014) concerning
what counts as violence and under what circumstances, understanding the
nature and extent of crime behind closed doors is considerably problematic.
 By way of illustration, consider some of the findings below relating to
rape and/or sexual assault:

• In a prevalence study conducted in London and published in 1985,

Hall reported that one in six women had experienced rape and one in
three women had experienced sexual assault in their lifetime.
• Myhill and Allen, two U.K. Home Office researchers, reported in 2002
using British Crime Survey data, an incidence of rape for the year
2000 of 61,000 women in England and Wales, and a prevalence rate of
754,000 women since the age of 16.
• The international criminal victimisation survey of 2000 measuring
incidents over the previous five years suggests that about 1 in 100
women in Sweden, Finland, Australia and England and Wales reported
sexual assaults with women in Japan, Northern Ireland, Poland and
Portugal being least at risk.
• The International Violence Against Women survey sponsored by
HEUNI and conducted in 2003 across 30 different countries reports
that between 35% and 60% of women in the surveyed countries have
experienced violence by a man during their lifetime, between 22% and
40% have experienced intimate partner violence during their lifetime,
less than one-third of women reported their experience of violence to
the police, and women are more likely to report stranger violence than
intimate partner violence, about one-fourth of victimised women did
not talk to anyone about their experiences.
• Mooney (2000), a British criminologist, reports that one in three
women surveyed from a sample of the general population in north
London during the early 1990s had experienced some form of
‘domestic’ violence during their lifetime.
• A report produced by the Economic and Social Research Council in the
U.K. on the nature and extent of violence in the U.K. published in
2002 reported that half the young men interviewed aged 14–21 thought
that it could be acceptable to hit a woman or force her to have sex, as
did one-third of young women in the same age groups.

Each of these findings conveys very different pictures of the nature and
extent of sexual assault and violence against women but they are all agreed
on one common finding:
 • Most rapes, sexual assaults, and violence(s) (particularly against
women) are perpetrated by people known to the victim: partners, ex-
partners, relatives or friends, and they are perpetrated by men.

(You might like to revisit your thoughts on the home as a safe haven at this
point; you might also like to consider the legitimacy of some of the myths
around rape. For example, ‘a woman runs faster with her knickers up than a
man with his trousers down’, when a woman says no she really means yes;
prostitutes cannot be raped; that real rape is stranger rape; that rape can only
occur outdoors; that women cry rape, etc.). And whilst all the findings
above relate to women as victims of sexual assault and physical violence,
this does not mean that men cannot be victims of such crimes too. For
example:

• In reviewing the literature on the rape of men in prison, a Human

Rights Watch Report indicates that 21% of male inmates had
experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sex since they
had been in prison. (No Escape: www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison.)
• In addition, an earlier study conducted by McMullen (1990) on male
rape in the United Kingdom challenges the view that this kind of crime
is purely a homosexual crime.

If all of these findings are put together they clearly put men, but especially
men known to their victims, at the centre of our understanding of sexually
motivated and violent crime, and our picture and understanding of the
nature and extent of crime behind closed doors becomes quite complicated.
Add to this the family and gender dynamics that underpin child abuse, in
which child physical abuse seems to be equally perpetrated by men and
women on male and female children, but child sexual abuse appears to be
something that primarily men do to female children, then the criminological
problem of understanding and explaining ‘crime behind closed doors’ is
compounded. Further, if the family and institutional bases to abuse of the
elderly are added to the crime agenda, then the nature and extent of crime
‘behind closed doors’ is substantial indeed!
The impact that these kinds of questions have on criminology are
usefully summarised in the following way:
 • The study of crime incorporates much more than common images of
the crime problem.
• If the findings presented here are taken seriously, much of that study
involved asking questions about things that are fairly ordinary
experiences for a lot of people.
• Many of those ordinary experiences are hidden from view and as a
consequence never come to the attention of the criminal justice system.
• Many of those ordinary experiences, though by no means all, are a
product of men’s behaviour toward women.
• The problem for criminology is how to incorporate findings such as
these into explanations of crime and criminality.
• These are not the ordinary experiences discussed by Felson.

In some respects, it is possible to argue that one of the underlying

mechanisms of crime behind closed doors is the question of power. In many
of the examples cited above, particular incidents can be understood in part
as a product of the personal power that one individual exerts over another
with that power sometimes having more influence and impact as a result of
age and/or other factors. (At this juncture, the reader might like to think
again about the relevance of the three different kinds of explanation of
criminal behaviour referred to earlier to this kind of crime; namely psyche,
opportunity and structure.) Power, however, is not only exerted at an
individual level. It is also part and parcel of structural relationships of
society. Those structural relationships also feed into our understanding of
the nature and extent of crime. Appreciation of the structural dimension to
power relationships is central to the concern that some criminologists have
with a further area of criminal activity also often hidden from view. This is
referred to here as ‘crime of the suites’.

THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF CRIME: ‘CRIME OF THE

SUITES’

Crime of the suites is used here to refer to a wide range of criminal and
potentially criminal activity relating to the world of big business.
Sutherland (1949), an American social scientist, first coined the term ‘white
collar crime’ to draw attention to the kinds of behaviour that may be
considered routine practice in the world of work, like using the Internet in
the office for personal purposes or taking a few extra pens home, as being
suitable subject matter for the criminologists. However, the term ‘crime of
the suites’ is intended to broaden our understanding of these kinds of
routine practices to include the kinds of practices that business corporations
may engage in against each other or just as a way of doing business. Put
simply, here we are concerned with the rather fine line between sharp
business practice and criminal practice whether that be in the form of
flouting health and safety regulations, fraud, or ‘insider dealing’. Chapter 2
documented some of the problems associated with counting this kind of
crime given its ‘invisibility’ most of the time, and of course those same
problems feed into the extent to which criminology can paint a picture of
the nature and extent of crime of this kind. It is very difficult to offer
anything like an accurate statistical insight into these issues. Frequently
when this kind of criminal activity does come to the attention of the public,
it tends to do so in a rather dramatic fashion. The examples that follow
illustrate some of the drama that can be associated with ‘crime of the
suites’.

EXAMPLE 1: THE BHOPAL DISASTER 1984

On Sunday December 2, 1984 in Bhopal, India, at the Union Carbide

Company of India (a subsidiary of the Union Carbide Corporation), water
leaked into a storage tank filled with methyl-iscyanate, resulting in a
chemical reaction and subsequent gas escape. Estimates vary on how many
died on that day from 1754 to upwards of 5000 people. Sources report that
two people have died every week since the accident as a result of exposure
to that gas. The Indian Government has acknowledged 3329 deaths for
compensation purposes.
The purpose of this example is to encourage you to think as much about
the victims of ‘crimes of the suites’ as much as the perpetrators. A good deal
has been written about the events in Bhopal, the consequences of which are
still being felt. These events are often referred to as a ‘disaster’ but you
might want to consider who was responsible for maintenance of the
facilities in which the leakage occurred and how has that been dealt with?
This is also a good example of the ways in which victim campaign groups
have worked to ensure improved responses to the victims of these events:
something you might want to think about in relation to the question of
justice discussed in Chapter 7.

EXAMPLE 2: THE WAR IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN, ABU GHRAIB PRISON

In February 2004, the International Red Cross reported on ‘The Treatment

by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by
the Geneva Convention in Iraq during Arrest, Internment and Interrogation’.
You can get the full report at www.globalsecurity.org. That report lists the
following practices: hooding (used to prevent people from seeing, making
them disoriented, sometimes combined with beating); handcuffing to an
extent that they caused skin lesions; beating with hard objects (rifles, pistols
and on various parts of the body); threats of ill-treatment or reprisals on
family members; stripped naked for long periods whilst being held in
solitary confinement; food, sleep and water deprivation; paraded naked in
front of others and for long periods and being made to adopt positions in
order to be photographed; being forced to remain in stress positions for long
periods. All of these practices, the Red Cross reports, were used
systematically for the purposes of intelligence gathering.
In this example, I am asking you to think about a much broader
conceptualised ‘crimes of the suites’ to include crimes committed on behalf
of the state. What crimes do you think are being committed here, if any, by
whom, against whom, in whose interests? What kinds of laws are being
transgressed? How does this example in particular relate to questions of
justice?

EXAMPLE 3: THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE 1994

The Rwandan genocide took place from April to July 1994 during which
time it is estimated that somewhere in the region of 500,000 to 1,000,000
Rwandans were killed. All were Tutsi or moderate Hutu people killed,
raped, and maimed and so on by the majority Hutu people. During this time
Rwanda lost about 20% of its population. These two groups had been
engaged in a civil war for some time. However, the international
community through both action and inaction and as a result of different
colonial legacies in Rwanda has been implicated both in the denial of this
genocide and in benefiting from it. (Of particular interest here is the work
by Hazel Cameron (2013), Britain’s Hidden Role in the Rwandan
Genocide: The Cat’s Paw.)
This particular example is included to encourage you to think about
‘crimes of the suites’ in terms of the way in which states can be complicit in
and/or bystanders to, gross violations of international law, if it is within
their interests to do so. What other examples can you think of in which
states might have operated or be operating in this way that might also be of
interest to criminologists? Remember that early victimologists were
particularly interested in making sense of events such as genocide and you
might want to consider how that area of analysis might contribute to
understanding these particular events and the behaviours associated with
them.
All of the examples above touch on different dimensions of crime of the
suites and as illustrations are not only dramatic in their reporting and impact
but also allude, in a very real way, to the problems of trying to offer an
estimate as to their nature and extent. However, the reader might like to
revisit the seven features of invisibility identified by Jupp, Francis and
Davies (1998) discussed in the previous chapter (no knowledge; no
statistics; no theory; no research; no control; no politics; and no panic) and
to think about how each of these features applies to each of the examples
above. The reader might also like to reflect upon their presentation as
‘disasters’ or ‘scandals’ rather than crimes. (We shall discuss this again in
Chapter 6.)
Needless to say, there have always been some criminologists who have
concerned themselves with the kinds of crime problems illustrated above
and we shall discuss that strand of criminology in more detail in Chapter 6.
What the examples presented here illustrate are not only the potential nature
and extent of ‘crimes of the suites’ (we only need to add to these examples
things like tax evasion, offences against health and safety legislation,
offences against financial regulatory agencies to get an added feel of that),
they also illustrate the wide variety of behaviours that might be included
here as well as the difficulties associated with them being labelled as
criminal. Some of those difficulties, as with crime behind closed doors, are
connected with the reluctance and/or inability of the victim to identify
things that happen to them as criminal (and as a consequence they are not
reported to anyone) and some of the difficulties lie with the powerful
position that some of the organisations involved in such activities occupy.
(Interestingly enough many of those individuals occupying the top positions
in such organisations are also male, endorsing the need for criminological
explanation to take account of gender in explaining crime. This is discussed
in the next chapter.) At this juncture, the reader might also like to think
again about the relevance of psyche, opportunity and structure to the kind of
criminal behaviour discussed above.

Summary and conclusion

This chapter began by stressing the importance of thinking critically
about the kinds of images of crime, victims and offenders that are
perpetuated by the media. In thinking critically about these images, you
were invited to consider some of the currently available data on the
nature and extent of crime in the United Kingdom, the United States and
continental Europe. In this chapter, it has become clear that different data
sources can offer us different answers to this question and that as a
criminologist it is important to think fairly carefully about what such
information does and does not tell us. In trying to extend our
criminological imagination about the nature and extent of crime we went
on to think about different kinds of crime that occur in structurally
different locations (crime behind closed doors and crimes of the suites)
and to consider what that extended understanding had to offer us.
Consequently, there are a number of themes that this review has put to
the fore. In summary for the criminologist the issues look something like
this:

1. I t is important to challenge media and common sense images of

what counts as crime, and who the criminals are.
2. I t is important to think about the problems of making comparisons
from society to society about the nature of crime and offenders.
3. I f there are problems in making comparisons about the nature of
the crime problem in different societies, then there must be
additional problems in borrowing policies from one society and
trying to make them work in another, without thinking critically
about those differences as well as the similarities.
 4. Power and power relations are important in defining what we see as
being criminal and what we do not see as criminal; whether that be
personal power (men over women); institutional power (carers over
the elderly); or economic power (big business corporations over all
of us).
5. I t is important to note the maleness of much offending behaviour.

The reader is encouraged to think about the extent to which the different
kinds of explanations of criminal behaviour to be addressed in the next
chapter account, or fail to account, for the kinds of crime we have
discussed here.

EXERCISE

When politicians talk about the ‘war on crime’:

• What kind of crime are they talking about?

• Why?
• How might we construct a different answer to this question?
• What kinds of problems would this raise for policy makers?
• What kinds of problems would this raise for politicians?

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER READING

A very accessible read is Marcus Felson’s Crime in Everyday Life (London:

Sage). This was first published in 1994 and is now in its fifth edition, which
was published in 2013. This is a useful book for not only challenging some
of the myths about crime, offenders, and victims, it is also one that will be
of interest in following up some of the themes addressed in Chapters 4 and
7. Accessing the Office of National Statistics (www.ons.gov.uk), or the
Bureau of Justice website for the United States (www.ojp.usdoj.gov), or the
Federal Bureau of Statistics (www.fbi.gov) will give you access to a whole
range of different reports on the nature of offenders and criminal
victimisation. For those wanting a more advanced discussion on the nature
and extent of crime in England and Wales, then a good starting point would
be Mike Maguire’s chapter ‘Criminal statistics and the construction of
crime’ in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (2012) The Oxford
Handbook of Criminology (5/e). This is quite a technical overview but if
you are serious about either understanding the nature and extent of crime or
serious about criminology or both, then it is the kind of material that you
will need to understand.

OceanofPDF.com
4 THE SEARCH FOR CRIMINOLOGICAL
EXPLANATION

In this chapter we shall be considering the different ways in which

criminologists attempt to explain criminal behaviour. The reader is
reminded that in Chapter 1 we have already discussed two historically
important ways of thinking about criminological explanation; biological
positivism and sociological positivism. Here we shall be considering some
further sociological ideas that have been used over the last 25 years to
explain crime. You might also recall from Chapter 1 that criminology was
established as a ‘modern’ discipline. This means that its growth and
development as a social science is parallel with the growth and
development of modern society. One of the central aims of the discipline
was, and still is, to look for ways in which the problem of crime, as a social
problem, could be better managed in the interests of society as a whole. So
criminologists offer information about the kinds of policies that would have
this effect. This means that they are concerned with understanding the
cause(s) of crime: a search for explanation. In this chapter we will be
considering the relevance of four different kinds of criminological
explanation, two key theories: rational choice theory and social control
theory, and two key concepts: relative deprivation and hegemonic
masculinity. At all times the reader will be encouraged to think about the
extent to which these ideas match with the data available about crime
discussed in Chapter 3.

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 highlighted the importance of positivism to criminology and the

way positivism is manifest in both biological and sociological
representations of the discipline. The purpose of this chapter is to develop a
more finely tuned understanding of criminological explanation by
considering the relative value of four different ways that criminologists
have used in recent times to explain criminal behaviour: rational choice
theory and its relative the routine activity approach; social control theory,
the concept of relative deprivation and the concept of hegemonic
masculinity. These four different ways of theorising about crime have been
chosen because they have each been differently deployed in informing
policy-making decisions and they each make different assumptions about
the importance of the role of the victim, or potential victim, in the
perpetration of crime. They also offer us one way of taking our threefold
concern with the psyche, opportunity and structure, introduced in the
previous chapter a little further. However we need to make sure first of all
that we understand what is meant by theory and what is meant by
explanation.

A WORD ON THEORY AND EXPLANATION

Thinking about theory tends to worry students. Yet all of us work with
‘theory’ all of the time. Put at its simplest ‘theory’ refers to the ideas we
have about the world. Our ‘theories’, or ideas, equip us with sets of
assumptions that enable us to make sense of the world we live in. In the
context of crime, each of us will have our own theories as to why some
people commit crime and others do not. We sometimes call this ‘common
sense’. What makes criminological theory a little different from ‘common
sense’ is that it attempts to offer ideas, assumptions, and/or hypotheses to
help us make sense of criminal behaviour that can be applied generally. In
other words, criminological theory tries to work with ideas that enable us to
make sense of the world above and beyond what we know based on our
own experiences and/or anecdotes. It seeks to make sense of the world
beyond individual experience. This can be expressed as the difference
between the theories we all have based on common sense from theories that
can be generated on the basis of good sense. So, in the search for an
explanation of crime, common sense is often not sufficient on its own to
explain why some people engage in criminal behaviour and others do not.
Common sense may work in some specific circumstances but it will not
necessarily be applicable generally. Criminologists look for theories that
can offer general explanations of crime. Only in this way can the link
between theory and policy be seen to make sense.
 A brief look at the range of books available on criminological theory
offers a clue as to the variety and complexity that can be associated with
this search for explanation. This should be expected. After all, human
beings can be fairly complex creatures! However, in making sense of
criminological theory, it is useful to ask a number of questions. Soothill et
al. (2002: 98–99) list these as being:

1. What is the theory trying to explain, and therefore what aspects of the
crime-criminal problem does it ignore?
2. How might we categorise this theory in relation to
Schools of thought
Key concepts and ideas
Main theorists

3. When and where was the theory written? What was the potential
influence of the social context at that time?

To this list I would add two more questions:

4. What are the policy implications that flow from a theory?

5. How do those implications resonate with the political climate of the
time?

So, put simply, it must be remembered that theory is not constructed or

applied in a social vacuum. It is always important to have some sense of
who the protagonists of a particular theory are, and what their influence is
likely to be. It is also important to remember that in order for criminological
theory to work it has to make sense of what it is that we know about crime,
criminals and criminal victimisation. In other words, the theory is there to
make sense of the evidence.
Some time ago, John Braithwaite (1989: 44–49), an influential Australian
criminologist, stated that there are 13 facts about crime that criminology
needs to explain that common sense knowledge can sometimes fail to
appreciate. To paraphrase these are:

1. Crime is committed disproportionately by males.

2. Crime is perpetrated disproportionately by 15–25 year olds.
 3. Crime is committed disproportionately by unmarried people.
4. Crime is committed disproportionately by people living in large
cities.
5. Crime is committed disproportionately by people who have
experienced high residential mobility and who live in areas
characterised by high residential mobility.
6. Young people who are strongly attached to their school are less likely
to engage in crime.
7. Young people who have high educational and occupational
aspirations are less likely to engage in crime.
8. Young people who do poorly at school are more likely to engage in
crime.
9. Young people who are strongly attached to their parents are less
likely to engage in crime.
10. Young people who have friendships with criminals are more likely to
engage in crime themselves.
11. People who believe strongly in complying with the law are less likely
to violate the law.
12. For both men and women, being at the bottom of the class structure
(including being a member of an ethnic minority group) increases their
chances of offending for all types of crime apart from those crimes for
which opportunities are systematically less available to the poor.
13. Crime rates have been increasing since the Second World War in
most countries developed and developing. The only case of a country
that has been clearly shown to have had a falling crime rate in this
period is Japan.

So think about the extent to which these ‘facts’:

• Fit with all kinds of crime

• Are a product of the database they might be derived from (think back
to the problems of what counts as ‘crime’ and how to count crime
discussed in Chapter 3)
• Fit, or do not fit, with your own common sense knowledge about crime
• Say anything about criminal victimisation
And, for the purposes of this chapter in particular:

• The extent to which the theories and concepts discussed below fit these
‘facts’.

So, now we have five questions with which to evaluate any criminological
theory:

1. What kind of crime is it concerned with to explain?

2. Where does it fit in relation to the ideas of the time?
3. When and where was it written?
4. What policies flow from it?
5. How does it relate to the evidence?

Each of these questions will be considered in the light of the four different
criminological explanations to be considered here: rational choice theory,
social control theory, relative deprivation, and hegemonic masculinity.
These theories have been chosen largely because of their contemporary
resonance and largely because they highlight the different policy
possibilities that flow from them as a way of illustrating how theory,
evidence, and policy can be connected in different ways.

RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

Ken Pease (2006), a U.K. criminologist writing in The Sage Dictionary of

Criminology in defining rational choice theory draws attention to the
capacity of offenders to make decisions about whether to offend in the light
of the information they have at hand, for example, time of day, whether
there are surveillance cameras evident and so on. This definition offers an
understanding of rational choice theory at its most general level and
encompasses another set of ideas that emphasise the rationality of the
criminal actor known as routine activity theory. These ideas are discussed
more fully below.
The idea that the criminal is a rational actor has its origins in what is
referred to as ‘classical criminology’. In classical theory, the individual
human being is seen as someone whose interests lie in maximising pleasure
and minimising pain. Put in more economic terms, individuals weigh up the
costs and the benefits of their actions and make choices on the basis of the
benefits that they think will accrue from them. Thus, classical criminology
puts great store by the deterrent effect of punishment. Despite the inherent
problems with this view of human beings and assuming that deterrence
works (it, for example, disregards the problem that different things might
work with different individuals), since the 1980s there has been a
considerable revival of interest in thinking about the criminal as a rational
actor making decisions in the way suggested above.
Some would argue that rational choice theory does not comprise an
independent theory at all since there are elements of the idea of the criminal
as a rational choice maker in a range of criminological theories. However, it
can be argued that the revival of interest in emphasising the criminal as a
rational actor was as much a reflection of looking for innovative policies of
crime prevention (given the rising crime rates of the 1980s) as it was a
concern to search for an explanation of criminal behaviour itself. Its value,
as an approach, has also been revitalised contemporarily as one way of
making sense of cybercrime (see Chapter 8). Cornish and Clark (1986: 1)
emphasise the value of rationality in the context of crime prevention policy
in the following way:

offenders seek to benefit themselves by their criminal behaviour; . . .

this involves the making of decisions and choices, however rudimentary
on occasion these processes might be; and . . . these processes exhibit a
measure of rationality, albeit constrained by the limits of time and the
availability of information

So, by implication, this rational process of decision making is used to

account for not only the decision to commit crime but also the time and the
place in which such crime is committed. Further, this view of the criminal
presumes that the harder the target of criminal behaviour, the more likely
the criminal is to choose another target. Of course, as Cornish and Clarke
(2006) recognise themselves, offenders (like all of us) are rarely in
possession of all the information to make a perfectly informed rational
decision. What offenders do engage in is a pattern of behaviour that has
worked for them before rather than necessarily being able to make finely
tuned, highly informed decisions in the present moment. Their rationality is
therefore ‘bounded’ by what they know and the context in which they are
operating. However the key to understanding offending behaviour is, whilst
the quality of the decision-making process may be variable, the actions
offenders engage in are always purposive, that is committed with the
intention of benefiting the offender. Thus, crime is never senseless.
Vandalism might reap the reward of esteem amongst peers. Violence in the
home may secure the authority of the person committing the violence.
Identity theft may result in financial gain. Suicide bombers may be
motivated by the possibility of rewards after death. So even in examples
like these where other factors may be present, the behaviour of the offender
is always seen to have a purpose.
This theory lends itself very readily to a range of policy initiatives
referred to as ‘situational crime prevention’ (see also Chapter 8). Put
simply, if the opportunities for criminal behaviour are removed, then the
costs of committing crime will outweigh the benefits. However, the reader
might like to consider whether this is the case after completing the
following exercise.

• Make a list of all the crimes in which you think offenders weigh up the
costs and benefits of committing crime.
• For each of the crimes in your list, do the costs and benefits look the
same for each crime?
• For each of the crimes in your list, what practical intervention would
you introduce to increase the opportunity costs of offending?
• What do you think would happen to the potential for criminal
behaviour as a consequence of your intervention measures?

Hopefully this exercise has led you to think about some of the problems
inherent in rational choice theory. It should have at least made you aware of
some of the complexities of not only assuming that criminals are rational
actors but also some of the other factors this emphasis on the rationality of
the criminal leaves out. In particular, it might have led you to consider the
problem of ‘displacement’. This refers to the extent to which making it
harder to commit particular crimes in particular places results in different
kinds of crime being committed at different times and in different places.
The problem of displacement suggests that target hardening, a key policy
intervention derived from this theory, in and of itself may only constitute a
partial answer to crime because it taps into only part of the equation that
causes crime. Cohen and Felson (1979), two North American
criminologists, tried to develop the complexity of the crime equation a little
more fully by exploring the relationship between the offender and the
opportunity to commit crime. This they called the ‘routine activity
approach’.
The routine activity approach to understanding the choices made by
offenders to commit crime at particular times in particular places against
particular targets argues that crime is the product of three factors coming
together: a motivated offender, a potential victim, and the absence of a
capable guardian. These factors come together in the daily, routine patterns
of people’s everyday lives and create the opportunity (or not) for criminal
behaviour. This view of crime, rather like rational choice theory, focuses
attention on crime as an event, with the idea of understanding people’s
routine activity adding a predictive element to where, when, and against
whom crime might occur because of the attention that it gives to the
patterning of activities. This way of thinking about the commission of crime
has also been used to understand the patterning of victimisation. Using the
concept of lifestyle rather than routine activity, Hindelang, Gottfredson and
Garofalo (1978: 250), three North American social scientists interested in
criminal victimisation, used this idea to understand the patterning of
personal victimisation. They state that for such victimisation to occur:

. . . – the offender and the victim – must have occasion to intersect in

time and space . . . some source of dispute or claim must arise between
the actors . . . the offender must be willing and able to threaten or use
force . . . offender views it as advantageous to use or threaten force . . .

From this starting point these authors then go on to list eight propositions as
to why some individuals are much more likely to be subjected to personal
victimisation than others drawing on such variables as age, sex, ethnicity,
etc. This way of thinking about the likelihood or otherwise of criminal
victimisation proved to be highly influential in the way in which the
criminal victimisation survey was developed. (The relevance of this work is
discussed more fully in the next chapter.)
Rational choice theory, along with the routine activity approach, was
harnessed by governments both in the United States and the United
Kingdom during the late 1970s and early 1980s when the crime rate was
rising rapidly since they offered opportunities for policy intervention.
Governments could be seen to be doing something about crime. Indeed the
popularity of closed circuit television in city centres, for example, stands as
testimony to the commitment to, and the continuing perceived value of this
approach. Moreover, within this explanation of crime, it should be noted
that criminals are viewed as people just like us: offenders are ordinary
people who commit ordinary crimes dependent on the supply of criminal
opportunities presented to them. They are not ‘pathological monstrosities’
as Lombroso suggested and was discussed in Chapter 1.
The influence of these ideas, and the policies and politics associated with
them, came to be known during the 1980s as ‘right realism’. This term was
intended to highlight the inherent political conservatism of these ideas and
the implicit assumption that crime was a problem of the individual not
social structure. More recently, and closely aligned to rational choice
theory, routine activity theory, and situational crime prevention, has been
the development of crime science.
Gloria Laycock (2006), a U.K. criminologist, writing in The Sage
Dictionary of Criminology, focused the crime science approach on the
logical, empirical testing of hypotheses and data analysis on the problems
of crime and disorder. Claiming to embrace the traditional principles of
scientific practice, including experimentation, crime science makes the case
for attending to the immediate circumstances that surround criminal
behaviour from the environment, to the rewards for crime, to how crime is
committed, to the opportunities that permit crime to happen. This focus
affords the opportunity to map crime or identify crime ‘hotspots’ and to test
out what kinds of measures can be put in place to prevent criminal
behaviour. In many ways this approach to criminal behaviour is an
extension of, and attempts to pull together, the other conceptual ideas we
have discussed thus far: opportunity, guardianship, and motivation for
offending. For many criminologists this is a contentious approach to crime
because of its emphasis on a very circumscribed understanding of what
affects individual behaviour. (For an interesting comparison between crime
science and criminology more generally, see the table produced by Tim
Newburn in his book Criminology, on page 295.) Our next criminological
theory takes a different direction.
SOCIAL CONTROL THEORY

The focus of social control theory is different than rational choice theory in
two key respects. First, it is concerned with the effect that society and its
various institutions has on individuals so its attention is on social processes
rather than individual ones. Second, it is concerned with understanding how
it is that people are encouraged to conform so its attention is on how law-
abiding behaviour is achieved rather than law-breaking behaviour. Some
would argue that these concerns are directly derivable from the famous
quote of the social philosopher Hobbes (1651), who observed that without
control life would be a ‘war of every man against every man’. Put simply, if
rational choice theory puts at the centre of human motivation the
maximisation of pleasure and the minimisation of pain, social control
theory puts fear at the centre of such motivation because it is fear of the
consequences of their behaviour that keeps people restrained. As Hobbes is
reported as saying in Hopkins-Burke (2001: 201):

Why do men obey the rules of society? . . . Fear . . . it is the only thing,
when there is appearance of profit or pleasure by breaking the laws that
makes men keep them.

There are many varieties of sociological theorising that have put the
processes of social control at the centre of their concerns and a number of
different variations on these have appeared in criminological work.
However, the most well-known proponent of social control theory is to be
found in the work of Hirschi (1969), a North American social scientist, who
developed what he called the ‘social bond’ thesis of social control.
For Hirschi, there were four components to social bonds that sustained or
threatened social relationships: attachment, commitment, involvement, and
belief. Hirschi saw these as social relationships not psychological ones. In
other words, they needed to be understood as a product of the extent to
which the norms and values of any society or social relationship had
become embedded within an individual. It will be useful to say something
about each of these social bonds in turn.

• Attachment. This refers to the level of strength or weakness of the

relationships that an individual forms with others. In particular, it is
 concerned with identifying the relative power of the social
expectations that relationships with others have over an individual. The
stronger the social expectations, the stronger the attachment, the more
likely an individual will conform. Such attachments can and do vary
over time.
• Commitment. This bond reflects Hirschi’s understanding of the
rational actor: the more an individual invests in conformity (i.e.,
commits themselves to a particular lifestyle) the more they have to lose
by deviating from it.
• Involvement. The more an individual spends his or her time engaged in
behaviour that is conventional or law abiding the less time he or she
has for other things.
• Beliefs. If an individual has been brought up to be a law-abiding
citizen he or she will be less inclined to break the law.

It is possible to argue that these four dimensions of social bonds are

interconnected and interdependent. In addition, it is also possible to see the
links between these ideas and common sense ones like, for example, ‘the
devil makes work for idle hands’. This is not far removed from the notion
of involvement above. However many people have seen the strength’s in
Hirschi’s ideas not in terms of their theoretical contribution but more from
the view that it is empirically well-founded. In other words, these ideas
have been subjected to a good deal of testing that has resulted in some
sound empirical support. (The reader might like to review Braithwaite’s
‘facts’ at this point and identify those that fit with the importance of social
bonds.) Empirical support notwithstanding, this version of social control
theory cannot help us understand:

• Why the absence of social control leads some people into drug
offences and other people into tax fraud.
• The role of changes in the law or levels of tolerance toward different
law-abiding/law-breaking behaviours.
• How one individual’s deviant or law breaking behaviour is recognised
and labelled as such and the same behaviour by others is not.

These kinds of problems have led others, most notably Gottfredson and
Hirschi (1991), to refine this original version of social control theory into
what they called ‘A General Theory of Crime’. This version of social
control theory is intended to explain all crimes at all times. It draws much
more closely on rational choice theory discussed above but adds the
importance of understanding ‘self-control’ to the previous emphasis on
social control. The combination of these two concepts led to much attention
being paid to one central mechanism of control that arguably has an impact
on both: the effectiveness or otherwise of parenting. Whilst this focus has
certainly won appeal in the policy arena (and still does largely on its appeal
to common sense) it still did not address all crimes at all times, as the
authors claimed. Again, the reader might like to think about the validity or
otherwise of ineffective parenting and its contribution to, for example,
insider dealing. This kind of question implies an absence debate; who is and
is not targeted for their (lack of) parenting skills? It also provides a neat
example of the construction of the Criminological Other discussed in
Chapter 1.
In an interesting development of social control theory, Charles Tittle, an
American social scientist, introduced control balance theory in 1995. He
made the observation that whilst too little control might lead to deviant
behaviour, so might too much control. So if control is balanced (whether
that is control of individuals or organisations), then conformity followed; if
control is unbalanced, then deviancy and crime were the results. So for
deviant or criminal behaviour to occur, a number of elements needed to be
present: a predisposition for deviant behaviour (motivation), a trigger
mechanism that highlights the control imbalance; recognition of and
opportunity for deviant/criminal behaviour; and the ability to overcome any
constraints on such behaviour (these could be situational, moral or simply
the presence of others). From this brief overview you can probably see the
way in which Tittle’s work tries to integrate some of the other ways of
thinking about crime that we have discussed thus far, and as he himself
observes (Tittle 2006) it remains to be seen whether this intervention has
any real promise in terms of policy intervention.
The impact of social control theory, in the nature of the theory itself, has
arguably been much more subtle and piecemeal in the policy arena. As a
social theory focussing on the importance of the social, it does not lend
itself so readily to easily measurable policies whose effectiveness might be
demonstrated in a relatively short period of time. Even the effectiveness or
otherwise of parenting interventions needs some time, and quite a complex
process, to demonstrate effectiveness. Therefore, despite some of the
relevance of the empirical findings that lend support to social control
theory, in a social context, both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, that
has increasingly demanded quick fixes for social problems, the impact of
social control theory has inevitably been very subtle if it has been there at
all. Our next conceptual intervention in this search for explanation had its
origins in the United Kingdom rather than the United States.

RELATIVE DEPRIVATION

Walklate (2007: 61) states that relative deprivation:

refers to conditions in which people may not only be (or may not at all
be) objectively deprived, but also may feel so deprived and perceive
themselves to be so deprived in comparison either with others in the
same social category or others in a different social category.

As a concept, relative deprivation has a long history used primarily in social

psychology. In the context of criminology, it has been used most recently as
a key explanatory concept within what came to be called ‘left realism’ (as
distinct from ‘right realism’ discussed above; the differences and
similarities between these two ways of thinking about crime will be
discussed more fully below). Jock Young (1992), a U.K. criminologist
whose work has been associated with left realism, argues that the concept of
relative deprivation is very powerful for three reasons:

• It can be applied to circumstances throughout the social structure.

• It can be applied to all kinds of crime not just those deemed to be
economically motivated.
• It is a concept that is not dependent on identifying some absolute
standard of deprivation or poverty.

The importance of this concept to left realism is best explained by putting it

within a more detailed appreciation of the left realist framework.
Left realism emerged in the United Kingdom during the 1980s in part as
a response to the way in which the early British Crime Surveys seemed to
be downplaying the importance and impact of crime in people’s everyday
lives. So in many ways the political purpose of left realism, in challenging
what the received view of the crime problem then was, has never been in
doubt. However, there has always been more to the left realist project than
politics.
Left realism has at its centre the need to address crime ‘as people
experienced it’ (Young, 1986: 24) and ‘necessitates an accurate
victimology’ which ‘must also trace accurately the relationship between
victim and offender’ and must take account of the fact that ‘crime is focused
both geographically and socially on the most vulnerable sections of the
community’ (Young, 1986: 23). In order to understand the complete picture
of crime, its production as a social problem and its impact, it was argued
that criminology needed to take account of the ‘square of crime’; that is, the
way in which the victim, the offender, the reaction of the formal agencies of
the state, and the reaction of the public all interacted with each other to
produce crime as a social problem. Within this square of crime, relative
deprivation is the concept that helps to understand the way in which crime
may be differently constituted in different circumstances. So, the motivation
for criminal behaviour has to be understood as the product of what people
see going on around them, how they see themselves in relation to that
understanding, and how their behaviour may or may not be reacted to
within the particular set of social circumstances in which they find
themselves. Young (2001: 244) states:

Discontent can be felt anywhere in the class structure where people

perceive their rewards as unfair compared to those with similar
attributes. Thus crime would be more widespread, although it would be
conceded that discontent would be greatest amongst the socially
excluded.

As Young himself is at pains to point out, the cause of crime cannot be

explained by material deprivation alone yet at the same time it must be seen
related to the social order. For the left realist the concept of relative
deprivation connects material circumstances with the social order since
human beings can and do reflect upon their circumstances and of those
around them. As he goes on to observe, the changing relationship between
merit (working hard for what you get) and reward, that can be observed in
contemporary society, from for example, the salaries of professional sports
people, to the bonuses paid to bankers despite their shortcomings displayed
during the economic crisis of 2008–2010, has an impact on rich and poor
alike: ‘Thus, relative deprivation, and a crisis of identity affects both parts
of society although the direction of the hostility conjured up and the
poignancy of its impact are very different indeed’ (Young, 2007: 46).
The policy agenda that flows from left realism emphasises such strategies
as multi-agency intervention that have become almost commonplace in the
United Kingdom since the first development of these ideas. However, these
ideas, like those discussed elsewhere in this chapter, have not proceeded
without criticism. For a detailed analysis of these see Walklate (2007,
Chapter 4) and Hopkins-Burke (2001, Chapter 15). One key problem that
remains is captured by the following question:

Given that this theory assumes no absolute condition of deprivation, this

means that we can all feel relatively deprived in relation to some other
group with whom we are comparing ourselves. So what makes some
people, as relatively deprived as their neighbours, turn to crime and
their neighbours do not?

In real terms, this question reflects one of the ultimate problems for theory
and explanation within criminology; is it the individual ‘at fault’, is it
society ‘at fault’ or is it some mix of the two? Each of the theories we have
discussed here offers us different solutions to this question. However before
taking this further, perhaps this is the point where it will be useful to revisit
the five questions about theory with which we began. So consider:

1. What kinds of crime can each of these theories tell us about?

2. How do they fit with the ideas of the time in which they were
formulated?
3. When, where, and by whom were they written?
4. What policies flow from them?
5. How do they relate to the evidence?

Hopefully in thinking about your answers to these questions you have

become particularly sensitised to the importance of understanding the
political context in which theories become popular, gain support, or recede
in significance. This is captured in the discussion here by some of the terms
that have been used to describe the theories themselves, like ‘right realism’
and ‘left realism’, both of which claim to take crime and its impact
seriously. Where they differ, of course, is where they locate the cause of
crime, and then, as a consequence, what there is to be done about it.
However, of particular importance to the discussion here is how each of
these theories performs in relation to question five. This we shall explore in
a little more detail.

HOW DO THESE DIFFERENT THEORIES PERFORM IN

RELATION TO THE EVIDENCE?

The evidence presented in this chapter by which to evaluate these theories

were the 13 facts that Braithwaite said any theory of crime should be able to
fit. It has already been observed that his ‘facts’ do not necessarily allow for
all kinds of crime and that much of Braithwaite’s work could itself be
situated within the social control model of crime. However, now being
aware of those limitations, it is still useful to consider how each of the
theoretical frameworks that have been discussed here perform in relation to
his facts, and also to consider the extent to which that performance might
connect or not with common sense knowledge about crime. So stop for a
minute and complete Table 4.1.
Think about your evaluation in Table 4.1. Which of these ‘facts’ do the
three theories we have discussed thus far explain? Which are left
unexplained? What are the differences and similarities between what is
included and excluded by these theories? Are all kinds of crime covered
here? If not, which are included and excluded? Which key fact is
highlighted by Braithwaite but is left out by all of these theories? Do any of
them take account of gender?

Table 4.1 How do different theories match with the evidence?

Braithwaite’s Rational Social Control Relative Common

‘facts’ choice deprivation sense
Yes/No/Maybe Yes/No/Maybe Yes/No/Maybe Yes/No/Maybe
1
 2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

LOOKING AT THE EVIDENCE: THE QUESTION OF

GENDER

Chapter 1 introduced the different ways in which criminology and

victimology, as areas of study, made some issues more visible than others.
In that chapter, this was discussed in terms of the ‘criminological other’ and
the ‘victimological other’. Issues around gender featured strongly in these
constructions and yet from the evidence of Braithwaite’s ‘facts’ and that
produced in Chapter 3 it is clear that crime is predominantly a problem to
do with being male. However, from the evaluation of the theories discussed
in this chapter thus far, it can be seen that the extent to which gender, as a
variable, is apparently accounted for within them is pretty minimal. It must
be said that the proponents of these theories would argue that their theories
are gender neutral (that is, they could apply to men or women; rational
choice theorists and social control theorist might say this).
At this point you might like to consider Frances Heidensohn’s (1985) use
of the concept of control to make sense of women’s lives, understood as
being:
 • under control (by men)
• or out of control (being deviant),
• or possibly being increasingly ‘in control’ as some have entered the
world of work in relatively powerful positions

How does this use of the idea of control compare with Hirschi’s or Tittle’s
use of the concept? What kinds of crimes might Heidenshohn’s concept of
control make more visible?
In addition, others might argue that the concepts they use are inclusive of
gendered issues (those committed to the concept of relative deprivation
might say this). Nevertheless, those committed to looking at the effect that
gender has on both the propensity to commit crime and the way in which
we might think about the victim of crime would have a different view.
Moreover, given that questions relating to gender and crime have been
given a good deal of criminological press in its recent history, it is
important to consider what the issues are about this that concern people.
First of all it is important to recognise the difference between gender and
sex. Put simply, sex is a biological given, male or female (though in a small
number of cases there can even be confusion here); gender refers to the
socially ascribed attributes of being male or female (man or woman).
Second, when the term gender is used, it does not only refer to women. It
refers to men as well. Third, some would argue that there can be no such
thing as a gender neutral concept; because the world is divided into men
and women, concepts or theories reflect either a male view of the world or a
female view. It is on this third point that many feminists initially, and
latterly theorists interested in masculinity, had (and some still do have)
problems with respect to criminological work. Their common concern is
reflected in this statement made by Brown (1986: 35), a U.K. criminologist:

. . . the more one seeks to show that male criminologists take leave of
their senses when the question Woman looms on the agenda, the more
one implies that they are in their right minds when they talk about male
crime.

By implication, the reason for raising the gender question is not just to
ensure that women are included within criminological theorising and
explanation, but also to ensure that criminology is also thinking critically
about how the maleness of crime (back to Braithwaite’s facts) is theorised
and explained. In recent years, some criminologists have tried to do this by
employing the concept of hegemonic masculinity.

HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY AND CRIME

Jefferson (2006: 199), a U.K. sociologist, defines hegemonic masculinity in

The Sage Dictionary of Criminology in the following way:

The set of ideas, values, representations and practices associated with

‘being male’ which is commonly accepted as the dominant position in
gender relations in a society at a particular historical moment.

Given the maleness of the crime problem and the dominance of men within
the criminal justice professions some criminologists, most notably
Messerschmidt in North America and Jefferson in the United Kingdom,
have explored the extent to which an appreciation of the dominance of men
in society as a whole is the starting point for understanding the dominance
of men within criminal behaviour. Much of the focus of this work owes a
good deal to the work of Connell (1987, 1995) an Australian social
scientist.
According to Connell (1987), the ways in which men express their
masculinity in contemporary society is connected to the powerful cultural
position given to normative heterosexuality. In other words, it is expected
and considered normal for men to see themselves as different from women
and at the same time to desire women. This deep-rooted expectation of what
it is to be a man is reflected in all kinds of social relations. So, for example,
it is found in the idea of the man being the breadwinner, in the
criminalisation of homosexuality, and in making women the objects of
pornography. Normative heterosexuality underpins all of these examples
and for Connell defines the structure and the form of manhood that any
individual man is constrained to live up to. If the question of ethnicity is
added to this framework, it suggests that the white, heterosexual male is in
the position of power and at the same time suggests that other forms of
manhood are downgraded (like the homosexual male, or the ethnic minority
male) as are forms of femininity. The powerful position of this version of
masculinity is maintained and sustained by consent. As we are all gendered
subjects we all benefit to a greater or a lesser degree by the framework of
hegemonic masculinity. So far, maybe so good; but how does this relate to
crime?
Messerschmidt (1993, 1997) related these ideas to crime in three key
locations: the street, the workplace and the home. In each of these locations
he provides a detailed account of the variety of ways in which masculinity
is given expression to; from the pimp on the street to the sharp business of
the rising white collar executive, to expressions of male proprietary in the
forms of various violence(s) in the home. All of these can be understood as
different ways of doing manhood within the framework of dominance
highlighted by Connell. They all demonstrate the ways in which men
display their manliness to others and themselves. So whilst the business
executive might use his position and power to sexually harass his secretary
in perhaps more subtle ways than the pimp controls his women, the effects
are the same. In this particular example, the women are ‘put in their place’
and the men are confirmed as men.
This way of thinking about crime and criminality certainly puts to the
fore the maleness of crime and the criminal justice industry. It has even
been used to facilitate an understanding of how men deal with
victimisation. An experience that men often struggle with since the
demands of masculinity would suggest that being a victim is something
highly contradictory for them (this is discussed again in the next chapter).
However, as a way of thinking, it has not proceeded without its critics and,
whilst it is not necessary for such a critique to be explored in detail here, the
following question from Hood-Williams (2001: 44) captures the essence of
the problem:

The question remains, however, why it is that only a minority of men

need to produce masculinity through crime rather than through other,
non-criminal means?

In many respects, the tensions that are inherent in the masculinity thesis in
its search for an explanation of crime are the tensions inherent within
criminology itself. The reader will recall from Chapter 1 that criminology
has to be understood as a ‘modern’ discipline. This means that it is
intimately implicated in the search for universal explanations that can better
inform the policy-making process. As a consequence, it looks for
explanations that will fit all kinds of crime. So, as Hood-Williams suggests,
criminology is constantly left with the dilemma of identifying a concept or
a theory that works for some kinds of crime but not all kinds of crime. Yet
some would argue that there is still much to be gained by exploring the
extent to which hegemonic masculinity, or indeed an understanding of
masculinities, takes the criminological agenda forward. This is not the place
to explore this debate, but the reader might still like to reflect upon its
value, as an idea, in relation to Braithwaite’s facts.

LOOKING AT THE EVIDENCE: FINDING A PLACE FOR

STATE CRIME?

Dawn Rothe and David Friedrichs (2015), two North American

criminologists, point out that much of the criminological endeavour has
been preoccupied with what might be termed ‘intra-state’ crime. In others
words, that kind of law breaking behaviour that goes on within national
boundaries with much of that focus being concerned with the kind that is
visible and committed by individuals rather than committed by
organisations. We shall pick up on thinking about what we have called here
‘crimes of the suites’ in Chapter 7; however, it is useful to take a moment to
reflect upon the extent to which Braithwaite’s facts might, or might not,
apply to ‘extra-state’ crime. In other words, the kind of criminal behaviour
not only committed in the interests of business corporations (indeed John
Braithwaite himself conducted a seminal study of Corporate Crime in the
Pharmaceutical Industry first published in 1984), but also committed in the
interests, or on behalf of, the state. Under this heading, you might want to
think about a wide range of activities, from the dubious legality of waging
war, one state on another (particularly an issue in respect of the war in Iraq
and Afghanistan 2003); the practice of genocide in the interests of one
dominant group within a state (like, for example, that waged in Dafur; see
Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2009) that offends international law, to the
questionable legality of mining for mineral resources and/or access to water
in the global south by those states occupying the global north exampled by
Rothe and Friedrichs (2015). Interestingly, Rothe and Friedrichs (2015:
Chapter 4) offer an excellent overview of the various theoretical
perspectives available to criminologists to make sense of this kind of
criminal behaviour (including the theories discussed in this chapter), that
those of you interested in pursuing an understanding of this kind of crime
would gain much from. It is sufficient for our purposes to consider the
extent to which crime of this kind is rendered more or less visible by the
theoretical concepts discussed in this chapter. The further development of
the questions that the work of these two authors raises is picked up again in
the Conclusion to this book.

A WORD ON CULTURAL CRIMINOLOGY

It would be remiss to leave a discussion about the search for explanation

within criminology without considering the rising presence of what has
been termed cultural criminology. Jeff Ferrell (2006) writing in The Sage
Dictionary of Criminology suggests that cultural criminology is concerned
not only with the representation of crime by different media sources but
also how those representations convey meaning and values for those
involved in crime and crime control. If we add to this the following
statement from Jock Young,

Cultural criminology is of importance because it captures the

phenomenology of crime – its adrenaline, its pleasure and panic, its
excitement, and its anger, rage, and humiliation, its desperation and its
edgework. (Young, 2004: 1)

it is possible to get a sense of what it is that is the focus of attention for

cultural criminology. Arguably emanating from work in the 1970s that
focused attention on the role played by the media in constructing and
reconstructing the crime problem (a role that has certainly not diminished as
any glance at newspaper, television and Internet coverage amply
demonstrates), cultural criminology is concerned with understanding how
‘culture, crime, and crime control converge’ (Ferrell 2006: 105). This focus
brings to the criminological table not only the role of the more traditional
media and the more recent presence of the Internet in the crime process but
also photographs, art, film, and other kinds of expressive practices, and the
way in which these arenas feed back into everyday life, not only for those
defined as criminal but also for criminal justice professionals. How might
this focus be translated into a specific criminological agenda?
 First, this way of thinking about crime and the problem of crime is
situated squarely within the way in which the media (film, TV, newspapers,
etc.) interplay with people’s experiences on the one hand or provide a
vehicle for experiences on the other. Some would argue that in
contemporary society, all experience is mediated in this way. You might like
to think about how many people you know who use what has happened in
their favourite TV series as a source of either information or experience, in
understanding their own world or that of others. Second, the media now
frequently provides us all with ‘instantaneous’ experience, minute by
minute reporting, of real events like wars, terrorist events, or as in the
United States, live reportage of criminal trials. The line between this kind of
experience and real experience is for many people increasingly fuzzy.
Whatever this line is, it is part of people’s subjective experience that needs
to be taken account of when thinking about crime. Third, there is a similar
fuzziness in the difference between belonging to a ‘real’ community and
what might be called a ‘virtual’ community and who individuals are using
as their reference point, moral or otherwise. A good example here is Internet
chat rooms and the potential they offer for criminal activity for paedophiles,
for example, where the move from the virtual to the real may not be
necessary at all in terms of what such people might be seeking.
So, it is the way in which crime is constantly constructed and
reconstructed against this kind of backcloth that is of interest to the cultural
criminologist. Consequently, their focus of attention becomes:

1. The motive for crime being about thrill, pleasure seeking and risk
taking rather than it being rational.
2. The context of crime being the spaces left available to people in which
they can be creative: the Internet would be but one example.
3. The recognition of crime as being a response to living in a highly
bureaucratised, rule-bound society; so breaking the rules, doing
something different becomes a part of living itself, of actually feeling
alive.
4. Such behaviours can only be studied by being immersed in them and
being reflective about immersion. Doing criminology becomes much
more oriented to doing ethnography rather than measuring the nature
and extent of crime.
 5. As a result of all of the above, criminology cannot be a science in the
positivistic sense. In cultural criminology there are no rigid lines to be
drawn between the expert and the criminal or between crime and
normality.

Thus, cultural criminology is likely to produce quite challenging and

alternative forms of knowledge, which according to Hayward and Young
(2004) makes it dangerous. In particular, cultural criminology challenges
much of the material discussed thus far in this book. For example, it
challenges the possibility of doing comparative work and certainly
challenges the possibility of there being a universal definition of crime.
More importantly, it works with quite a different sense of motivation for the
criminal, not as being rational but as being a risk taker, a thrill seeker;
someone desiring sensation. In this sense, cultural criminology endeavours
to capture the way in which the post-modern world (as opposed to the
modern world in which criminology has its origins) results in individuals
seeking out their own ways of making sense of the world. Here the
emphasis on difference and diversity are put to the fore alongside an
appreciation of the ways in which that defined as ‘criminal’ needs to be
contextualised within people’s normal everyday lives.
For example, in a seminal study by Winlow and Hall (2006), two U.K.
sociologists, they explore the testimonies of young people in how they
experience their everyday lives. In this study, these young people are both
captured by, and captivated by, egoism, competition and consumerism,
whether that is in relation to their own personal lives and relationships, or in
relation to what they wear and how they choose to spend their time. As
Winlow and Hall observe, they occupy a ‘perilous social terrain’ (p. 31) in
which their social precariousness, to borrow a phrase from Young (1999), is
punctuated by Saturday nights and having a ‘good night out’. There seem to
be a number of ingredients to a good night but two are key: alcohol and
violence. Indeed, for some of the young people in this study (mostly the
young males) there is the sense of some vicarious pleasure to be gained
from witnessing violence on a ‘good night out’. Here the relationship
between violence and leisure is almost normalised. These young men have a
sophisticated understanding of what gives rise to violence and their
relationship with it, both as victims and perpetrators, in which the
boundaries between these two categories are very blurred indeed with many
incidents never being reported to anyone. It is the cultural embeddedness of
what might be viewed as criminal and the processes that surround it in
situations such as these that fascinates the cultural criminologist. You might
want to think about the extent to which this kind of cultural embeddedness
provides a useful way of thinking about other kinds of behaviours, for
example, murderousness in war, school shootings, and police/ethnic
minority relations. How might a cultural criminologist, or indeed anyone
committed to any of the other theoretical perspectives covered in this
chapter, make sense of these kinds of events? What kind of explanation
works for you?

Summary and conclusion

This chapter has illustrated that:

1. There is a good deal of difference between common sense and

criminological sense. So, what we know about crime as members of
the public can sometimes connect with what criminologists know
about crime but this is not always the case.
2. Criminologists do not all agree on how to explain crime. One of the
key tensions for criminologists is how much of their explanation to
attribute to the individual and how much to attribute to the social.
This tension is, of course, connected with the fact that criminology
as a discipline is multi-disciplinary in character and so people from
different backgrounds will emphasise different variables. Moreover,
this tension should not be seen as a problem. It is, after all, what
makes criminology interesting and the subject of much debate!
3. No one criminological theory connects that well to all the known
facts about crime. This suggests that it is time for criminology to
stop looking for grand explanations and that it might be more
fruitful now to search for more middle range explanations perhaps
focussing on particular crimes or particular contributory factors
towards criminality.
4. Different criminological theories lend themselves to different policy
interventions and it will depend on the political climate how
 successful any theory or policy intervention may be. (Crime
prevention policy is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8.)
5. Different theories make different crimes, criminals and victims
visible and invisible. None of the theories discussed here makes
‘crimes or victims of the powerful’ highly visible. This does not
mean that they could not, just that they have not generally been
applied in this way. This comment, of course, encourages us to think
about the extent to which ‘crimes of the suites’ have achieved the
same kind of criminological attention as ‘crimes of the streets’ or
‘crimes behind closed doors’ at all. This is clearly one arena in
which common sense theory about crime and criminological theory
share in similar assumptions about what kind of crime is harmful,
and as a consequence is made visible, in how we think and talk
about it as well as what kind of crime is considered to be not so
harmful. This question is explored more fully in Chapter 6.

Much of what has been considered in this chapter has focused our
attention on the kinds of ideas that criminologists work with that help us
understand why people commit crime. Remember, we have only
considered here some recent sociological approaches to this question. In
the next chapter we are going to consider the kinds of ideas that
criminologists work with to help us understand the nature and impact of
crime. This is the area of work known as victimology and as its label
implies it is intended to focus our attention on understanding the victim
of crime.

EXERCISE

1. In your own words, define the following terms:

Bounded rationality
Control balance
Relative deprivation
Hegemonic masculinity
How do your definitions match with those found in the Glossary of Terms?
 2. Define right realism.
3. Define left realism.
4. What do you think are the key differences and similarities between
these two ways of thinking about crime?

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

For those wanting a further introduction into the contemporary nature of

criminological theory and its relationship with criminal justice policy, take a
look at S. Walklate (2007) Understanding Criminology (3/e) (London:
McGraw-Hill-Open University Press). Anything by the authors referred to
in this chapter will develop your understanding of the nature of
criminological concerns in specific areas. See, for example, M. Felson and
M. Eckhert (2015) Crime in Everyday Life (5/e) (London: Sage), J.
Braithwaite (1989) Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press) and J. Young (1999) The Exclusive Society
(London: Sage). Reading any of these will deepen your understanding of
rational choice theory, social control theory, and relative deprivation,
respectively. The material dealing with gender tends to be a little more
specialised as many university courses have units dedicated to just
exploring the gendered nature of crime. For an excellent overview of
feminism and criminology, see C. Renzetti (2013) Feminist Criminology
(London: Routledge), and for a book that situates an understanding of
women’s experiences of crime within a global context see K. Carrington
(2015) Feminism and Global Justice (London: Routledge). Both of these
books are very accessible and provide an excellent grounding in the
questions covered.

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5 THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIM OF CRIME

This chapter is concerned with the impact of crime. You will recall that in
Chapter 1 some introductory comments were made about the area of
analysis within criminology called victimology. In that chapter you were
introduced to the ideas that have historically informed the way in which
those criminologists who have been interested in the victim of crime have
gone about their work. You were also made aware of the way in which the
work of feminists challenged those ideas and the way in which these
processes resulted in the assumption that men cannot be victims. In Chapter
1 this was called the ‘victimological other’. In this chapter the
criminological concern with the victim of crime will be explored in much
more detail building on what has been learned about the nature and extent
of crime from Chapter 3.

INTRODUCTION

The central purpose of this chapter is to offer a more complete picture of the
kinds of things that interest criminologists and victimologists about victims
of crime. As was stated in Chapter 1, the study of criminal victimisation has
its origins in the work of lawyers who fled the Nazi regime prior to the
Second World War and they, alongside many others, were concerned with
understanding how such mass victimization could occur. However, the
concepts that these early theorists employed focused very much on what it
was about the victim that had resulted in the events that had happened to
them. In other words, they were looking to establish what made victims
different from nonvictims, thus mirroring the earlier criminological concern
with what made offenders different from nonoffenders. It was not until the
1960s and 1970s that the interest in the victim of crime took on a different
shape from this. This change in shape was largely a result of the emergence
of the feminist movement on the one hand, and the development of the
criminal victimisation survey on the other. These developments, and the
data that they each differently generated, clearly pointed to a pattern of
criminal victimisation; a pattern that could not be explained by reference to
the individual alone. There had to be some structural explanation.
Awareness of this patterning has led criminologists interested in the victim
of crime to be concerned with four main questions:

1. What does the pattern of criminal victimisation look like and why does
it look this way?
2. What impact does criminal victimisation have on both individuals and
their wider communities?
3. What role do victims of crime have in the criminal justice process and
what do they think of that role?
4. Why do some victims of crime get more attention than others?

We shall discuss each of these questions in turn, but first a word about the
concept of victim.

WHAT DOES THE TERM ‘VICTIM’ MEAN?

For many people working with victims of crime either as practitioners or

academics, the term ‘victim’ is highly problematic. It is contested and what
it means can be messy. Even if you take a look at any standard (English)
dictionary, you will be offered at least three different definitions of what
this term can mean. It is particularly problematic for those working within
the feminist movement. Why? There are two issues here for feminism.
Firstly, historically sacrificial victims have frequently been female.
Secondly, in languages in which words are designated masculine or
feminine, the word victim is denoted feminine. Taken together, these two
factors link the word both with passivity and powerlessness associated with
being female. It is these links that are problematic for those working within
the feminist movement who prefer to use the term ‘survivor’ to try to
capture women’s resistance to victimisation. At the same time, the idea of
being a victim or being a survivor is also problematic. The either/or
distinction fails to capture the processes associated with victimisation. In
other words, it is possible that an individual at different points in time, in
relation to different events, could be an active victim, a passive victim, an
active survivor, a passive survivor, or might see themselves as having had
an experience comprising a complex mix of all of these possibilities.
You might like to stop and think about this for a minute and try to
identify people you know, or have heard about, who have had experiences
that might fall into any of these categories. Think about the following
questions.

Did something just happen to them outside of their control?

Did their behaviour contribute in any way to what happened to them?
How did they react to what happened to them?
Does the label ‘victim’ work for you in the examples you have thought
about?
If so, how does it work, and under what circumstances?

You might reach the conclusion that the label ‘victim’ really is quite
problematic and does not necessarily work for all individuals in all
circumstances.
There is, however, another problem associated with the word ‘victim’
that is derived from a deeper appreciation of the process whereby an
individual becomes a victim. This problem is connected with what Nils
Christie (1986), a Norwegian criminologist, has called the ‘ideal victim’. In
other words, there are certain assumptions attached to the label ‘victim’ that
means not everyone actually acquires this label. For Christie, the ‘ideal
victim’ is found in the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale; a young, innocent
female out doing good deeds, attacked by an unknown stranger. Indeed this
‘ideal victim’ fits all the common sense stereotypes of the ‘legitimate’
victim of rape, for example; particularly someone who suffers an
unprovoked attack from a stranger. Christie was keen to point out that some
people acquire the label of victim very readily and easily and as a result are
recognised as deserving victims, and other people may never acquire the
label of victim at all; they are undeserving victims. This distinction between
deserving and undeserving victims and how it impacts upon peoples’
experiences of the criminal justice process is one of the issues that has
preoccupied criminologists interested in the victim of crime and has led
Eamonn Carrabine and other U.K. sociologists (2004: 117) to talk of a
‘hierarchy of victimisation’.
 This hierarchy offers one way of thinking about what underpins how
some individuals and groups are more readily identified as victims than
others. For example, at the bottom of this hierarchy would be the homeless,
the drug addict, and the street prostitute: all those for whom it might be
argued that their lifestyle renders them prone to victimisation. Nearer the
top of this hierarchy would be the elderly female victims of violent crime,
those least prone to criminal victimisation, but who are assumed to be
vulnerable and more readily assigned victim status. Hidden from view, but
nonetheless illuminating the power of this hierarchy, would be young
offenders who find themselves in prison but who might be there because of
their experiences of victimisation. (See, for example, the work of Chesney-
Lind and Pasko [2004] who suggest that such experiences are one pathway
into crime for young women. There is some evidence to suggest that this
applies to some young men, too.)
The presence of this hierarchy is most readily identifiable in media
constructions of the elderly female as the victim of violent crime and the
readiness with which such events are given full and graphic coverage by the
media. This is despite the evidence that the group of people most likely to
be the victims of violent crime are young males who go out drinking two or
three times a week. However, understanding the power this hierarchy draws
attention to at least two key ideas that contribute to whether people are
identified as victims. These are lifestyle and the notion of deserving. Taken
together they inform the ways in which different victims acquire the
legitimate status as a victim.
At this juncture it might be worth taking a little time to consider how the
concepts of lifestyle, deserving, and legitimacy work together to make some
individuals and/or groups more visible than others as victims.

Who would you consider to be a legitimate victim and why?

To what extent do these concepts tally with Christie’s concept of the
‘ideal victim’?

Hopefully in thinking about these questions it has become apparent that

achieving the status of victim is also a highly politicised process. We shall
return to this issue at the end of this chapter. Despite the problems inherent
in the term ‘victim’, some of which have been discussed here, it is
nevertheless the word that is in common usage, and we shall use it for the
rest of this chapter having acknowledged its problematic status.

UNDERSTANDING THE PATTERNING OF CRIMINAL

VICTIMISATION

Chapter 3 presented you with a wider range of data sources about crime and
criminal victimisation. On the basis of these data, criminologists are in
agreement that there are four important social variables that frame
experiences of criminal victimisation; they are social class, age, gender and
ethnicity. In summary, criminologists would say that the patterning of
criminal victimisation can be understood by reference to these four
variables so, for example,

1. The risk of having your house burgled is much higher for the poorer
sections of the population.
2. The younger you are the more likely you are to be murdered or abused
in some way, and the more hidden this is, the less likely this is to be
reported or recorded as a crime. (This is especially the case for
children living in institutions and the elderly.) Even theft and street
crime is more likely the younger you are, with teenagers most likely to
victimise each other rather than older people.
3. Men are most likely to be victimised violently by other men who are
their acquaintances and women are most likely to be victimised
violently and/or sexually by men that they know and in their own
homes.
4. People belonging to ethnic minority groups are more likely to be
criminally victimised than white people.

The relevance of these variables and their relationship with the likelihood of
criminal victimisation seems to be fairly consistent across different societies
but is especially the case in the United Kingdom and the United States.
However, recognising that these variables pattern criminal victimisation in
important ways does not explain the pattern. Victimologists and others
concerned with criminal victimisation have used a range of concepts and
theoretical perspectives to explain this pattern. Here we shall focus on the
value of three of them: the concept of ‘lifestyle’ as associated with positivist
victimology referred to above and discussed in Chapter 1, the concept of
patriarchy associated with the work of radical feminism, and the relevance
of hegemonic masculinity as discussed in Chapter 4.

LIFESTYLE AND CRIMINAL VICTIMISATION

As was suggested in Chapter 1, the concept of lifestyle has been important

in underpinning the kinds of questions asked in the development of the
criminal victimisation survey first in the United States, then embraced in
the United Kingdom and elsewhere and more recently in the efforts to
measure criminal victimisation on an international scale. So in this respect
at least this concept has been very influential. It was developed initially and
related to criminal victimisation by Hindelang, Gottfredson and Garofalo in
their book published in 1978 Victims of Personal Crime: an Empirical
Foundation for a Theory of Personal Victimisation. In this book, they
present a way of thinking about personal victimisation in which lifestyle
refers to ‘routine daily activities, both vocational activities (work, school,
keeping house, etc.) and leisure activities’ (Hindelang et al., 1978: 241) and
in which individuals are constrained by role expectations and structural
characteristics that are reflections of their demographic positions (class,
age, sex, ethnicity, etc.). The way in which individuals adapt to these
constraints is reflected in their daily routines, their lifestyles. They argue
that there is a direct link between an individual’s routine daily activity and
their exposure to high-risk victimisation situations from which personal
victimisation occurs. So what individuals do on a day to day basis, whether
they go out at night, whether they use public transport, whether they live in
areas where offenders also live and so on can increase or decrease the
chance of being victimised.
There are both strengths and weaknesses associated with this way of
thinking about lifestyle but before those are considered you might want to
reflect for yourself on the following questions:

• Which, if any, of these propositions fit with what is known about the
patterning of criminal victimisation?
• What kinds of crimes do these propositions fit best with and why?
 • What might the policy implications of these propositions look like?
• What do you think the strengths and weaknesses of these propositions
are?

There are at least three strengths that can be identified with this way of
thinking about the patterning of criminal victimisation:

1. It is grounded in the data.

2. It does relate to the patterns that are found rather than just focusing on
the individual.
3. It does encourage a critical thinking about policy; for example, would
encouraging the elderly to go out more expose them to more risks of
criminal victimisation and how could those risks be managed?

However, there are also at least three weaknesses:

1. Is lifestyle the kind of objectively measurable implied by this approach

or is lifestyle something a little more vague and fuzzy?
2. How do we make sense of the criminal victimisation that takes place in
private rather than in public?
3. Do people adapt to their social demographic position or are they made
to? Putting this another way, is it just as important to talk about racism,
sexism, ageism, etc. as it is to talk about race, sex, and age? In other
words, what about relationships of power?

A fair conclusion might be that this way of thinking about the patterning of
criminal victimisation works for some crimes and not for others (crimes of
the streets but not crime behind closed doors or crimes of the suites) and
has some value in the policy arena. However, this conceptual starting point
is limited because of the way in which lifestyle is understood focussing
attention as it does on how people adapt to public expectations of
behaviour. However, whether or not in public or in private, people’s
everyday lives are also products of negotiated power relationships. This
understanding of lifestyle lacks an appreciation of power relationships.
However, it is these relationships that are put to the fore in radical feminism
and in its understanding of patriarchy.
PATRIARCHY AND CRIMINAL VICTIMISATION

Chapter 1 discussed the way in which work emanating from the feminist
movement challenged much criminological and victimological thought.
Moreover, whilst it is important to acknowledge that there are different
kinds of feminism all of which pose different questions for criminology and
victimology, in this section we are going to focus on the importance of just
one strand of feminism: radical feminism. (If you are interested in a fuller
discussion of the relationship of the different strands of feminism with
criminology and victimology, then take a look at Walklate [2004], Gender,
Crime and Justice, 2nd ed.) Our purpose here is to understand how and to
what extent radical feminism has contributed to an understanding of the
patterning of criminal victimisation. So, first of all, it is important to offer a
little more detail about radical feminism.
Radford (2006: 336), a U.K. feminist, defines radical feminism in The
Sage Dictionary of Criminology with oppression of women by men with the
support of all the agencies of social control including the criminal justice
system. She also points the important activist element to radical feminism:
the desire to campaign to change this oppression. So radical feminist
analysis focuses on the ways in which men oppress women (and children)
and the ways in which the structure of society helps sustain that oppression.
This structure, and its impact, is referred to as patriarchy. The key variable
in patriarchy is men’s power over women. This power is reflected in all
aspects of social life but for the radical feminist at its centre lays the
question of sexuality. Tong (1989), a North American feminist, puts the
issues that concern radical feminism in this way: Who rapes whom; who
batters whom; for whom does pornography exist; for whom does
prostitution exist; for whom does female sexuality exist? The answer in
each case is men.
In the context of making sense of the patterning of criminal victimisation,
it is relatively easy to see both the kinds of crime and criminal victimisation
that radical feminism draws attention to. Put simply, radical feminism
clearly focuses attention on all those criminal victimisations that go on in
private between people who are for the most part known to each other. This
means rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. In focussing attention on
these kinds of criminal victimisations, radical feminism also emphasises
that the offenders are men. At this point the reader might like to consider:
 • What kinds of victimisations are excluded from this analysis? Do you
think that this exclusion is appropriate?
• What might the policy implications be of adopting the radical feminist
view of criminal victimisation?
• What do you think the strengths and weaknesses of this way of
thinking about the patterning of criminal victimisation look like?

It is fair to say that despite the ideological tensions between radical

feminism and victimology over the use of the term victim referred to earlier,
the work of radical feminism has contributed enormously both in widening
the understanding of this kind of crime and criminal victimisation. Both
criminology and victimology now take these issues much more seriously
than they once did especially in understanding the impact that this kind of
crime has. This will be discussed more fully below. This work has also
clearly placed men, understanding men’s behaviour, and men’s relationship
with masculinities at the centre of such agendas. This is what constitutes a
gendered analysis. However, some of you might have already realised that
despite the impact of feminist informed work, understanding crime and
criminal victimisation is not so straightforward. Where do social class, age
and ethnicity fit in our understandings? In other words, how do we make
sense of the impact of these other variables and the relationship between
them that is clearly evidenced in the data pointed to in Chapter 3? Making
sense of the interconnections between these variables is a problem that
criminology and victimology struggle with and is picked up again in the
Conclusion to this book. There is another problem here that was also
alluded to in Chapter 1.
Chapter 1 discussed how victimology, alongside the influence of
feminism, has served to construct a ‘Victimological Other’. Put more
simply, as a result of the kind of work done on criminal victimisation,
women (and children) are much more visible as victims than men are. In
part some would argue that this is a result of their greater vulnerability. A
concept that will be discussed more fully when the impact of crime is
considered in more detail below and connects back to our earlier discussion
of a hierarchy of victimisation above. However, before we proceed to do
that it will be useful to think about the relative invisibility of men as victims
by asking the question: can men be victims? In order to answer this
question we shall revisit the concept of hegemonic masculinity that was
introduced in Chapter 4.

HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY AND CRIMINAL

VICTIMISATION

In Chapter 4 the concept of hegemonic masculinity was introduced as being

an important one that criminologists work with as a way of understanding
the maleness of offending behaviour. Here we shall consider its value in
helping us understand the relationship between being male and being a
victim of crime.
Whilst much victimological work leaves us with the impression that
victims are not likely to be male, this is clearly empirically not the case.
Much male violence is committed against other men, and in recent years
there has been an increasing awareness that much of that male violence is
sexual violence. So quite clearly men can be victims. However, what is
problematic is understanding how they experience that victimisation and
what impact it has on them. Increasingly criminologists and victimologists
have used the concept of hegemonic masculinity to understand this
experience. In other words, how men see themselves as men. For example,
Goodey (1997), a U.K. criminologist, in researching male reaction to
violence, used the phrase ‘big boys don’t cry’ to help explain how it was
that young men struggled with being victimised. Put simply, it contradicted
their understanding of themselves as men. The following quote is taken
from Etherington (2000), a U.K. social scientist who has worked with men
who were sexually abused as children. One of her respondents said this
about his experiences of being abused by his mother:

Apart from being my mother, she was a woman. I’d been educated by
my father that women were there for the cooking, cleaning and sex . . .
They were not the abusers they were abused upon. So how could she
abuse men when I was the man?

This quote captures some of the confusions existing for men when they
experience violence or other forms of victimisation especially at the hands
of women. This is perhaps made worse when they know that this is likely to
be a minority experience. The concept of hegemonic masculinity helps us to
understand some of the confusions that such experiences generate for men.
Of course, not all men will experience victimisation in the same way, but
the general unwillingness of men to identify themselves as a victim and the
greater likelihood of men reporting anger when criminally victimised is
only just beginning to be understood by criminologists and victimologists.
An appreciation of these issues may go some way to help us to understand
the relative invisibility of men in the patterning of reported criminal
victimisation. The reader might like to consider then:

• What does the concept of hegemonic masculinity help us understand

about the patterning of criminal victimisation?
• What kinds of criminal victimisations are included and excluded by
this concept?
• What might the policy implications look like that would follow from
putting the concept of hegemonic masculinity at the centre of our
understanding of criminal victimisation?
• How might men who do report such criminal victimisation experience
the criminal justice process?

Arguably one of the key areas that the concept of hegemonic masculinity
puts to the fore of criminological and victimological understanding is the
way in which men and women might differently experience the impact of
crime. So that is the issue to which we shall now turn.

UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF CRIME

Some would say that the now well-documented ‘fear of crime’ is one of the
key areas in which crime, to a greater or lesser extent, has impacted upon us
all over the last 30 years. However, criminologists and victimologists work
with four important distinctions in understanding the impact that crime may
have on individuals. These are primary victimisation, secondary
victimisation, indirect victimisation, and vulnerability. We shall discuss
each of these in turn.
Primary victimisation refers to the direct impact that a crime has on the
victim. That impact may vary with the nature of the crime, of course, from
physical injury, to financial loss, to loss of earnings as a result of the
required involvement in the criminal justice process. However for some
people this kind of impact is made worse by the stress, shock, and sense of
invasion of privacy that may go along with burglary, along with feelings of
fear, difficulty in sleeping, to the post-traumatic stress syndrome reported
by some victims of rape. This kind of impact can sometimes be made worse
by the way in which the criminal justice system responds to such victims.
This is what is referred to as secondary victimisation. Research has
indicated that individuals who are involved in the criminal justice process,
as either victims or witnesses, frequently feel let down by that process. This
can happen in different ways from not being kept informed of what was
happening in their case, to being treated unsympathetically by the
professionals working in the criminal justice process, to not being believed
when they are giving their evidence. These kinds of experiences all,
arguably, add to the feelings of victimisation. In other kinds of cases, like
for example murder, the families of both the murderer and the murder
victim can also feel victimised by their experiences both in relation to
feelings of bereavement, to maybe being under suspicion themselves for
what has happened, as well as just not being able to make sense of what has
happened. All of this is referred to as indirect victimisation. However, the
extent to which any individual may experience crime in any of these ways
is frequently connected with their personal or structural vulnerability. In
other words, not all victims of crime will experience their victimisation in
the same way or with the same level of impact. Criminologists refer to the
variations that can be found in people’s experiences as their vulnerability.
Overall those most affected by crime look very similar to those most
likely to experience criminal victimisation. Mawby and Walklate (1994:
54), two researchers from the United Kingdom, listed those most affected
by crime in the following way:

1. Those on low incomes.

2. Those in rented accommodation.
3. Those from ethnic minorities.
4. The elderly and the very young.
5. Single person or one parent households.
6. Women compared with men.
If this is put together with those most at risk from crime, then those for
whom crime seems to have the most impact are those least at risk – elderly
females. Those who are at the most risk from crime (young males) express
the least concern about its impact on them. The links between risk and
impact seems to hold in a range of different social contexts suggesting that
there are some common patterns across different societies in terms of
vulnerability. However, it is important to remember that Mawby and
Walklate (1994) derived this list from what could be identified from
criminal victimisation survey data. The list might look different if we were
to incorporate some of the work emanating from the feminist movement
into it. Then the list would need to take account of the impact of being
criminally victimised by someone you know, an intimate, in your own
home, for example. This would also change who was and was not thought
to be vulnerable. In addition, if we were to incorporate some of the
concerns addressed by those criminologists and victimologists interested in
corporate crime, we might also want to consider the structural and global
dimensions to the impact of crime. For example, globally the most
casualised workers are the most at risk from workplace injury resulting
from offences against health and safety legislation, women have been most
at risk from poor quality breast implants, and ‘product dumping’ in general
exploits poorer countries in the search for work. So the link between risk
and impact can vary quite considerably depending on how we think about
what counts as crime. As a result those impacted by crime, and vulnerable
to that impact, can also vary producing very different agendas for
criminology/victimology and policy. Embracing the impact of ‘corporate
crime’ can indeed produce an extensive agenda and one that we take up a
little more fully in the next chapter.
So criminologists and victimologists work with a range of different
concepts to help understand the impact of crime. Some of that work
focusing on secondary victimisation has resulted in increasing attention
being paid to the role that victims have in the criminal justice process, since
more often than not victims who get involved in the criminal justice process
feel victimised twice: once by the offence and once by the process. It is to
that issue that we shall now turn.

VICTIMS AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE PROCESS

It goes without saying that victims play a crucial role in the criminal justice
process in any jurisdiction. Without their role in reporting crime, and their
subsequent presence as complainants at court, much more crime would
remain invisible and not prosecuted. However, the change in terminology in
the last sentence encapsulates a key change in status for the victims once
they enter the court. At this point, they cease to be victims but become
complainants in the same way that an offender ceases to be ‘an offender’
and becomes a defendant. This is because the purpose of the criminal
justice system is to establish the ‘truth’ of a particular case and the
associated guilt or innocence of the accused. The terms offender and victim
prejudge the outcome of that process. However, because of the central
importance of the victim to the criminal justice process in ensuring cases do
proceed, increasingly efforts have been made to look for ways of better
improving the experience that victims have of the criminal justice process
to ensure their continued involvement in it. A good deal of campaigning
work has been focused on this both from within the feminist movement and
from those who are involved in the range of victim support organisations
that now exist in many different societies. Much feminist work has
concerned itself with challenging and changing the laws to do with sexual
offences whereas much of the victim support work has focused on the
question of campaigning for victims’ rights. These campaigns take a
different shape and form in different societies and have had a differential
impact dependent upon whether the criminal justice system is adversarial or
inquisitorial. The difference between these systems is taken up in Chapter 7,
but at this juncture the reader might like to:

• Make a list of all the different organisations that you are aware of who
claim to represent the interests of the victim of crime. What are the
similarities and differences in those claims?
• Make a list of what the strengths and limitations might look like of
looking for ways of improving the involvement of victims in the
criminal justice system.
• Make a list of the kinds of questions you think that a criminologists
interested in the victim of crime might ask about policy initiatives that
claim to give victims ‘rights’ in the criminal justice system (like, for
example, the Victim Impact Statement).
Thus far, in this chapter, the kind of crime victim we have talked about has
either been the victim of ‘crimes of the streets’ or ‘crimes behind closed
doors’. We have yet to consider the victim of ‘crimes of the suites’ in any
great detail. At this point then it is worth thinking about why some victims
of some kinds of crime get more attention than others.

WHY DO SOME VICTIMS GET MORE ATTENTION THAN

OTHERS?

Part of the answer to this question returns us to the issue of vulnerability

discussed above. In one sense it is obviously quite reasonable, at the level
of understanding the harm done to an the individual, for a highly vulnerable
elderly female who has suffered the trauma of being attacked by an intruder
in her own home intent on burglary, receives all the attention necessary
from victim support workers and the criminal justice process. This kind of
response to this kind of individual clearly returns us the image of the ‘ideal
victim’ with which this chapter began. Indeed, in practice, the nearer an
individual fits the ‘ideal’ stereotype the more sympathetic attention they are
likely to receive. However, it is also clear that whilst there are differences in
attention received at an individual level, there are differences in attention
received by victims of crime at a structural level. Think back to the data
sources on the nature and extent of crime discussed in Chapter 3. In that
chapter you were presented with a number of case studies in which law-
breaking behaviour had occurred. Yet despite the dramatic nature of those
case studies they were not necessarily nor readily identified as criminal. As
a consequence, neither were the victims of those case studies readily
identified as victims of crime. Such issues notwithstanding, there are
criminologists who spend their time exploring these less visible crimes and
victims despite the lesser attention that they receive. Described here as
victims of ‘crimes of the suites’, the work that criminologists do in this area
is discussed much more fully in the next chapter. For the purposes of this
chapter, it is sufficient to be aware that criminologists would argue that
there are both individual reasons and structural reasons as to why some
victims of crime receive more attention than others. It is also important to
remember that recognising the process of victimisation, of who may
become a victim of what kind of behaviour, is not a static one. New
‘victimisations’ occur, can be recognised, and responded to. In the light of
this we shall spend just a little time thinking about ‘newer’ victimisations
that are being increasingly recognised: hate crime, state crime, and
genocide.

HATE CRIME AND GENOCIDE

A concern with what has come to be called ‘hate crime’ has emerged as a
consequence of understanding how minority groups in particular experience
crime. In the United Kingdom there is no legislative status that delineates
hate crime from other kinds of crime though there is a range of legislation
that can be used to prosecute behaviours deemed to be motivated by hate.
This is in contrast to the United States. There the FBI defines hate crime as
offences that are ‘motivated in part or singularly by personal prejudice
against others because of a diversity – race, sexual orientation, religion,
ethnicity/national origin, or disability’. Despite these kinds of jurisdictional
differences, the term ‘hate crime’ does have some currency especially in the
media and its portrayals of particular crimes and their impact. Consider, for
example, the nail bombing of a ‘gay’ pub in London in 1999, the brutal
murder of James Byrd in Texas in June 1998, or the murder of Stephen
Lawrence in London in 1993. These were all what criminologists might
refer to as ‘signal’ events that marked particular turning points in
appreciating the extent to which ‘difference’ can provoke a criminal
response. For example, the FBI report on hate statistics for 2014 states that
47% were racially motivated, 18.6% were the result of sexual orientation
bias, 18.6% were the result of religious bias, and 11.9% motivated by ethnic
bias. These figures highlight the range of differences amongst the victims
who can be targeted in this way. So whilst the actual behaviour perpetrated
as a hate crime may be just the same as in other kinds of crime, that is,
vandalising property or violence against the person, this criminal behaviour
is perpetrated because of the differences associated with the victim. In this
sense, the U.K. response to this kind of crime focuses attention on it as a
crime against an individual’s identity and in this sense everyone can be a
victim of it. If hate crime is thought of as an attack on an individual’s
identity, it focuses attention on its potential impact. Basia Spalek (2006), a
U.K. criminologist, refers to this as spirit injury. Developed from work
done by black feminists, this concept captures the way in which a person’s
sense of self identity is not constructed in isolation but is part and parcel of
their sense of belonging to a wider group. Hence damage to the individual
is also damaging to that wider group. It is this concept that affords
connections to be made between hate crime toward an individual and hate
crime toward a collectivity: genocide.
As was highlighted in Chapter 1, the area of analysis referred to as
victimology emerged and developed in the years after the Second World
War with the early theorists in this area very much concerned with making
sense of the Holocaust. So in many ways victimologists have always had an
interest in not only victims as individuals but also victims as collectivities.
However, as a result of the powerful influence of positivist victimology
(also discussed in Chapter 1), the individual has, up until recently, received
much more attention than the collectivity. However, over the last 20 years
this has changed with the crime of genocide now being widely recognised
from the United Nations down. What actually comprises genocide is
debated though it is evident that it includes a wide range of behaviours
more than simply killing people in large numbers. Alex Alvarez, a United
States criminologist, describes acts of genocide in this way:

Genocide has been perpetrated not only with gas, guns, machetes, clubs
and other similar kinds of weapons, but also through less direct methods
that include disease, malnutrition and starvation, forced sterilisation and
displacement and rape.
(Alvarez 2010: 7)

As with individual hate crime, groups targeted in this way are done so
because of who they are but with the added ingredient that this targeting is
given legitimacy by the state powers in the contexts in which they occur.
Here then, there is an important link with crimes of the state discussed in
the next chapter. However before we move to consider these issues in
further detail, there is one other development within the study of criminal
victimisation worthy of comment here. That is the increasing awareness of
the impact on individuals of witnessing horrendous events sometimes
considered under the umbrella terms of cultural victimology.

IS THERE SCOPE FOR A CULTURAL VICTIMOLOGY?

The turn to the ‘cultural’ within victimology mirrors similar developments
in criminology discussed in Chapter 4. This in turn, echoes the observations
made by Richard Quinney (1972), a North American criminologist, about
the then increasing voices (of victims) seeking to claim compensation for
what had happened to them. As Frank Furedi (2002), a U.K. sociologist, has
suggested, we are all victims now! However, the turn to the cultural within
victimology is concerned with more than claims for compensation. It is
concerned with unpacking the nature and impact of the increasingly visual
nature of social life in which images can be presented, and re-presented,
through time and space, with great speed. Of course, the presence of the
Internet has certainly facilitated this process. As a result we as individuals,
and collectivities, are exposed to and have access to images and events that
do not fade with time. They can have an ever present ‘real time’ quality and
can expose people, if they so choose, to materials not necessarily accessible
in other ways. The way in which the cartoon image of the prophet
Mohammed published in Denmark in 2005 quickly travelled around the
globe and provoked demonstrations in some countries constitutes a good
example of the kinds of events and their impact that might interest a cultural
victimologist.

Summary and conclusion

In this chapter we have explored the kinds of questions that
criminologists interested in the victim of crime might be concerned with.
In so doing we have considered some of the findings that those questions
have produced, some of the concepts that have been used to make sense
of those findings, how we might think about the impact of crime from
the victims’ point of view, and what some of the policy developments
might look like from the victims’ point of view. Hopefully what you have
learned is that this work shows that:

1. The chance of being criminally victimised is unevenly distributed

across any population, with poor people from ethnic minorities,
especially males, being most likely to be victimised by a stranger
and women most likely to be victimised by someone they know,
though criminologists differ on the primacy that they give to each of
 these variables. Some think that race and/or ethnicity is the most
significant; others explore gender, others social class and others
focus on age. It is likely that all of these variables interact with one
another and have a compounding effect when impact is considered.
2. The impact of crime is wide and varied and is most likely to take its
greatest toll on those sections of society who can least afford to deal
with it either in terms of material resources or personal resources;
that is, the most vulnerable. This group more often than not
comprises those who have a number of the characteristics listed
under point one.
3. The closer someone fits with the idea of the ‘ideal victim’ the more
likely they are to receive a response, help, and support from the
criminal justice system.
4. Victims are central to the working of the criminal justice system,
and much effort has been made, and continues to be made across
different jurisdictions, to make the criminal justice system more
victim-centred.

EXERCISE

The reader might like to critically assess each of the statements above and
in so doing think about:

• How the kinds of stories you might come across in the media match up
to or fail to match up to these statements and why.
• What the problems might be in reorienting the criminal justice system
so that its concerns match more closely with the victim of crime.

Thinking about these two questions will act as good preparation for the two
chapters that follow.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER READING

There are a number of textbooks that are intended to introduce the reader to
the subdiscipline of victimology that has been the focus of this chapter. One
of the most popular ones is written by a North American, Andrew Karmen
and is simply called Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology (Pacific
Grove, CA: Brooks Cole) first published in 1990 and now in its eighth
edition. A more comparative approach that addresses the question of
victims’ rights is offered by Lorraine Wolhutter, Neil Olley and David
Denham (2009) Victimology: Victimisation and Victims’ Rights (London:
Routledge-Cavendish). An interesting take on the developments with
victimology is developed by Ross McGarry and Sandra Walklate (2015) in
their book Victims: Trauma, Testimony Justice (London: Routledge) with a
more advanced collection edited by Sandra Walklate (2007) Handbook of
Victims and Victimology (London: Routledge-Willan) written by experts on
various issues relating to victims of crime is for the ambitious only.

OceanofPDF.com
6 CRIME, POWER, AND GLOBAL
RELATIONS
An introduction to critical criminology

This chapter will extend our thinking about crime and criminology by
developing our understanding of the nature and impact of ‘crimes of the
suites’. Chapters 2 and 3 were concerned with exploring some of the
problems inherent in counting crime and assessing how much crime there
might be. In both of those chapters some consideration was given to the
kinds of crimes that were more easily countable and as a result featured
more readily in pictures of the extent of crime. It was clear from those two
chapters that the crime and criminals most visible both in the criminal
justice system and in various crime statistics are crimes of the streets. In
addition, it was observed that the criminal activities loosely termed ‘crimes
of the suites’ are much more difficult to count and as a consequence it is
much more difficult to offer an assessment of their nature and extent. Partly
as a result of these problems such crimes are much less likely to be seen as
criminal either by the general public or by the criminal justice system. The
purpose of this chapter is to pay a little more attention to these ‘crimes of
the suites’, to review the way in which criminology and criminologists have
paid attention, or failed to pay attention to them, and to suggest why this
may be the case. So, to get the most benefit from this chapter the reader is
advised to revisit the relevant pages in Chapters 2 and 3 to refresh your
memory on some of the issues related to measuring this kind of crime.

INTRODUCTION: THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE

POOR GET PRISON

This heading is borrowed from the title of a book first published in 1979 by
Reiman, an American social scientist, and now in its tenth edition. In the
first edition of this book, Reiman produced statistics designed to challenge
conventional thinking about what counts as crime. For example, he stated
that in 1974 the total number of people ‘murdered’ in the United States was
168,600: 114,000 deaths occurred as a result of occupational hazard; 20,000
from inadequate emergency medical care; 15,625 were a result of a knife or
other cutting instrument including a scalpel; 13,987 resulted from the use of
firearms; 2000 from hypodermics or prescriptions; and the remainder
included a range of different weapons. These figures clearly indicate quite a
different understanding of the context in which, for example, ‘murder’
might occur. In a similar vein, Steven Box (1983), a U.K. social scientist,
argued (using the Health and Safety Executive’s own statistics) that
between 1973 and 1979 there were 3291 deaths recorded as homicide by
the police and a total of 11,436 deaths resulting from occupational accident
or disease. In a more up to date assessment of the figures for the United
Kingdom, Whyte (2004a: 136) suggests that ‘the total number of deaths at
work, that result from health and safety crimes, are likely to exceed 4500
each year and this is before we factor in the largely unknown deaths caused
by other occupational diseases’. Moreover, as Tombs and Whyte (2007: 37)
state, ‘In contemporary societies, work routinely kills workers and members
of the public through acute injury and chronic illness’. The widely reported
and celebrated rescue of the miners trapped underground in Chile in 2010
both serves to remind us of the particularly hazardous nature of some work
environments as well as the global variations in experiences of those
workplaces. In addition, Whyte (2004), reporting on findings in the United
States, suggests that corporate fraud costs up to 20 times more than the cost
of ‘traditional’ crime. The question is: what are the common concerns for
these authors in the context of criminology? There are at least four:

1. To draw our attention to a wider understanding of law-breaking

behaviour.
2. To emphasise that this law-breaking behaviour frequently has serious
consequences.
3. To point to the extent to which such behaviour is at least connected
with, if it is not a product of, economic imperatives.
4. To draw our attention to the fact that such behaviours are not
necessarily subjected to the criminal justice process, but other kinds of
regulatory agencies, and as a consequence the perpetrators are not
criminalised, that is, labelled as criminal, in the same way.
This chapter will explore each of these concerns in more detail, but first
what kind of crime is under consideration here?

CRIMES OF THE SUITES: PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION

Chapter 3 offered case studies of the kind of ‘crime’ under consideration

here both huge in their impact and widely covered in the media. However,
what kinds of crime do these case studies, and the statistics presented
above, represent? Different criminologists use different terms to try to
capture the kind of criminal behaviour under discussion here. Terms such as
white-collar crime, corporate crime, business crime, crimes of the powerful,
commercial crime, and crimes of globalisation are just a few terms that are
used to capture this kind of criminal behaviour. The problem is, what do all
of these terms mean? Or put another way, as it is by Nelken (2007: 738), a
U.K. criminologist: ‘What, if anything, is there in common between the
marketing of unsafe pharmaceuticals, the practice of insider trading, the
‘long-firm’ fraud, computer crime, bank embezzlement and fiddling at
work’? Of course one commonality in all of these activities is that they do
not normally feature in common sense understandings of crime. This is
partly because these behaviours invoke confusing images between what are
considered to be respectable activities or occupations with that which is
considered to be unrespectable; the criminal.
In thinking about the problem of definition, Hazel Croall (2001), a U.K.
researcher, has suggested that it makes sense to work with a distinction
between crimes committed against organisations (by their employees and
others) and crime committed by organisations (either on their employees
and others or on each other). This distinction puts to the fore the levels of
trust and status that facilitate the kinds of harms perpetrated under either of
these conditions. (At this juncture it may be worth reflecting back to the
case study of Harold Shipman discussed in Chapter 1.) These features lend
a certain commonality between the different kinds of criminal behaviours
that might be focused on. However, what if we considered crimes of
omission as well as crimes of commission committed by those with power
and trust? Crimes of omission might, as Tombs and Whyte (2006) point out,
lead to a consideration of the ways in which decisions made by business
corporations might lead to negligence in terms of, for example, health and
safety legislation, but may nonetheless still be deemed a legitimate feature
of business practice. In other words, the question arises as to how it might
be possible to disaggregate normal business practice from deliberate acts of
harm and/or violation. Taking this consideration one stage further has led
Dawn Rothe and David Friedrichs (2015) to talk of crimes of globalisation.
By this they mean:

those demonstrably harmful policies and practices of institutions and

entities that are specifically a product of the forces of globalisation, and
that by their very nature occur within a global context.
(Rothe and Friedrichs 2015: 26)

Before continuing the reader might like to reflect upon these two different
dimensions to thinking about crimes of the suites and think about the
following questions:

1. What are the main points of similarity and difference between them?
2. What kinds of behaviours do they draw attention to?
3. What kinds of offenders are they drawing attention to?
4. Who are the victims likely to be?
5. From what you have read thus far in this book, what kind of attention
do you think the criminal justice system pays to these offences,
offenders, and victims?
6. To what extent do you think your answers to these questions might
vary with which part of the world you live in? (Think, for example, of
the issues associated with deforestation in South America, or the
impact of questionable military intervention in the Middle East.)

These perspectives on ‘crimes of the suites’ draw into our understanding of

crime and criminology a wide spectrum of activities that, as earlier chapters
have shown, might reach the headlines of the newspapers from time to time,
but do not regularly feature in the kinds of crimes that people worry about
on a routine daily basis. Yet there is a strong tradition within criminology of
exploring not only what people do worry about (crimes that they see) but
also what does not concern them so much (crimes that they do not see).
According to Nelken (2007) part of the explanation for why we see some
crimes and not others lies within the ambiguity that is associated with how
criminologists think about crimes of the suites in the first instance. Nelken
(2007) uses the term white-collar crime in his discussion and in presenting
his arguments his label will be used. However, the reader might like to note
that he uses this term to cover all the kinds of crimes that are of concern
here.

NELKEN’S AMBIGUITIES

1. White-collar crime as a contested concept.

The term white-collar crime was first coined by Sutherland in 1949 who
defined it as the kind of crime committed by ‘a person of high status in the
course of his occupation’ (ibid: 9). This kind of definition, by implication,
focuses attention on the status and respectability of the offender as much as
the illegality of the offence and, as a consequence, has generated much
confusion as to what kind of behaviour is to be included and/or excluded by
it. For example, following this definition has led some researchers,
especially in the United States, to focus on what might be called the routine
criminal behaviour of the middle classes (tax fraud, false claims and
accounting) and has led others to argue that white-collar crime is a normal
and well-organised part of business life: rooted in the same principles as
more conventionally understood organised crime ‘permitted’ as a product of
collusion with those there to regulate such practices. In between these
extremes, others have attempted to generate different categories of white-
collar crime; crimes in the workplace, economic crime, environmental
crime, with some extending these kinds of categories to include such things
as genocide, etc.
As Nelken (2007) argues, problems of definition should not be ignored.
These problems reveal that not all criminologists in this area are necessarily
talking about the same kind of behaviour. By implication this means that
problems of measurement and explanation will also look somewhat
different. However, those of you who have already read Chapters 1 and 2
will now be fully aware of the contested nature of some of these issues for
criminology.

2. Is white-collar crime really crime?

This ambiguity is quite clearly connected to the first since if we are not sure
what white-collar crime is, how can it be considered criminal? This
ambiguity reflects the tensions that exist between those who take the
criminal law as the defining point for the study of criminology and those
who might want to take a wider legal remit and include civil and
administrative offences as being part of the criminological agenda. There
are, of course, those who would take a much broader understanding of what
might be included as criminal by considering not the law per se but the
question of the harm done as being crucial to defining the criminal. (If this
causes confusion, revisit the discussion around what is crime in Chapter 1.)
Whilst the recognition of this ambiguity is a useful reminder of the diverse
nature of criminology, it should also be remembered that even taking the
narrow definition of the criminal law as the defining point of criminological
investigation poses particular problems in understanding and accessing
issues associated with white-collar crime. For example, the diffusion of
responsibility that exists within many organisations makes it difficult to
identify who is both legally and criminally responsible for an event. In
addition, the ever-changing nature of technology in the workplace makes it
difficult for Health and Safety legislation, for example, to keep up with such
changes.

3. What causes white-collar crime?

If there is ambiguity about what white-collar crime is, and whether it is

really criminal in the ordinary sense of the term, then it follows that there
will be ambiguity about explaining it. This ambiguity rests upon the extent
to which the normal explanations of criminology fit or do not fit with the
white-collar criminal. (At this juncture, the reader might like to reflect upon
the extent to which the different explanations for crime discussed in
Chapter 4 might be applied to the crime under discussion here.) Different
criminologists within this area take different positions on this question.
Some opt for explanations that focus on the individual (put simply, greed
rather than need). Others adopt the view that it is capitalism itself that sets
the framework, which generates criminal behaviour of this kind (put simply,
the pursuit of profit will be maintained by whatever means, legal or illegal).
An early Dutch criminologist, Willem Bonger (1876–1940), argued that
capitalism itself produced the condition under which exploitation as a
system and a practice became valued. This view is linked with the fourth
ambiguity.

4. White-collar crime in its everyday setting.

Any search for explanation requires that we understand the meaning and the
context in which the behaviour under investigation occurs. In the case of
white-collar crime, some commentators argue that the same requirements
also apply. So, if such behaviour is put in its social context, then it does not
look so criminal. This social context involves recognising that, on the one
hand as Croall (2001) points out, victimisation is diffused, indeed people
might not be aware that they have been victimised at all, and on the other
hand, there is the question of intentionality, did the offender intend to cause
harm or was their behaviour not intended to deceive anyone but simply a
product of what might be considered to be normal business practice? The
American Bernard Madoff, serving 150 years for fraud, is reported as
saying ‘People just kept throwing money at me. Some guy wanted to invest,
and if I said no, the guy said, what am I not good enough’? (The Daily
Telegraph, June 21, 2010). What do you think? Of course, there are some
well-known cases in which neither of these conditions could be said to have
applied. The way in which the P and O Ferry Company ignored safety
advice for their roll-on/roll-off ferries might be a case in point (see Slapper
and Tombs, 1999). However, such cases notwithstanding, placing white-
collar crime in its everyday setting not only adds to its ambiguous status, it
also makes it a bit easier to understand why detection is more difficult.

5. Responding to white-collar crime.

The main issue here is the use of a range of different regulatory agencies
and enforcement methods to deal with white-collar infringements. Agencies
who, more often than not, are not that well-funded or well-equipped to fulfil
their task and required to complete a task that more often than not is rooted
in the need for the compliance of the offender. These factors add to the
problems of detection, prosecution and conviction. In a recent study, Tombs
and Whyte (2010) present evidence that suggests a collapse of regulatory
practices in respect to health and safety legislation in the United Kingdom
as the tightening economic climate has taken its toll on the resources of the
Health and Safety Executive, the agency charged with the enforcement of
the legislation. Add to this the need for the cooperation of the offender
(compliance) in order to pursue any complaints at all, then the ambiguous
messages sent out with respect to white-collar crime becomes evident.
Moreover, as Croall (2001) observes, even when prosecuted and found
guilty, sentences are frequently seen to be lenient with the vast majority of
such offenders given fines. Putting all of this together, it can be seen that
the response to white-collar crime is very ambiguous indeed.

6. White-collar crime as an index of social change.

Nelken’s sixth ambiguity has two dimensions to it both of which are

intended to situate this kind of criminal behaviour within the wider context
of changing levels of public tolerance. One dimension points to the view
that there is less public concern about this kind of behaviour and therefore
less support for more severe punishment. The other points to a slightly
contradictory view that changing social attitudes results in the penalising of
behaviour that was previously considered acceptable. This ambiguity lends
itself to trying to understand how and under what conditions that which
Walklate (1989) called the ‘ideology of disaster’ is the prescient way of
thinking about the impact of events or disasters accrue a ‘criminal’ label.
Changes in public attitudes connect with the last of Nelken’s ambiguities.
(See also the case studies in Chapter 3.)

7. The collateral costs of control.

Here Nelken is pointing to the more general dilemma posed by the title of
this chapter: the rich get richer and the poor get prison. What would be the
costs of reorienting the law enforcement process to focus on white-collar
crime (defined all inclusively) in terms of enforcement, prosecution and
conviction? Whose interests would such a reorientation serve and what
would the outcomes actually look like? As Nelken (2007: 761) states,
‘Industry tends – with the collusion of the state – to balance the safety of
workers against the increased costs of production’. What would the costs
and benefits of behaving differently look like, especially in the
contemporary global market? In Rothe and Friedrich’s (2015) terms, what
would the costs to the global north look like if the impact of activities
associated with globalisation were to take seriously the impact that they
were having on the global south?

EXERCISE

Given the concerns of this chapter and the financial crisis of 2007–2010
you might like to think about the following questions:

1. In what ways, if at all, is such a crisis a concern for criminology?

Why?
2. How, if at all, does such a crisis impact upon society and whom?
3. What might the relationship be between this impact and criminal
behaviour, and what kind of criminal behaviour?
4. What role, contributory role, if any, did the regulatory agencies play in
this crisis?
5. Who has paid the price for this crisis? What does this look like in the
global north as compared with the global south?
6. How, if at all, can such crises be prevented?

You might want to hold on to your answer to the last question and think
about it again after reading Chapter 8.
Nelken’s ambiguities have provided useful insight into some of the
problems associated with taking white-collar crime seriously. As a result, it
is possible to add to the problems of measurement discussed in Chapter 2, a
further list identified by Croall (2001) that white-collar crime suffers from:

• Low visibility
• Complexity
• Diffusion of responsibility
• Diffusion of victimisation
• Difficulty of detection
• Difficulty of prosecution
• Lenient punishment
• Ambiguity in the law
• Ambiguity in criminal status
Moreover, the nature of these difficulties tends not to vary much from
society to society. At this juncture, the reader might like to revisit the case
studies presented in Chapter 3 and identify the extent to which they suffer
from any or all of the difficulties in the above list.
In addition, and by way of illustrating some of these problems, you might
like to do the following:

1. Choose two daily newspapers from the same day: a quality one and a
‘popular’ one.
2. Count how many articles there are in each of them on crime and note
the pages in the newspaper where they occur.
3. What kind of crime is covered in each of the papers? Are they similar
or different? What kind of language do the newspapers use in
discussing the crime covered?
4. Are there any reports that cover the kind of crime we are discussing
here? How do those reports compare and contrast with reports on other
kinds of crime?
5. What kinds of ideas can you find that try to explain the different kinds
of crimes covered? Are these ideas the same, or used in the same way,
for different kinds of crime?
6. How does this coverage, if at all, illustrate the ambiguities we have
been discussing here?

If all of these problems in relation to white-collar crime are put together it is

no wonder that it is the view of some criminologists that the rich get richer
and the poor get prison. However, a question remains: who is the victim of
this kind of crime? As was discussed in Chapter 1, the victim of such crime
is rarely seen or heard yet the harm done as a result of the kinds of
behaviours and activities under discussion here can be substantial.

CRIMINAL VICTIMISATION AND CRIME OF THE

SUITES

A key condition for the perpetuation of white-collar crime, as the term has
been used in this chapter, is as Geis (1973) observed victim responsiveness.
Or put another way by Box (1983: 17), ‘the majority of those suffering from
corporate crime remain unaware of their victimisation – either not knowing
it has happened to them or viewing their “misfortune” as an accident or “no
one’s fault”’. The disaster scenario mentioned above is one that feeds off
victim responsiveness. Of course, as we have observed in this chapter, it is
not victim responsiveness alone that permits such crimes to happen. We
also need to add to this the different and differential policing of such
activities (by regulatory authorities rather than the criminal justice system),
the imperative of the profit motive, and in relation to some aspects of white-
collar crime, the presence of trust between the victim and the criminal.
Again think back to the discussion of the case of Harold Shipman in
Chapter 1 in relation to trust and the crimes of this potentially powerful
individual. Indeed, the exploitation of trust and trust relationships is also a
key in understanding some aspects of fraud, including Internet fraud.
Taking these factors together, Box (1983: 67) concluded:

If employees, consumers, and other corporate victims had their

awareness sharpened and supported by trade unionism, consumerism
and environmentalism, and the state and legal institutions could be
shamed into closing the gap between lofty principles and tawdry
practices . . .

Over 30 years on the question remains whether anything has changed. Elias
(1986, 1993) has argued that, despite the growth in victim-centred
movements and victim-oriented policies, victims as a group remain
subjected to political manipulation with the focus of much of this activity
directing the policy gaze toward mundane and ordinary crimes rather than
those rather more hidden crimes of the powerful. However, there are
notable exceptions to this. McGarry and Walklate (2015) document the
important influence that the victim-centred organisations still working with
the aftermath of Bhopal (one of the case studies mentioned in Chapter 3)
have had on subsequent responses to the victims of that event. Others,
notably Phil Scraton (2009), offer a powerful analysis of the effort to
silence and then hear the families of the events of Hillsborough in the late
1980s. (Hillsborough refers to a football match where 96 Liverpool football
supporters died. By 2016 the final inquest on these events has yet to finish
its inquiry and offer a report on them, indicative of the refusal of the
victims’ families to be manipulated and/or silenced.) In both of these
examples, it has taken significant determination, organisation and
commitment for these voices to be heard and for the harm caused to them to
be taken on board. In other cases, such harm is very readily realised. Think
about the following example.

In the summer of 2015, the international press carried the harrowing

picture on their front pages of a three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, found
drowned on a Turkish beach, having been washed overboard from the
boat on which he and his Syrian family were endeavouring to escape
from Syria to Europe. At the time this image had a profound effect on
the politics surrounding responses to the migrant crisis occurring during
the summer of 2015 consequent to the conflict in Syria. In the first
instance those politics drove some European countries, notably
Germany, to accept more refugees in their country. Others were more
lukewarm in their response. As the summer went on and the migrant
crisis deepened attitudes toward refugees changed with some European
countries tightening their border controls.

Any newspaper search will reveal more detail on these events and their
unfolding during the summer of 2015. Putting a ‘crimes of the suites’ hat
on, think about the following questions:

1. What kind of crime might be part of the problem here?

2. Who is considered to be the victim of such crime? Why?
3. Why did this particular victim hit the media headlines in the way that it
did? (You might want to think about the relevance of Christie’s [1986]
concept of the ideal victim, discussed in Chapter 5, at this point.)
4. What might be the less visible processes lying behind the death of this
young child?
5. Is it possible that these victims are being subjected to the political
manipulation of which Elias speaks?
6. What might this event reveal about the relationship between these
kinds of events and changing public attitudes of which Nelkin speaks?

It is without doubt that this particular event and the migrant crisis more
generally are having ramifications across Europe and it is also without
doubt that you may have found answering some of the questions above
easier than others. Arguably this example puts to the fore the interconnected
nature of global events, not only through the pervasive nature of the ever
present mediated nature of social life (through social networking, the
Internet and so on) but also the interconnected nature of those events in real
time and over time. For instance, the unsettled nature of the Middle East
takes its toll elsewhere in the world and the powerful, whether they are
governments or big businesses, play a role here both by acts of omission
and commission, and in the harms that result. Thus, referring back again to
the notion of crimes of globalisations as discussed earlier. We shall consider
the nature of these interconnections again below as we consider the
potential questions associated with terrorism as a substantive topic for
criminology, particularly critical criminology.

Summary
The discussion thus far has tried to extend what it is that might count as
crime and who as a consequence might count as a victim of crime. It can
be seen that extending our understanding in this way is highly
problematic both in terms of common sense understandings of these
issues and in terms of legal understandings of these kinds of activities.
There is a fine line between what might be considered sharp business
practice and criminal fraud, for example. However, extending our
understanding of what might count as criminal has been an important
aspect of criminology so now we shall move on to consider what kinds
of ideas criminology has used to make sense of this kind of criminality.

HOW HAS CRIMINOLOGY ATTEMPTED TO EXPLAIN

CRIMES OF THE SUITES?

Much of the discussion above has drawn implicitly on an understanding of

crime and the problem of crime that might be best understood as being the
‘criminality of the state’. This view of crime and criminology relies, in
different ways, on the work of Karl Marx. Marx drew attention to the way
in which the powerful in society use the range of resources available to
them, including the law, to secure and maintain their dominant position. In
this view of society, the law and the processes that underpin the law and its
practice are at the centre of critical scrutiny. Such scrutiny puts to the fore
the way in which some groups in society are targeted by the law and its
practice and others are not. Put simply, the law and its enforcement become
arenas in which the powers of the state are made legitimate. For a
criminologist working within this kind of framework, these powers express
themselves especially along class, race and gender lines. Hence, the rich get
richer and the poor get prison. This way of thinking about the nature of
crime and criminal victimisation is an important dimension to criminology,
though it takes a variety of forms and we shall discuss three of them briefly
here: Marxist criminology, radical criminology and critical criminology.

MARXIST CRIMINOLOGY

Marx himself had little to say about crime or the law, but the general tenor
of his views can be translated into the context of criminology. Two
important writers who have done this are both North American, Chambliss
(1975) and Quinney (1977). Chambliss argued that capitalism creates the
desire to consume and since not all members of society are able to earn
enough to match the levels of consumption generated by capitalism, this
puts the haves and the have nots in conflict with one another. This view
does not presume therefore that only the have nots (the poor) will engage in
criminal behaviour, but it does presume that it is their behaviour that will be
the focus of the criminal law. He says:

Criminality is simply not something that people have or don’t have;

crime is not something some people do and others don’t. Crime is a
matter of who can pin the label on whom, and underlying this socio-
political process is the structure of social relations determined by the
political economy.
(Chambliss, 1975 cited in Muncie et al. 1996: 228)

So for Chambliss the underlying cause of crime (remember criminology, as

was outlined in Chapter 1, is still about the search for causes) lies with the
state and the political and economic interests that are necessarily served by
the law and its implementation. As Chambliss argued, ‘The state becomes
an instrument of the ruling class enforcing laws here but not there,
according to the realities of political power and economic conditions’
(Chambliss 1975 cited in Muncie et al. 1996: 230). A similar emphasis can
be found in the work of Richard Quinney (1977).
Quinney used the term ‘politicality of crime’ to suggest that criminal
behaviour was not the product of a deficient personality or poor
socialisation, but a political expression. By that he meant that it was not an
individual’s behaviour itself that was criminal but the action that was taken
against it that rendered it criminal. It was his view that the ways in which
some behaviours were deemed problematic and other were not were
embedded in social relationships. These relationships were structural, that
is, rooted in power relationships. These should not be seen as conspiratorial
but part of the social relations of society. Taking this as a starting point,
Quinney constructed a typology of crime. So he talks of crimes of
domination (police brutality, white-collar crime, governmental crimes);
crimes of accommodations and resistance (theft and homicide produced by
the conditions of capitalism); and terrorism (a response to the conditions of
capitalism).
Both of these versions of Marxist criminology clearly put all crimes of
the powerful (crimes of the suites) on the agenda and see such crime as the
product of either the authorities themselves or endemic in the conditions of
capitalism. This results in some behaviours being targeted more consistently
and more effectively than others. Not many criminologists in the present
decade take such a simplistic view of the cause of crimes of the suites in
particular or the cause of crime in general, but these ideas were influential
in the development of the second two strands of Marxist oriented
criminology to be discussed here; radical criminology and critical
criminology.

RADICAL CRIMINOLOGY

Radical criminology has its origins in the United Kingdom rather than the
United States and is largely associated with the work of Taylor, Walton and
Young in their book The New Criminology published in 1973. Arguably this
work paved the way for the later work of Young and others that focused on
relative deprivation discussed in Chapter 4. The New Criminology was
written as a critique of the then dominance of criminology by psychological
explanations of crime. It strived to create what they called a fully social
theory of deviance. They were concerned with taking account of (amongst
other things) the nature of the criminal process as a whole and how its
constituent parts produced the whole.
However, developments in Marxist theory, especially in relation to
understanding the nature of the state, rather left radical criminology
stranded with the exception of the well-known work done in the United
Kingdom by Stuart Hall and others called Policing the Crisis and published
in 1978. This work attempted to make sense of how, during the mid-1970s
in London the crime of ‘mugging’ was constructed as not only a social
problem but also as the archetypal ‘black’ crime. Their analysis of this
process was controversial, but in terms of the development of a Marxist
oriented criminology it led people to think much more critically about the
role of the law in relation to crime and the criminalisation process. In other
words, how some groups and/or sections of society were much more likely
to receive the attention of the criminal justice process for their behaviour.
Indeed behaviour that might not be too different from the behaviour of other
groups in society. (The reader might like to think of some examples of this:
raucous behaviour at the rugby club or a football match as compared with
raucous behaviour elsewhere is a good place to start!) Arguably
understanding this process of criminalisation is the starting point for critical
criminology.

CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY

The final strand of Marxist oriented criminology to be discussed here is that

known as critical criminology. This is a label that still has some resonance
for contemporary criminology and criminologists though it is often difficult
to ascertain its precise meaning. It is a term used here as a way of bringing
together a range of different work that is concerned with the various ways
in which the state uses its power to maintain and sustain itself. So critical
criminology is still concerned with the criminality of the state but
recognises that the way in which the state has vested interests in the way
things are (rather than the way they might be) frequently works in very
subtle and socially nuanced ways.
For some criminologists, understanding those subtleties has meant
focusing on how classism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism are an intrinsic
part of the way in which institutions work, how policies are formulated,
what becomes an agenda item or not, etc. In others words, they become part
of the structural relationships in which people work, that require constant
work and self-reflection on the part of individuals to change them. For other
criminologists this being ‘critical’ means focusing on how some state
practices marginalise and criminalise some groups and not others. For
others it has meant focusing more critically on the victim of crime and
endeavouring to establish a more subtly nuanced understanding of why
some people are more likely to be seen as victims and others not. All of
which are quite legitimate questions for understanding crimes of the suites
as some of the examples we have discussed above illustrate. Yet in many
ways, criminology still struggles to put crimes of the suites at the centre of
its concerns. The question is, why?

CRIMINOLOGY AND CRIMES OF THE SUITES: HAPPY

OR UNHAPPY BEDFELLOWS?

Whyte, a U.K.-based critical criminologist (2004b: 145), offers the

following critique of criminology.

1. Criminology, for the most part, follows the official view of the nature
and extent of the crime problem. This includes looking away when
crimes of the powerful are evident.
2. Alongside this the way in which the law is structured and functions
makes it much more difficult to move beyond its boundaries and to
consider the role of the state in regulating behaviour in the interests of
the crimes of the powerful.
3. Thus, much of the worst harm done is committed by large corporations
often with the implicit support of the state. The question then arises
how criminology, given its current orientation, might change a system
structured in this way.

In devising your response to the observations summarized above, hopefully

you have considered a number of things including:

• The nature of criminology as a discipline and its umbilical link with

modern society and as a consequence the policy-making process.
 • The kind of data available to criminologists.
• The inherent difficulties of accessing data about white-collar crime.
• The kinds of crimes that people take seriously and expect the criminal
justice system to ‘do something about’.
• The role of the law in defining what is and what is not criminal.
• The role of the law in defining who can be and who cannot be an
offender.
• The role of the victim in all of the above.

You may, of course, have thought about others things too, and may have
concluded by agreeing or disagreeing with all, some or none of Whyte’s
observations. However, what is important in relation to thinking about them
and thinking about criminology is to recognise that what is understood by
‘crime’ can never be taken for granted, and that if serious consideration
were to be given to the victim of crime the question of the harm done by a
wide range of illegitimate activities (like not adhering to health and safety
legislation on the one hand or genocide on the other) might be a more
meaningful one to pursue.

TERRORISM: A TOPIC OF SUBSTANCE FOR CRITICAL

CRIMINOLOGY?

The events of 9/11 in New York, 11/3 in Madrid, 7/7 in London, Mumbai in
November 2008, and Paris 2015, amongst many others, transgress borders
and certainly transgress conventional understanding of crime. As a result,
they pose a number of interesting questions for criminologists, like, for
example,

• What is terrorism? Is it crime, or is it something else?

• Why ‘new’ terrorism?
• Why should criminologists be interested in terrorism?
• Does critical criminology have something of value to say about
terrorism?
• What kinds of concepts might help us understand this particular aspect
of the contemporary global world and its interconnections?
In what follows we shall consider aspects of each of these questions.
First of all, it is important to recognise that terrorism itself is not a
singular, coherent concept. Some writers trace its origins to the ‘reign of
terror’ that took place during the French Revolution. Others might take a
gendered approach and talk of stalking as ‘terrorism’. Others still would use
this term to refer to the terrorist activities of the state as opposed to those
activities aimed at undermining the state. So, as a concept, it is contested.
As a result, one way of making sense of the kind of terrorism governments
are preoccupied with is to think of a continuum of terrorism.
In the context of the United Kingdom, for example, contemporary
terrorist activities and the response to them need to be set against the
backcloth of ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland and the mechanisms put in
place to respond to those activities. The concept of a continuum helps to do
this and it also accommodates other kinds of extremist activities like, for
example, animal rights activism. This then allows us to compare and
contrast what might be called ‘old’ terrorism with ‘new’ terrorism along a
number of dimensions; its organisation, identity, focus and use of weapons.
So, ‘old’ terrorism can be characterised as being nationally based, with a
vertically organised infrastructure using conventional weapons. ‘New’
terrorism is globally based, could involve anyone, tends to be organised in
cells and uses suicide bombers.
This kind of analysis is rather crude but it does give a feel for the
complexity of identifying what is being discussed. Interestingly this kind of
analysis does not readily lead us to think about ‘state’ crime as terrorist
activity. Yet some critical criminologists would be very keen to ensure that
the activities of states against their own people and other states are a central
feature of understanding terrorist activities. (At this juncture you might
want to think again about the case study of Abu Ghraib discussed in
Chapter 3.) Indeed, given the long-debated question around the legality of
the war in Iraq from 2003 onward, some commentators would want to
include all the activities that have followed on from this as terrorist. So,
here we have some clues as to why criminology might be interested in
terrorism.
Put simply, criminologists are interested in terrorism because it
encourages us to think critically about:
 • What is crime? (Does it include international law-breaking behaviour
as well as more conventionally understood criminal law-breaking
behaviour?)
• Who can be criminal? (Individuals or governments?)
• By what processes are they identified as criminal? (Are the powerful
always exempt?)
• Who is the victim of crime? (Individuals or states?)
• What does the ‘fear of crime’ mean? What are people afraid of and
when?

In some respects, these are similar questions to those asked by cultural

criminology but rather than wanting to situate answers to these questions
within specific cultural contexts, criminologists who are interested in
questions relating to terrorism are just as preoccupied with the politics that
underpin the questions listed above and their global dimensions. Let us just
pursue the issues that are raised for the ‘fear of crime’ for a moment since
this was discussed in some detail in Chapter 2.
Furedi (2002), an English sociologist, has developed a provocative
commentary on what he calls the ‘culture of fear’ present in the United
Kingdom and possibly elsewhere, since the advent of the global terrorist
activities of 2001. This culture of fear he argues is encouraged by sound
bite politics and an uncritical mass media which transforms every human
experience into a safety situation. Everything from the food we eat, to the
nature of our workplace, to the utensils we might use in our homes are
classified as potential sites of danger. The paralysis that results from this is
what he calls the ‘culture of fear’. In addition, new fears emerge all the
time; from terrorism to cybercrime. Add to this the extension of the use of
stop and search powers by the police under antiterrorism legislation in
which suspect people do not actually have to commit a crime to be
identified as criminal, then the dangers faced by us all become apparent.
Indeed, we have now moved into a situation in which these kind of pre-
emptive activities are central to tackling terrorism. (This is something that
we shall pick up again in the next chapter where we discuss crime
prevention.) The logic of anticipating the risk from terrorism requires that
our response is driven by the question: what if? This question permits not
dealing with crime, but with pre-crime.
 The term ‘pre-crime’ is the name given to a specialized police unit in
Phillip K. Dick’s (1956) science fiction short story Minority Report. In this
story, it is the primary duty of pre-crime officers to track down and arrest
perpetrators before crime happens. Interventions are made on the basis of
information about future crimes given by three ‘pre-cogs’ – beings who are
able to visualize impending criminal incidents. This short story was made
into a relatively successful film that raised many of the dilemmas being
faced in the contemporary context. The reliability of horizon scanning, the
perils of pre-emptive intervention, the capture and utilization of personal
data, the evidential standard of proof and the difficulty of establishing
innocence in a changing environment are key themes in this story. Such
concerns resonate very aptly with responses to terrorism. The problem is
that these concerns are not science fiction. Jude McCulloch and Dean
Wilson, two Australian social scientists, point out that:

By targeting anticipated crimes, and proceeding as if they had already

happened, pre-crime transforms the relationship between crime and
punishment, with profound implications for security, justice and society.
(McCulloch and Wilson 2016: 1)

You might want to take a moment to reflect upon this statement and
consider what the implications alluded to might look like and which
sections of society are most likely to be on the receiving end of these
implications.
This orientation toward anticipating crime when put alongside the
ongoing construction of the morally decent ‘us’ as against ‘them’
epitomised by the pronouncement by George Bush that ‘you are either with
us and against the terrorists, or you are on the side of the terrorists’, it is
easy to see how not only new fears are being constructed but also new
categories of offenders and victims have been created. The problem for
criminology is how to make sense of these changing processes. So here
again there is a range of interesting questions for the discipline:

1. Is everyone experiencing this ‘culture of fear’ in the same way?

2. If not, why not? (You might want to think here about not only the
positions different groups occupy in different societies that afford them
 different levels of protection but also how such fears might look in
different parts of the global south as opposed to the global north.)
3. What is the role of culture in mediating the impact of global events
such as 9/11, 3/11, 7/7, the attacks in Paris, and so on? Moreover,
within this, what role do the media play?
4. What do events such as these tell us, if anything, about ‘fear’, risk or
crime?

Summary and conclusion

In this chapter our understanding of crime, what crime is, who can be
considered a criminal and who can be considered to be a victim of crime
has been extended considerably. Hopefully some of this has served to
challenge further both your own common sense understandings of all of
these issues and also what criminology is about. Whilst small in number
in relation to the criminology community as a whole, critical
criminologists have a very important role to play in challenging not only
what we might all take for granted about the crime problem, but what the
discipline itself takes for granted about the nature of the crime problem.
Given that much of the policy arena in relation to crime works with a
very conventional understanding of crime the impact of critical
criminology and critical criminologists is likely to be rather limited. This
fact, however, should not deter the reader from appreciating the value of
asking questions about what this strand of work represents. Questions
like, for example, whose crime and whose justice are we putting to the
fore here? The answers that are given to such questions form the basis of
understanding how criminologists think about the criminal justice system
and crime prevention, the focus of our next two chapters.

EXERCISE

Either read Dick Francis’ short story Minority Report or watch the film and
think about the following questions:
 1. What practices does the story allude to that you know are already in
place?
2. How effective do you think these practices are?
3. Who is most likely to be targeted by these practices, or are we all
vulnerable?
4. What questions do they raise about justice? (You might want to revisit
this question after reading Chapter 7.)
5. What might a critical criminologist say about these kinds of
developments?

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

A thorough discussion of white-collar crime can be found in H. Croall

(2001) Understanding White Collar Crime (Buckingham: Open University
Press) and G. Slapper and S. Tombs (1999) Corporate Crime (London:
Longmans). Both offer a good case study analysis of particular white-collar
crimes. More recently, Tombs and Whyte (2007) have taken a detailed look
of infringements associated with health and safety legislation in Safety
Crime (London: Routledge). J. Reiman and P. Leighton (2013) The Rich
Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (Pearson Education) now in its tenth
edition and first published in 1979, is a must if you want to read a very
radical approach to the issues addressed in this chapter. R. Elias (1993)
Victims Still (London: Sage) remains a sound, if somewhat polemical,
discussion of the way in which the victims’ movement in the United States
has been the object of political manipulation. For a more advanced
appreciation of the problems that ‘crimes of the suites’ poses for
criminology, take a look at Nelken’s more recent chapter on White Collar
and Corporate Crime in M. Maguire, R. Morgan, and R. Reiner (2012) The
Oxford Handbook of Criminology (5/e) (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

OceanofPDF.com
7 A QUESTION OF JUSTICE

In Chapter 1 it was made clear that criminologists not only concern

themselves with the problems of defining, measuring, and explaining crime,
they are also concerned with how the criminal justice system works, or fails
to work, for the criminals, victims, and the professionals who are involved
with it. For many criminologists this concern centres on whether any
criminal justice system works in a fair and equal way for the people who
come into contact with it. This means that criminologists are also interested
in questions of what counts as justice and for whom. In order to make any
comments on justice, of course, it is necessary for a criminologist to have
some kind of understanding of how a criminal justice system works. So this
chapter will introduce the reader to some understanding of the nature of
criminal justice systems as well as highlighting the kinds of questions that
criminologists might ask about them.

INTRODUCTION

Before it is possible to consider whether any particular criminal justice

system works fairly or not, it is important to be able to appreciate what the
different parts of the system are supposed to do. We will consider this in
due course. Moreover, being concerned about fairness or equality ultimately
means that criminology and criminologists also have something to say
about justice. However, justice is a difficult concept both to understand and
define.
Some would argue that justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Such a view implies that justice is as variable as beauty itself and as a
consequence, because it is so variable it can only be an aspiration of any
criminal justice and cannot be achieved in a way that would satisfy
everyone. Nonetheless, it is clear that any criminal justice system in any
society, as its title implies, is expected to deliver justice. So the purpose of
this chapter is to explore some of the ideas on which different criminal
justice systems are based and to examine the extent to which these ideas
reflect different understandings of how justice might be achieved. We shall
consider first of all, then, different definitions of justice. Secondly, we shall
consider the nature of different criminal justice systems but will focus
primarily on those rooted in the principles of adversarialism (those of
England and Wales, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand). First, how might justice be defined?

WHAT IS JUSTICE?

Ways of understanding what counts as justice have changed over the

centuries. The ancient Greeks took the view that justice was rooted in the
logic that gave the world its order. In this sense, justice (logic) was
something opposite from chaos and it could be applied everywhere and
objectively measured. However, more modern understandings, to be found
especially in the work of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, argued that
justice was rooted in moral principles (that is, ideas about right and wrong)
that also could be applied everywhere. More recently, the twentieth century
philosopher Richard Rorty has argued that justice is not so much connected
with moral principles (what might be referred to as ethics) as it is connected
with the achievement of a consensus. In other words, justice is what people
agree that it is. One extension of this view of justice is that expressed in the
following quote from Alasdair McIntyre, a contemporary moral
philosopher, who states:

So rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a

history: indeed since there are a diversity of traditions of enquiry with
histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than
rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than
justice.
(MacIntyre, 1988: 9)

So, what ‘justice’ means has been, and still is, highly contested. Feminists
argue, for example, that when you begin to unravel what rationality means
within the criminal justice system it refers to a particular kind of rationality:
the rational man of law. Ngaire Naffine (1990), an Australian socio-legal
scholar, suggests that this man of law is a middle class, entrepreneurial man,
a successful market individual. If this is the man of law whose rationality
counts in the legal process, then this rationality fails to speak to, and for,
other kinds of men as well as women. So the law and the courts in
particular, cannot ‘hear’ the working class male, the ethnic minority male,
or the female who may come before it. Hence, criminal justice professionals
may advise defendants to wear a suit, or to look presentable if they are
required to attend court. In other words, present themselves as compliant
with this middle class, entrepreneurial man of law. This is a fairly low key,
but nevertheless important way, in which the ‘man of law’ impacts on the
processes of delivering justice.
Despite the difficulties implied above, there is still the expectation that
the purpose of a criminal justice system is to deliver justice. This, perhaps
inevitably, has been and is intertwined with the idea of punishment. The
way in which justice and punishment are, or should be connected, is also an
issue of considerable debate. For example, some states in the United States
still uses capital punishment for those convicted of first degree murder
whereas most European countries no longer have this option on their statute
books for this kind of offence (though in some instances it is still retained
for offences of treason). However, each of these different practices still
implies that crime, and the punishment for crime, are connected. This is
usually referred to as the ‘principle of proportionality’; that is, the idea that
punishment is not arbitrarily imposed, but has been subjected to debate,
agreed upon, and considered appropriate for the crime committed. Put more
colloquially, there is some sense in which the ‘punishment fits the crime’,
though quite clearly this does not mean that the punishment will be the
same everywhere for that same crime.
Recognising that there is a connection between justice and punishment
acknowledges that one focus of concern for the criminologist is the policies
that any particular criminal justice system implements in relation to justice.
These policies symbolise what is considered to be a reasonable way of
connecting justice and punishment in any particular society. However, such
connections are themselves neither simple nor straightforward. Indeed,
there are theoretically a number of different ways in which this relationship
might be articulated. Below is a list of concepts that arguably articulate
different ways of considering the relationship between justice and
punishment. The reader is encouraged to think about each of these terms
and to reflect upon the questions that follow.
 • Revenge
• Retribution
• Restitution
• Reparation
• Restoration

Think about the following questions:

1. What do each of these terms mean?

2. What do they each imply about punishment?
3. What do they each imply about justice?
4. How might they be represented in criminal justice policy?
5. What does each of them suggest about the relationship between the
victim and the offender?

If you have thought about the terms listed above and tried to answer the
questions that follow, you are probably now aware that no one criminal
justice system’s approach to punishment and justice comprises just one of
these responses. More often than not, criminal justice systems reflect a
mixture of policies that have elements of each of these approaches within
them. In addition to being aware of this kind of complexity, it is also
important to be aware that there are different principles upon which any
particular criminal justice system might operate in relation to its policies.
These different principles are referred to as ‘natural justice’, ‘due process’,
‘crime control’, and ‘social justice’. We shall discuss each of these in turn.

NATURAL JUSTICE

Natural justice centres on three principles: fairness, equity and equality. In

practice, this focuses on the delivery of fair procedures informed by two
key practices: no one should be a judge in their own case and no one should
be found guilty without having being heard and/or represented.

DUE PROCESS
The due process principle centres more attention on ensuring fair
procedures that are publicly known. In practice this means, for example,
arrested persons should know what they have been arrested for, why they
are going to court, that there should be standards of proof in relation to
evidence, and that each side should have the opportunity to present their
case. So the due process model implies more than just the establishment of
fair procedures, it also implies that those procedures must be administered
fairly and equitably and that there is impartiality about the judicial process.

CRIME CONTROL

The crime control principle centres the role of the criminal justice system in
delivering punishment. The crime control perspective on criminal justice
therefore puts value on the criminal justice system in general, but the courts
in particular as being the means whereby the law is upheld regardless of
questions of impartiality.

SOCIAL JUSTICE

The social justice principle centres the role of the criminal justice system in
the delivery of justice and a social good. If the criminal justice system is
understood as a social good (like the institutions for education and health, in
other words something that we can all benefit from), then in delivery and a
system that is fair and equitable the question becomes: how, if at all, the
criminal justice system should take account of social inequality when it
comes to the question of punishment.
This is an important area of debate for those criminologists who would
argue that it is through improving social policy that crime can be tackled,
not by sending people to prison. Indeed for some commentators the
relationship between criminal justice and social justice is paramount. Dee
Cook, a U.K. social scientist, states:

If a society cannot guarantee ‘the equal worth of all its citizens’, mutual
and self-respect and the meeting of basic needs, it cannot expect that all
citizens will feel they have an equal stake in abiding by the law, and it
cannot dispense justice fairly and enhance confidence in the law.
(Cook, 2006: 21)
In this sense, criminal justice policy and social policy are intimately
connected. So, it is important to think about how changes in one area might
impact upon the other, like for example, policy decisions made in 2010 by
the coalition government in the United Kingdom as a part of the
Comprehensive Spending Review, to limit people’s access to state support
for housing, that as a consequence might render some people homeless and
expose them to criminal victimisation. You can undoubtedly think of other
ways in which social policy and crime might be connected.

EXERCISE

Make a list of the ways in which social policy and crime might be
connected and think about the following questions:

1. What kind of crime features in your list?

2. What kind of offenders would be targeted in your list?
3. Who might the victims be?
4. How might criminal justice policy be used to respond to the list you
have constructed?

Keep your list and when we come to discuss crime prevention, return to it
and examine the ways in which crime prevention policies match or fail to
match with the connections you have made.
The different understandings of justice outlined above become
particularly pertinent when we add them to the notion of the rational man of
law previously commented on. The observations made some time ago by
Kathy Kendall, a Canadian sociologist who now works in the United
Kingdom, illustrate one dilemma that debates on justice, when set alongside
the reasonable man of law, raises for feminists. She asks:

The question feminists face is whether justice for women is best

achieved through legal recognition of sexual difference (special
treatment) or by regarding sexual difference as largely irrelevant (equal
treatment).
(Kendall, 1991: 80)
Given the rational man of law principle then it is quite possible to ask the
same question that Kendall asks on behalf of women for the working class
man, or the man from an ethnic minority. If we put this question on behalf
of the working class, ethnic minority female, the question of whose justice
and what kind of justice might prevail becomes quite problematic. Thus, the
question of special treatment or equal treatment when overlaid with what
we might understand by justice, captured by the different definitions above,
and how that justice might be achieved is neither simple nor
straightforward. A key question arises: is justice about making sure
everyone experiences the due process of the criminal justice system in the
same way, or is justice about ensuring that like cases result in the same
outcome? What do you think?
It is possible to see elements of each of these principles of justice present
in many contemporary criminal justice systems. For example, consider the
amount of time and effort spent on high profile cases, like that of the serial
killer Harold Shipman discussed in Chapter 1. This time and effort taken
reflects a commitment to due process since the last thing any barrister wants
with this kind of case is for it to go to appeal on a ‘technicality’, that is, on
an issue relating to the defendant’s rights not having been adhered to. In
contrast, much of the work of the magistrate’s court or a lower court might
fit with the crime control perspective where there is little argument between
the prosecution and the defence when over 90% of defendants plead guilty.
Issues pertaining to ‘natural justice’ are not so easily identifiable but as
more and more people appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, and
the human rights legislations takes a deeper hold on the working of Western
criminal justice systems, it is likely that this perspective will have greater
importance. A social justice approach can be delineated in some of the
policies that are intended to keep young offenders out of prison, like for
example inter-agency work. Increasingly too, the ‘victim’ has been given a
greater voice in the justice process as more and more jurisdictions introduce
variations on victim impact statements. We shall consider the role of the
victim in the delivery of justice in greater detail later in this chapter.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS

In democratic societies, the practice of justice is the responsibility of the
different agencies which comprise the criminal justice system. Most
criminal justice systems comprise the following elements: police, an
independent prosecution system, courts, some kind of youth justice service
and probation service, and a prison system. These are all usually overseen
by some central government office with independent inspectorates to deal
with complaints and/or have other monitoring processes. Whatever
jurisdiction you live in you will be able to find information about the role
and aims of each of these component parts on their respective websites. For
the purposes of this chapter we shall focus on three issues that are pertinent
to understanding the workings of any criminal justice system: the
underlying principles on which they are based, the role of discretion as a
key feature of criminal justice delivery, and the space afforded to the victim
within different criminal justice systems.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE: UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES

Earlier in this chapter reference was made to the principle of adversarialism

as underpinning several Western criminal justice systems. This principle
captures the essence of these systems in which cases are won or lost on the
basis of the strength of the case made to the court. So in an adversarial
system the defence and the prosecution appear as opponents whose task it is
to present the evidence in any case and to cross-examine witnesses and their
testimony in such a way as to convince the judge and/or judge and jury of
the strength of their case. You will note here that this does not necessarily
equate with what actually happened in any particular case, or indeed the
truth of what transpired. In an adversarial system, the judge and/or judge
and jury need to be persuaded of the case being presented to them in order
to reach a decision on its outcome though the judge may intervene in this
process on points of law as necessary.
The United States and the United Kingdom share in the principle of
adversarialism. However, even here there are some important differences.
For example, the United States has a written constitution that guarantees all
of its citizens certain rights (like, for example, the right to arms) and each of
the states within the United States can make their own laws with their own
associated recommendations. This is exampled in the case of capital
punishment with not all states having this on the statute book, and those that
do, do not necessarily use the same kind of capital punishment. The role of
the victim in the criminal justice system can also vary from state to state.
However, subsequent to the 68 recommendations made by the President’s
Task Force on Victims of Crime in 1982, much has been put in place for the
victim of crime, with all 50 states of the United States having passed
victims’ rights laws. What these rights translate into in practice, however,
does vary from state to state. One area of common practice is in allowing
the victim to give evidence on the impact of a crime either as part of a
presentence report or at the point of sentencing with most states allowing
for both opportunities though with some leaving it to the discretion of the
judge. This role of the victim in criminal justice in this way is returned to
below.
Systems based on an inquisitorial procedure (as is the case in many
European countries with the exception of England and Wales) operate in a
different way. This procedure is characterised by pretrials, presided over by
a judge, whose role is to hear all the evidence from both the prosecution and
defence, and to decide at this stage whether there is sufficient evidence for a
case to proceed further. Witnesses and the accused can be heard at this stage
but they are not necessarily put under oath. Here the emphasis is on
deciding whether there is a case to be put before a court. There is no cross-
examination of witnesses and if there is a jury they do not have access to
the papers that the judge has access to.
The inquisitorial principle can be found in many of the criminal justice
systems in continental Europe. However, as in the United States, many of
these countries also have a federal system of government, which makes it
important to understand the relationship between the region or the locality
and central government before it is possible to appreciate how the criminal
justice system works. This is the case, for example, in France where in the
context of policing it is important to understand the different roles accorded
to the local gendarmerie as compared with the Police Nationale. There are
similar differences in Germany and Italy. These different systems also
afford a different role to the victim (or complainant) within criminal
proceedings as they can also permit the victim to present a civil claim
against their offender as part of the criminal proceedings. The extent to
which victims make use of this is, of course, a moot point. However, it does
lay down the potential for a different structural relationship between the
victim and the offender that is connected with the different principles on
which such criminal justice systems proceed. This can result in quite a
different experience of the criminal justice system especially for the victim
of crime. For example, they can, if they choose, be more involved in all the
proceedings, but perhaps more importantly they have a tendency to feel less
under scrutiny since the central purpose of the inquisitorial system is to find
out what happened in which the role of the victim has a different purpose.
So here we have two very different procedures for delivering justice. The
first is often seen as a game between the prosecution and defence with only
one winner and only loosely connected with what actually happened. This
can result in victims/witnesses feeling very much either intimidated and/or
neglected as a result. The second is much more concerned with whether
there is a case to answer and on the nature of the evidence in support of
that. This system affords a very different role for the victim/witness (and
indeed the offender) but relies much more on the quality of the inquisition
that takes place early in the process. Neither system is perfect. Both are
differently impacted by the role of discretion.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE: DISCRETION

All criminal justice professionals use their judgement in when or when not
to take action in any given situation. This is referred to as discretion. The
use of discretion occurs at every point of decision making within any
criminal justice system and criminologists are particularly interested in how
this is put into practice and the patterns associated with its use. In what
follows we shall consider the role of discretion in delivering criminal justice
in England and Wales but to reiterate again, discretion occurs in all criminal
justice systems and this should be borne in mind as you work through the
following discussion.
DISCRETION: THE POLICE
In order to understand police discretion it is important to have a clear
understanding of what the police are there to do. Brogden, Jefferson and
Walklate (1988: 1), all based in the United Kingdom, defined the role of the
police as a specific occupation with:

The mandate . . . upholding ‘law and order’. The powers to fulfil this
include a range of extra powers over and above those of citizens. And
 the form of accountability is accountability to the law, not to politicians
or more generally to the ‘democratic’ polity.
Thus, the police have a unique role. Whilst a range of organisations from
school teachers, to youth justice workers, to security guards operating in a
shopping mall, traffic wardens to police community safety officers and
special constables are all concerned with policing behaviour; it is only the
blue uniform police officer who has the mandate to uphold law and order
and who is accountable to the law in the way in which they do this. This
makes the work of the police both more subject to public scrutiny and more
likely to have an impact on those subjected to police action all at the same
time. (Those of you unsure as to the validity of this last statement might like
to consider whom they would complain to, and the likely effectiveness of
that complaint, if a security guard in a shopping mall behaved
inappropriately toward you.) The central feature of the combined effect of
the police mandate and their accountability to the law is to be found in the
concept of discretion.
Upholding law and order requires police officers to make judgements as
to whether the behaviour that is the object of their attention is either
criminal, or disorderly, or in some instances both. This process of making a
judgment implies discretion: making a decision in the light of the
circumstances presented to them and in the light of their understanding of
the law. All that a police officer needs to do is to ensure that any decision
that they make can be defended in law. Clearly the police do not (nor indeed
could they) enforce all of the law all of the time in all kinds of
circumstances. A police force that did this would truly be a police state. The
question arises, however, whether their use of discretion in applying the law
is applied fairly. that is, in line with some sense of justice. In recent years in
England and Wales this question has been raised most frequently in relation
to the police use of stop and search as a method of apprehending suspected
criminals especially in relation to people from ethnic minorities. (This issue
is returned to at the end of this chapter.)
Focusing on the police use of discretion directs attention much more to
their law enforcement role than their maintenance of order role. Yet it is
clear that the police are expected to work with both functions: enforce the
law and maintain order even though on occasion these two functions might
contradict one another. For example, enforcing the law in the context of
policing a public demonstration might incite the crowd to greater disorderly
behaviour, whilst the use of discretion, used with authority, might equally
diffuse crowd behaviour. In other words, there is always a balance to be
struck between these two functions. Nevertheless it is the case that
historically the police have implicitly taken on board the view that the
maintenance of order equates with dealing with unruly behaviour on the
streets; drunks, young people hanging about, prostitution, etc. Whilst
clearly in recent times the police function in relation to the maintenance of
order has concerned itself with such issues as domestic violence, its
historical focus of order maintenance from the 1830s to the present day
suggests that some groups of people are much more likely to find
themselves arrested, charged and taken to court. It is at this juncture that the
Crown Prosecution Service takes over.
DISCRETION: THE CROWN PROSECUTION SERVICE

Having been arrested and charged, the decision as to whether to proceed

with a prosecution is taken by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). This
organisation was established in 1985 and began its work in 1986. At the
head of this organisation is the Director of Public Prosecutions and the role
of the CPS is to conduct criminal prosecutions on behalf of the state. In
other words, the CPS makes decisions, either to prosecute or not prosecute
according to what it considers to be in the public interest.
The notion of the public interest points to another important area in
which discretion can play its part in the decision-making process. The CPS
decides whether proceedings are in the public interest and in so doing will
take account of a number of factors that focus attention on the costs of
proceedings: economic, social, and whether justice will be served as a
result. This can be quite a contentious issue but one of the key concerns is
to avoid frivolous or unnecessary proceedings. Prior to the establishment of
the CPS prosecutions had been conducted by the police; however, the
introduction of this system was intended to transfer the process of
prosecution to lawyers with no previous involvement in the case as a way of
trying to ensure a more impartial approach to prosecution. However, the
extent to which this has been achieved has been subject to some debate with
some evidence suggesting that the CPS remains on balance guided by the
police in its decision making.
DISCRETION: THE COURTS
Once the decision has been made to prosecute for an offence, the next stage
in the proceedings is for the defendant to appear in court. At the top of the
court system sits the House of Lords. This is the final place for appeals that
are considered to be in the wider public interest. For most criminal offences
there are two key levels in the court system; the magistrates’ court and the
crown court. It is important to remember that there are two important
features of the courts:

1. To prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that the accused committed the

offence of which they are charged.
2. The principle of adversarialism (as discussed above) to achieve this.
This does not necessarily equate with a search for evidence about what
actually happened or the ‘truth’.

These two principles often leave complainants and witnesses somewhat

confused by how they have been treated when they have appeared in court
particularly in the witness box. Yet it is important to remember that it is the
function of court proceedings (as articulated under adversarialism) to cast
doubt on all evidence brought before it in order for the argument to be won
or lost. In this process it is essential to cast ‘reasonable doubt’ on any
testimony or evidence brought before the court. (The reader might like to
think about what concept of justice is reflected in this process.)
In addition, these two courts deal with different kinds of offences.
Magistrates’ courts deal with less serious criminal offences referred to as
summary offences. Here most defendants plead guilty to the offence they
have been charged with and the magistrates (usually three of them more
often than not an ordinary member of the public) guided by the clerk to the
court will impose the appropriate penalty for the offence. (There are quite
detailed guidelines given to magistrates as to what kind of penalty is
appropriate for what kind of offence, though they do have discretion with
these guidelines.) Life becomes a little more complicated at crown court.
Here more serious offences referred to as indictable offences are heard
before a jury (although again here in the region of two-thirds of cases are
guilty pleas and heard by a judge only) and it is here that the adversarial
system comes into its own with both sides trying to convince the jury on the
merits of its case.
 So, whatever the offence or the court where the defendant appears, the
majority of people plead guilty. Indeed much of the work of the
professionals involved in the pretrial process is arguably geared toward
obtaining a confession or securing a guilty plea to a lesser offence (plea
bargaining), which means that much of the work of the court is concerned
with sentencing. In making decisions on sentencing the courts are guided by
three things:

1. Sentencing guidelines
2. Information about the offence
3. Information about the offender

Latterly a fourth factor has come into play:

4. Information about and from the victim

In England and Wales there has been some movement to give the victim of
crime a bigger voice in criminal justice proceedings. This has taken a
number of forms from the court having the option at its disposal to order the
offender to pay compensation directly to the victim, to the introduction of
the Victim Personal Statement Scheme (an opportunity for the victim’s
statement on what happened to them and the impact it has had to be
presented to the court), and the increasing popularity and development of
restorative justice as an option of disposal for the court. The extent to which
any of these developments with respect to the victim amount to anything
more than a symbolic reference to the victim is a moot point but they do
point to the increasing importance being given to the role of the victim in
the criminal justice process in England and Wales.
In conclusion, it is possible to say that discretion runs throughout the
criminal justice system. However it is important to note that this discretion
is not unfettered. It is subject to the law, rules, guidelines, and ultimately
public scrutiny, yet it is still an important part of the process. So, for
example, whilst for particular offences there are clear guidelines indicating
maximum and minimum levels of punishment, it still remains in the hands
of the court what particular sentence is imposed. Also, as was seen with the
CPS, not all cases are always proceeded with. The CPS may choose not to
take a case further because they decide that it is not in the public interest to
do so. The role that discretion plays within the criminal justice system is
important in keeping some flexibility in response to the circumstances of a
particular case and, in a liberal democracy, keeping the criminal justice
system cognisant of its role in delivering justice. However, criminologists
are particularly interested in how, through the cracks and crevices of
discretion, justice is dispensed and what kinds of patterns of decision
making can be identified.

Summary
Thus far we have discussed the key features of the criminal justice
system in England and Wales and highlighted some of the areas that
particularly attract criminological attention. What is of interest is the
extent to which those features repeat themselves, or do not repeat
themselves in other jurisdictions. Obviously in an introductory book of
this kind it is impossible to deal with other criminal justice systems in
great detail. However, it should be remembered that in any jurisdictions
the conditions under which the criminal justice system operates and the
kind of relationship that is presumed by the people party to that system,
are framed by:

• The presence or absence of constitutional rights,

• The relationship between federal governments and central
government and
• The respective powers that each of these have, along with
• The different political traditions that may exist in different
countries.

Taken together this means that whilst each jurisdiction will have similar
components (the police, the courts, a prosecution service, etc.) the
powers that these components have and how they relate to each other can
be very variable. In the light of this the reader might want to reflect upon
how these issues might inform the problem of comparison discussed in
Chapter 2.
Given the policy emphasis in England and Wales and elsewhere on
looking for ways to better integrate the victim of crime within the
 criminal justice system that emphasis will provide the lens through
which we shall look at the question of justice next.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND VICTIMS: THERAPEUTIC JUSTICE

Focusing attention on initiatives offering victims a voice in the criminal

justice system stems from a commitment that justice can be done better:
that is, justice can be more sensitively nuanced to take account of victims’
feelings. Focusing on the victim in this way needs to be understood against
the backcloth of what is referred to as ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’. Thinking
about the potential ways in which justice might be considered therapeutic
draws attention to the central role that emotions have within the criminal
justice process for all the parties involved. Indeed, recent policy agendas
across the globe have moved in the direction of affording the victim a voice
and this movement gels with thinking about the potential for justice to be
therapeutic. These moves are evidenced in two ways. First by the desire to
offer the victim an opportunity to voice the impact that a crime has had on
them: victim impact statements. Victim impact statements give victims an
opportunity to present their account of what happened: to tell their story
either during the evidence gathering process or as a part of the court
proceedings. Second by considering the ways in which opportunities might
be made available for offenders to offer an apology to victims and for the
victim to offer forgiveness to the offender: restorative justice. We shall
consider each of these developments in turn.
VICTIM IMPACT STATEMENTS

Many common law countries, that is, those informed by the principle of
adversarialism, have introduced the opportunity for the victim to provide
the court with information about the impact of their crime as a means of
participating in the criminal justice process. In England and Wales, this
takes the form of a victim personal statement. This statement can be taken
at the time of any offence and can form part of the papers associated with a
particular crime that are presented to the court. The purpose this scheme is
to offer an (optional) opportunity to the victim of crime to relate to all the
agencies of the criminal justice system how a crime has affected them, and
to provide the system with more information about that impact. Such
statements do not necessarily inform sentencing but can inform thinking
about compensation. In the United States, the majority of such schemes
require that the court take account of the impact of a crime on the victim in
setting the sentence with some states specifying the kind of information that
should be included in such a statement. Other rights included at the state
level in the United States cover such issues as the right to information, the
right to restitution, and the right to protection from the offender. Whilst
such rights may be on the statute books, there is still recognition that
ensuring compliance with those rights can be problematic. As a result, some
states have introduced the equivalent of a Crime Victims Ombudsman to
investigate complaints when these rights are not adhered to. Similarly, the
Code of Practice for Victims of Crime, published in October 2015, indicates
the range of entitlements that victims of crime can expect in England and
Wales. In particular, in the United Kingdom, victim impact statements in
cases of murder and manslaughter can be presented to the court. The
Victims’ Advocates Scheme offers the families of those bereaved in such
cases the opportunity to present a statement to the court outlining the
impact that that event had on them (a Family Impact Statement) once a
conviction has been secured for the crime and before sentencing has been
pronounced. Interestingly, in an initial evaluation of this scheme Sweeting,
and colleagues (2008) suggested that families welcomed these statements as
an opportunity to have their voice heard in court and also reported the
process to be therapeutic.
In the light of the discussion above, search any national newspaper
archive on the Internet for victim impact statements or family impact
statements for the past 12 months. (Many newspapers get permission to
publish these in full once a case has concluded.) When you have found and
perhaps read two of these, think about the following questions:

• What influence, if any, do you think these kinds of statements should

have on the decision making of the court?
• What other purpose might these statements serve?
• What do these kinds of policy developments have to say about justice?
What kind of justice is implied in their development? Is this achieved?
For whom?

What conclusion did you reach? One might be that justice can take many
forms and can be practised in many different ways. Justice is highly
contested and part of the interest for the criminologist is how this contest
plays itself out both in individual cases and in the case of social groups and
their experience of the criminal justice system. (The reader is invited to
remember the problems associated with crime data discussed in Chapter 3
and reflect upon how those issues might relate to the workings of the
criminal justice system at this point.) The exercise might have also led you
to think about the wide range of participants in the process of delivering
justice by both professional practitioners and individual citizens. They all
play their part in what we might think of justice. In particular, it might have
led you to think about what those presenting these statements (the victims)
might have got out of it. Were they therapeutic do you think? If so, how was
this manifested? Is this what the justice system is for?
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Restorative justice is often presented as victim-centred justice. This kind of

justice has developed at a remarkable pace despite that fact that the
evidence that what is actually meant by restorative justice is highly
contested. Restorative justice seems to have become a catch-all category for
a whole range of different policy initiatives that loosely involve the victim
and/or require the offender to make amends for their offence in some way.
In discussing restorative justice as a victim-centred approach, Braithwaite
(2002: 570), an Australian social scientist and a major proponent of
restorative justice, suggests five standards that need to be present for such
initiatives to be victim-centred: remorse over injustice, apology, censure of
the act, forgiveness of the person, and mercy. All of these demand
emotional work on the part of all participants including the victim. In
particular they demand understanding what might count as an apology and
what counts as forgiveness.

EXERCISE

Reread the victim impact statements that you found and see if you can find
any evidence within them that:

1. Responsibility had been admitted for what had happened,

2. There was any acknowledgement of the harm done or that what had
happened was wrong,
 3. There was any expression of regret or remorse for the harm done,
4. There was any offer to repair the harm or make amends,
5. There was any promise not to repeat the behaviour in the future.

All of the above are the kinds of things that might be present if there was an
apology forthcoming from the offender or if there was an offer of
forgiveness forthcoming from the victim. The presence and/or absence of
these features reveal much about the problems and possibilities for
restorative justice. Of course, the impact statements you have found might
be in relation to very serious cases including murder and there might be
particular problems for a family of a murder victim in either accepting an
apology or offering forgiveness. What do you think? Is restorative justice
only a possibility for relatively minor offences? For what kind of offences
might it work best? What might the issues look like in cases of domestic
violence, for example?
As these questions imply, claims made for restorative justice when put
into practice are neither simple nor straightforward in terms of achieving
the outcome looked for. In some ways restorative justice, its value for and
impact on victims, and even its conceptual armoury, have all suffered from
conflating the issue of improved satisfaction with the criminal justice
process as experienced by victims/witnesses with the desire to offer some
kind of emotional healing for the victim. In many ways we do not know
how and under what conditions restorative justice will be therapeutic, or
indeed, when it may well prove to be the opposite.
COMPLEX JUSTICE?

Hopefully this chapter has demonstrated the importance of understanding

some key features of how any particular criminal justice system operates
and the principles on which it may operate. It is particularly important to
consider:

1. What the key function of any particular criminal justice system might
be: crime control, due process, natural justice or social justice.
2. The central importance of discretion; where that is located, how it is
used, and who benefits or does not benefit from it.
3. That whilst all criminal justice systems might have similar component
parts, those parts are not necessarily connected in the same way and do
 not necessarily attribute the same importance to the same parties in the
process. This is especially the case in relation to the victim of crime.
4. Given these kinds of differences, it makes it very difficult for criminal
justice policy to travel from one jurisdiction to another. However,
those difficulties are not only technical ones of understanding how
different legal systems work they are also cultural ones to do with what
people expect the criminal justice system to deliver.

So this chapter has thus far introduced the reader to the nature of the
criminal justice system in different jurisdictions and to offer an insight into
its complexity. It is important to appreciate this since criminologists spend a
good deal of their time trying to understand who it is who comes to the
attention of the criminal justice system, what happens to them when they
do, and why what happens to them does so in the way that it does. All of
which connects with the question of what kind of a society do we think we
live in or want to live in. As the findings in Chapter 3 illustrated, some
people are much more likely to be subjected to the processes of the criminal
justice system than others and, as that chapter and Chapter 5 suggested,
there is a whole range of crimes that are never criminalised, never subjected
to the criminal justice process but may be subjected to other ‘regulatory’
agencies. However, discretion is an inherent and important part of the way
in which all criminal justice systems operate. If we put the concerns of this
chapter alongside those evidenced in Chapters 3 and 5, these features have
led to a considerable concern, in the United Kingdom in particular, that the
criminal justice system is ‘institutionally racist’. As a way of encouraging
the need for critical thinking highlighted in Chapter 1, it will be useful to
consider what this actually means in the light of what we have learned thus
far.
IS CRIMINAL JUSTICE ‘INSTITUTIONALLY RACIST’?

The charge of ‘institutional racism’ was made against the criminal justice
system in the United Kingdom by the Macpherson Report. This was
produced in the wake of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in London in
1993. The inquiry that followed the failure to secure a conviction for the
murder of this young black man resulted in the Macpherson Report. That
report concluded that a catalogue of compounding factors had contributed
to not only the death of Stephen Lawrence but also the failure to secure a
conviction for his murder. This end product the report attributed to
‘institutional racism’ that it defined as:

The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and

professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic
origin. It can be detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which
amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance,
thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority
ethnic groups.
(Macpherson Report, 1999: 321)

The publication of this report and its conclusions led many police forces in
England and Wales in particular to ‘declare’ their institutional racism and to
put in place procedures and practices to combat it. Whether these practices
have proved to be successful is not of concern here. Our concern is to
understand how and why such a conclusion was reached, given what we
have learned thus far about the nature of crime, offenders, victims (Chapter
3) and the complexity of the criminal justice system (this chapter). At this
juncture, it will be useful to review some of those findings.
Put simply, when we look at what we know about known offenders it is
possible to see that they include a higher proportion of males, young males,
black males, people from poor background, and people with disturbed
childhoods, than might be predicted from their presence in the general
population as a whole (Chapter 3). In other words, these kinds of people are
over-represented in the criminal justice system. In this chapter we have
concluded that the working of the criminal justice process is neither simple
nor straightforward. So it might be fair to add who eventually ends up being
a known offender is also neither simple nor straightforward. Indeed if we
wanted a criminological answer to this question we would need to trace
quite a large sample of people from all kinds of backgrounds (including
class, ethnicity, sex, culture, etc.) from the moment that they are stopped by
the police, through to the point at which they are dealt with at (crown)
court, and all the points in between, and compare what happened to them.
Such a study would be very difficult to mount and would require the
cooperation of a large number of people. A study similar to this was
conducted in the late 1980s by Tony Jefferson and Monica Walker, two
U.K. criminologists, who were then based at the University of Sheffield.
This study compared and contrasted the experiences of the criminal justice
system of young white youths, young Asian youths and young Afro-
Caribbean youths. One of its findings was that in areas that were
predominantly inhabited by white people, the young males from ethnic
minority groups were considered problematic and often targeted by the
police; and in areas that were predominantly inhabited by people from
ethnic minorities, the white youth were considered to be problematic and
often targeted by the police.
The readers might have their own hypotheses as to why this was their
finding; however, the study is mentioned here just to point up how complex
an issue like this can be. I have used it here to endorse the need for serious
empirical investigation of experiences of the whole criminal justice process
and its complexities. One conclusion might be that that one example (in this
case, the murder of Stephen Lawrence) neither proves nor disproves a
general rule. Form what we know thus far, the criminal justice system in
England and Wales could equally be charged with the ‘offence’ of
institutional sexism’ or ‘institutional classism’! The important issue being
that all of these ‘charges’ return us to the question of justice with which this
chapter began, but more importantly the question of whose justice.
Thinking about the question of ‘whose justice’, take a look at the
statistics presented in www.mappingpoliceviolence.org. As an example, that
website reports that 336 black people were killed by the police in the United
States in 2015. It goes on to offer a more detailed breakdown of the
circumstances associated with these deaths, their geographical location, the
presence/absence of weapons on the victim, whether anyone was called to
account. Several of these incidents precipitated widespread unrest in the
cities in which they occurred. Using your criminological imagination, think
about these statistics in the light of:

1. The discussion of ‘institutional racism’ above.

2. The statistics on who is most likely to come to the attention of any
criminal justice system.
3. Who is most likely to be called to account for their action.
4. What they imply about concepts of justice.
5. What role they imply for the victim or their family.
6. Whose justice prevails under in these kinds of events.
CONCLUSION

This chapter has been concerned with unpicking the complexity of the
criminal justice system within the framework of trying to develop what it is
that interests criminologists about it. Hopefully this has drawn attention to a
number of issues of criminological concern from how the criminal justice
system works, whether that works in a fair way, what the patterns of
decision making within the criminal justice system look like, and whether
anything can be learned from other jurisdictions with respect to those
practices. Moreover, some criminologists also concern themselves with the
professionals involved in the criminal justice system and how they do their
work. This has been especially the case with policing and prisons, for
example, though less so with the judiciary. In this last respect, there is still
much interesting work to be done. However, one of the over-riding
questions of criminological concern is: what works? What kind of policy
works for whom under what circumstances? This preoccupation with what
works also runs through the next chapter. This is concerned with crime
prevention.

EXERCISE

Explore the Internet to find out answers to the following questions about the
criminal justice system in your jurisdiction:

1. How many female police officers are there?

2. How many magistrates are female?
3. How many barristers are female?
4. How many senior judges are female?
5. How many prison officers are female?

In looking for answers to these questions you will undoubtedly uncover a

range of other statistics about who works within the criminal justice system
and at what level they are employed. In the light of the data you have
gathered, think about the following questions:
 1. In what ways, if at all, do you think this ratio of women to men in the
workforce within the criminal justice system might impact upon how
justice is delivered?
2. Will that impact look the same at all points in the criminal justice
system?
3. Given what we know about offending behaviour from Chapter 3, if this
pattern is put alongside the figures here, does that mean that crime is
men’s work?

FURTHER READING

A good general introduction to criminal justice systems is to be found in

Peter Joyce (2012) Criminal Justice (2/e) (London: Routledge). A very
user-friendly edited collection by Anthea Huckersby and Azrini Wahidin
(eds) (2013) is Criminal Justice (2/e) (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
This has an online resource centre associated with it. Indeed using the
Internet for access to information and up to date statistics about the various
agencies discussed here would be a fruitful exercise. For those of you
interested in the more general concept of justice, B. Hudson (2003) Justice
in the Risk Society (London: Sage) provides an excellent review and
critique of the debates, though it is fairly advanced reading so be warned!

OceanofPDF.com
8 CRIME PREVENTION AND THE FUTURE
OF CRIME CONTROL

This chapter will consider some issues relating to crime prevention. The
reader will recall that Chapter 1 placed a good deal of emphasis on
understanding and appreciating the nature of criminology as a ‘modern’
discipline. This emphasis stresses the link between the things that concern
criminology and criminologists and the desire to influence the way in which
society responds to social problems, in this case the social problem being
crime. Put more simply, criminologists do not just want to know about
crime, many of them also want to be involved in developing policies that
will help prevent crime. However, the link between knowing something
about crime and devising policies that will help prevent it is not always
simple or straightforward. In this chapter, we shall be exploring some of the
difficulties associated with policy formation. In so doing we shall be
revisiting the distinction that was made in earlier chapters between crimes
of the streets, crime behind closed doors and crimes of the suites.

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we shall consider the key trends in crime prevention that
have occurred over the last 30 years and we shall explore their links with
different strands of criminological thought. More importantly, however, this
chapter will be just as concerned with demonstrating what has been made
visible and invisible within these trends. In other words, the reader will be
asked to think about what kinds of crimes policy trends have paid attention
to and why. However, first of all, it is important to say something about
what is assumed by the idea of crime prevention.

WHAT DOES PREVENTION MEAN?

In general terms, ‘prevention’ is taken to be a ‘good thing’. Whether with
respect to health, poverty, or crime, prevention is assumed to be a good
thing because social problems are seen to be bad things. However, in any
context, understanding prevention involves two connected processes; being
able to predict the outcome of a chain of events, and then being able to
devise a way of intervening with, or altering that predicted outcome. Within
criminology crime prevention implies that we can identify the cause of
crime and on the basis of this devise policies that can stop crime from
happening. (For those of you who have managed to make it this far through
this book, you should already be aware of what a tall order this is!) The ever
changing nature of crime, and the ways in which it is committed, indicate
how complicated a relationship this may be. Nevertheless, policy makers
and politicians, sometimes informed by criminologists sometimes not,
spend a good deal of time being preoccupied with crime prevention. In
recent years, however, it has become more popular to talk of crime
reduction and/or community safety, or even the notion of resilient
communities. This change in terminology sends out the message that the
possibility of preventing crime is less likely than reducing it or managing it
better as a social problem, in order to make people feel better about crime.
The reader will undoubtedly make up his or her own mind on whether this
is likely to be the case.
As this chapter unfolds it will become clear that there are different ways
in which crime prevention is understood and subsequently acted upon. Ken
Pease (2002), an internationally recognised criminologist who has
frequently worked within the crime prevention area, argues that there are
three broad approaches to the cause of crime. We have used his terms
earlier in this book but to reiterate them here they are: psyche, opportunity
and structure. These terms all articulate different ways of thinking about
how to proceed with crime prevention (reduction).

• Those who think that crime is caused by the criminal mind (the
psyche) might opt for solutions that emphasise the importance of
deterrence or incapacitation.
• Those who adopt the view that circumstances lead to criminal
behaviour (opportunity) look for solutions in changing the social
and/or physical setting in which crime occurs.
 • The structural approach tends to adopt the position that crime
prevention can only be achieved if efforts are made to alleviate social
and economic inequalities.

So, even from this brief review, it can be seen that the relationship between
understanding the causes of crime and the kinds of policies that might flow
from that understanding can be very varied. Despite this variety, different
ways of thinking about this relationship have been popular at different
points in time, so before it is possible to discuss the viability or otherwise of
different policies, it will be useful to develop an overall picture of the trends
in crime prevention over the last 30 years and what has been learned from
them. Much of what follows is implicitly informed by the criminological
and policy question: what works?

TRENDS IN CRIME PREVENTION

Over recent times there have been five identifiable strategies deployed to
tackle crime each with a different focus on where the cause of crime lies.
These are not mutually exclusive strategies and frequently exist side by
side, but they have varied in their political popularity. These are:

• Offender centred strategies

• Victim centred strategies
• Environment centred strategies
• Community centred strategies
• Integration strategies

In this section we shall discuss some of the key themes within each of these.

OFFENDER-CENTRED STRATEGIES

As the label implies, crime prevention work under this heading focuses on
the individual offender as both the cause and the cure for crime. Under this
heading it is possible to situate all those initiatives that can be loosely
grouped together under the ‘prison works’ heading. The view that prison
works embraces the idea that prison acts as either a deterrent to crime or as
a means of incapacitating the offender. This view of the preventive role of
prison is most frequently associated with those who adopt a tough political
stance on law and order. This approach appeals to a wide range of people,
including some feminists who favour a tough stance on domestic violence,
for example. There is, of course, another view of the preventive role of the
prison, not focused on its deterrent role but its rehabilitative role. In this
view prison can provide rehabilitation for the offender through learning or
behavioural work with individual offenders. Offender-centred strategies
might also include the popularly labelled zero tolerance campaigns.
It is possible to trace two sources to the origin of zero tolerance: one
rooted in feminist campaigns on violence against women and one rooted in
the ‘broken windows’ thesis of two North American criminologists, Wilson
and Kelling (1982). Feminist campaigns carrying the zero tolerance label
originated in Canada in the aftermath of the murder of 14 female
engineering students in Montreal in 1989. Subsequently imported to
Edinburgh in 1992 and latterly other places, this version of zero tolerance
has a number of policy characteristics but is focused on violence against
women and children and has a strong punitive stance. No violence against
women and children is to be tolerated regardless of age, class, ethnicity or
ability. However, it is a view equally arguing that policies addressing
women’s and children’s needs across and between different agencies should
be coordinated alongside and backed by resources. Arguably these
campaigns have been quite successful in raising public awareness of the
problem of violence against women and children.
The ‘broken windows’ variant of zero tolerance addresses somewhat
different concerns and it is this version that has become particularly popular
with politicians. Wilson and Kelling (1982: 32) argued:

A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is

smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children,
emboldened become more rowdy. Families move out; unmarried adults
move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant
asks them to move, they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates.

This view of crime suggests that such behaviours make an area vulnerable
to crime, and if left unchecked, inevitably lead to urban and neighbourhood
decline. However, the empirical evidence in support of this thesis is
ambivalent. There does appear to be some relationship between what
Wilson and Kelling call ‘incivilities’ and the fear of crime but it is quite
difficult to map causal connections between what would now be called
antisocial behaviour, crime proper, and urban decline since a range of other
factors are also likely to come in to play. Like for example, the housing
market, demographic changes, the job market, local road building policies,
etc. All of these kinds of changes have their different and differential impact
on the rise and fall of particular localities. These issues notwithstanding,
Wilson and Kelling made the case that the police had a key role to play in
warding off further decline by policing disorder; the rowdy; the prostitutes;
those causing ‘trouble’. Though again there is little acknowledgment of
what happens when the disorderly are moved on; where, for example, are
disorderly people moved to? Whilst Young (1997) argued quite cogently
that this reflected a view of the ‘social as simple’ offering a ‘quick fix’ to
quite complex problems. Nonetheless, policing disorder via zero tolerance
has proved to be very popular.
There are a number of lessons for the budding criminologists to think
about here.

1. Not all criminological ideas are ‘soft’ on the offender. Think about the
implications of the punitive stance of feminism and the disorder focus
for policing from Wilson and Kelling.
2. Support for policies is often based on a partial reading of the evidence,
and neither a criminologist nor anyone else has any power to influence
that reading.
3. Reasoned critiques of policies can be frequently ignored.
4. The political will to move policies in one direction rather than another
can sometimes override what might be considered reasonable.
5. Policies sometimes take on a life of their own regardless of the
evidence that may or may not support their implementation.
6. There is very little criminology, per se, in support of zero tolerance
policies yet they have consistently secured popular support.
7. None of the above necessarily means that zero tolerance policies will
not work anywhere but no one really knows where, when and how
they might work because of 1–6 above.
However, there is another view of crime prevention that focuses on the
offender that is sociological in orientation rather than psychological. This
kind of offender-centred approach is found in the work of the youth justice
system and social work that can be very focused on getting young offenders
especially to make amends for their offence. This is seen as a way of getting
them to understand the impact that their offence has on their victim and/or
the community. Here we shall discuss this version of offender-centred
strategies under the fifth heading of ‘integration’ since this focus derives
from the important impact that restorative justice has had in more recent
years on criminal justice systems in different jurisdictions.
So offender focused work can take different forms, however, it should be
remembered that some societies embrace the ‘prison works’ view much
more readily than others. So it is important to situate the prominence, or
otherwise, of any particular strategy within the wider social context in
which it is placed. Our next heading takes the victim as the focus of policy
intervention.

VICTIM-CENTRED STRATEGIES

It might seem a little odd to talk of victim-centred crime prevention

strategies but the heading is intended to capture the increasing attention that
has been paid to the victim of crime over the last 30 years, not only in terms
of the impact of crime but also in terms of how the support of the victim
might be harnessed in relation to crime prevention. Under this heading it is
possible to situate all of that victim avoidance advice with which we have
all become very familiar. For example, next time you pass your local police
station or public library, take the time to look at the range of crime
prevention leaflets available and ask yourself the following questions:

• Who do they suggest is responsible for crime?

• Who do they suggest might help prevent crime?
• What kind of crime are they concerned with?
• What kind of prevention strategies do they suggest?

Chances are you will have come across leaflets ranging from mobile phone
theft, to burglary to keeping safe at night, to cybercrime. Many of these
leaflets are directed at the ordinary member of the public and what they can
do to prevent crime happening to them. It is in this sense that they are
victim-centred; directing our attention to victimisation avoidance. The
increasing attention that has been paid to the way in which everyday
behaviour affords opportunities for criminal behaviour is part of what David
Garland (2001), a criminological theorist from the United Kingdom, has
called the ‘responsibilisation thesis’; that is the ever widening web of
individuals and organisations involved in sharing the responsibility for
crime prevention.
It might be worth just stopping to think for a moment about the kinds of
crimes that might be more susceptible to prevention as a result of
victimization avoidance. Think about the distinction used in this book
between crimes of the streets, crimes behind closed doors, and crimes of the
suites. In which, if any of these domains, would victimization avoidance
make sense? Now think about specific crimes under each of these general
headings: how might victimization avoidance strategies address

• Online fraud
• Bag snatching
• Rape

What might be problematic in making the victim responsible for these

different kinds of crimes? Does where such crime occurs make a difference
to these problems? (On the streets, behind closed doors, in the suites?) What
kind of explanation of crime do these kinds of strategies reflect? (It might
be worth revisiting Chapter 4 here.)
The focus on what it is that members of the public do to make crime
easier or harder to commit and trying to encourage the public to reduce the
opportunities available for such criminal behaviour has links with our third
crime prevention strategy: environment centred.

ENVIRONMENT-CENTRED STRATEGIES

This approach to crime prevention focuses on the offence rather than the
offender. It has two strands to it; those policies concerned with target
hardening and those concerned with what is referred to as ‘designing out
crime’. Again target hardening is something with which we are now very
familiar: fitting steering wheel locks to cars, window locks on properties,
introducing chip and pin credit cards, and security measures at airports are
all good examples of target hardening. Designing out crime looks for ways
in which housing estates and/or individual buildings can be better designed
in order to either increase means of surveillance and/or reduce those areas
for which no one feels responsible. In some respects closed circuit
television systems straddle both of these strands offering a technical fix in
terms of increased surveillance to target both crime and disorderly
behaviour. Indeed it would be rare to find a shopping centre or a car park
now that did not have a CCTV system in place. Yet despite the popularity of
CCTV, what is actually achieved is still subject to some considerable
debate.
Think back to where we started with this chapter and in particular the
idea that in order to prevent something you needed to have a fairly clear
idea of what caused it in the first place. And whilst the presence of CCTV
might have an impact in the particular location where it is installed, there is
no reason to think that this means that crime or disorderly behaviour has
been reduced or eliminated since the crimes or behaviours might be
committed somewhere else. Criminologists refer to this as the problem of
displacement. There are four different kinds of potential displacement as a
result of increased surveillance like CCTV.

1. Temporal – Crime is committed at a different time.

2. Spatial – Crime is committed in a different place.
3. Tactical – Crime is committed in a different way.
4. Target – Different kinds of crime are committed.

So whilst CCTV offers an increasingly attractive and popular technical fix

for crime, and we are all increasingly tolerant of the ever-present cameras, it
does not necessarily impact upon crime itself other than possibly in the very
localised area in which it is situated. Given the problem of displacement
presented above, the reader might like to think about what kinds of crimes
are targeted by CCTV and what kinds of crimes are not. You might also like
to reflect upon the extent to which the problem of displacement also applies
to zero-tolerance policies. Our next crime prevention trend focuses on a
different kind of surveillance, not that of technology but that of the
community.
COMMUNITY-CENTRED STRATEGIES

There are five ways in which the community can be harnessed in the
interests of crime prevention:

1. The introduction of neighbourhood watch schemes

2. Multi agency cooperation
3. A policy focus on community safety
4. A wider concern with partnerships
5. Building resilience in communities

Much of what we have discussed under the previous two headings

constitute situational crime prevention; that is, they look to manipulate the
specific dynamics of particular situations in order to render them less crime
friendly. Community-centred strategies can be generally understood as
social crime prevention strategies. As such they are looking to manipulate
the underlying structural dynamics that make some areas/communities more
crime friendly. However, as with situational crime prevention strategies,
social ones reflect a range of problematic assumptions. However, before
these are considered it will be useful to develop an appreciation of the five
types of community-oriented policy listed above.
NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH SCHEMES

Neighbourhood Watch Schemes, popular both in the United Kingdom and

the United States, aim to harness members of the community as the eyes
and ears of the police with two objectives in mind. The first objective is to
increase the kind of surveillance that routinely takes place within
communities. In other words, heighten the kind of watching and noticing
that frequently occurs within localities with a view to encouraging people to
report any suspicious behaviour that such activities generate to the police.
The second objective lies in the hope that increased surveillance of the kind
just described will also result in an increase of social cohesion in
communities so that people will themselves feel able to challenge behaviour
that is problematic for them.
MULTI-AGENCY COOPERATION
Multi-agency cooperation, as the title implies, starts from the premise that
crime prevention is not the sole responsibility of the police but should be
shared by all the agencies whose task it is to work within any particular
community. So attention is focused on how the police, social services,
youth justice and education might work together within a particular locality
to tackle the crime problems that an area has. Contemporarily such multi-
agency cooperation is probably taken as routine practise in most
jurisdictions with respect to questions of child abuse and increasingly in
relation to domestic violence. Whether it works is another issue.
COMMUNITY SAFETY
A policy focus on community safety shares some of the same rationale as
multi-agency cooperation but is more likely to start by finding out what
people who live in a particular locality think the problems are in their area
and develop policies accordingly. This is sometimes referred to as a ‘bottom
up’ approach as distinct from the ‘top down’ approach of multi-agency
cooperation. As the label itself implies in using the term ‘safety’, there is
the potential for community safety strategies to operate with a much
broader agenda than that of criminal behaviour as defined by the law and
are just as concerned to get members of the community involved in working
in the interests of their community as they are to involve the ‘professionals’.
Put very simply, community safety could be viewed as a mixture of the
ideas of neighbourhood watch with multi-agency cooperation.
PARTNERSHIPS
The idea of partnership takes the notion of harnessing the community one
stage further by both broadening and deepening the range of groups
encouraged to take responsibility for crime prevention in a particular
locality. In the United Kingdom, the especial inclusion of local authorities
in taking responsibility for crime prevention affords an opportunity for the
clear and more direct involvement of those who are locally and
democratically elected to have a say in how to tackle local problems as does
the inclusion of the business community. So in a sense the idea of
partnership working builds incrementally on the other three ideas discussed
above.
BUILDING RESILIENCE IN COMMUNITIES

This strand to community crime prevention or social crime prevention

arguably constitutes a complex mix of all of the other strategies outlined
above. What makes it worth a separate comment is:
 1. It starts from the presumption that some communities are in deficit in
terms of resilience. In other words, they lack the sense of belonging,
identity, what American researchers might call collective efficacy, to
respond to and manage their own problems. Consequently, strategies
need to be imported to assist them.
2. The notion of building resilience in communities has come to the
forefront of policies designed with community intervention in mind as
preoccupations with terrorism, particularly what is referred to as
‘home-grown’ terrorism, has risen up political and policy agendas.

We shall revisit this feature of community-centred crime prevention

strategies when we take a closer look at the structural dimensions to crime
prevention discussed below.
Each of these community-centred themes are characterised by a differing
emphasis on different kinds of crime. For example, neighbour watch is
largely associated with burglary, multi-agency cooperation with child abuse,
community safety with safe spaces, partnerships with domestic violence
and/or hate crime, and resilience with terrorism. They are themes that also
have a different kind of influence in different countries. Most countries
seem to have embraced some form of multi-agency cooperation, for
example, with neighbourhood watch being favoured in the United Kingdom
and the United States with partnership now working a legal requirement in
the United Kingdom on some issues. However, underpinning them all is a
key question: what is understood by community?
Think about the following questions; make a note of your answers, then
compare what you have said with the issues discussed below.

1. What do you understand by community?

2. What might comprise a virtual community?
3. Do you live in, or belong to, a community?
4. Write down what makes you think that either you live in a community
or belong to a virtual community, or that you do not.
5. What other groups of people do you think live in your community or
might have a virtual existence?
6. Who is included and excluded from this list?
7. If you were to make a list of the things that people think are a problem
in your community what would that list look like, what would you do
 about those problems, and whose help would you ask for in order the
solve those problems? Would this list look the same for a virtual
community?

If you have tried to answer the questions above you may have got a sense of
how difficult it is to define what a community is and then go on to design a
crime prevention policy that might work in a community, virtual or
otherwise. Quite some time ago, Peter Wilmott (1987), a British sociologist,
commented that community was a ‘seductive’ word. Rather like prevention
discussed at the beginning of this chapter, community carries with it all
kinds of positive connotations, but what it actually means is a little more
problematic. Wilmott (1987) offers three ways in which people use the term
community: to refer to an area (territorial meaning); to refer to things that
people have in common (an interest group meaning); to refer to a sense of
belonging (an attachment meaning). (In your own notes you may find traces
of all of these meanings including within virtual communities, that is, those
people you only know through the Internet.) In criminology, it is possible to
find other ways of thinking about community, for example, as disorganised
(see the discussion of sociological positivism in Chapter 1); as
disadvantaged (as localities in which the means to achieve the goals of
society are not available); and as frightened (as localities in which the fear
of crime is greater than the problem of crime itself).
So it can be seen that whilst the notion of community conjures all kinds
of ‘feel good’ factors associated with sense of place, identity, family ties, or
neighbourliness, when it comes to translating these ‘feel good’ factors into
policy not only is it difficult, it is a process that involves differentiating
those ‘communities’ in need of intervention and those that do not (hence,
the criminological use of terms like disorganised, disadvantaged or
frightened). Moreover, some would argue that in contemporary times
communities are characterised by quite different factors than the ones listed
above. Jock Young (2001), for example, suggests that communities are now
so ‘de-territorialised’ and no longer rooted in face-to-face interaction, they
are increasingly characterised by fragmentation, separation, and short-term
relationships rather than a sense of place or neighbourliness. Indeed,
communities may exist in quite different forms with different senses of
belonging, like Internet chat rooms, for example, as your own notes from
the exercise above may well illustrate.
 This brief discussion highlights how complicated the idea of community
can be and therefore how difficult it might be to formulate policies that
might work within any particular community. It also highlights a further
range of questions that are worth thinking about:

1. If the policy concern is with social crime prevention, for what kind of
community and in what way?
2. If the concern is to intervene in some communities, are some of them
pathologised (made different and problematic); if so, why are they, and
are they blamed or not, for the problems they have?
3. Are all communities comprised of the citizens who all have the same
personal and economic resources, free of intimidation, to put policies
into effect? (Think about the kinds of localities where being the ‘eyes
and ears’ of the police might be problematic and where it might not
be).
4. What is the relationship between local authorities and national
authorities in providing for communities with problems, and how
might this be managed?

The third and fourth questions listed above encourage us to think about at
least two other questions. The first encourages us to think about the more
general question of how different societies work with a different
relationship between the citizen and the state. For example, fairly recent
research from France, Germany, and Italy suggests that not only does
community carry with it different meanings in those societies, they also
operate with different assumptions about who is responsible for what at the
local level, at a regional level, and at the level of the state. Indeed, there is
some evidence to suggest that the state has retained more responsibility for
social problems in those societies than has been the case in the United
Kingdom. Understanding these differences might interest a criminologist
trying to understand what might work or not work in the United Kingdom,
for example. The second question encourages us to think about whether all
members of a community have the same economic, social, and personal
resources to participate in community life and as a consequence participate
in crime prevention initiatives. This reintroduces the importance of
understanding power relationships in our thinking about crime prevention.
This is a question that we shall return to shortly. Our final trend in crime
prevention has been labelled integration strategies.

INTEGRATION STRATEGIES

Integration strategies largely derive from the work of John Braithwaite

(whose facts about crime were discussed in Chapter 4) and take the form of
seeking ways to reintegrate the offender back into the community usually
with the involvement of the victim in some way. These strategies are
popularly termed restorative justice. What is actually meant by restorative
justice, however, is not very clear. It seems to be quite an elastic idea with
two features. First, restorative justice looks to ways of bringing the victim
and offender together so that the victim might better understand what has
happened to them and have a say in what happens to the offender. Second, it
looks to ways to ensure that the offender can appreciate the impact of their
behaviour, be encouraged to make amends, and hopefully behave
differently in the future. The criminological legacy of this policy, found in
the work of John Braithwaite and others in Australia, is concerned with
developing ways of ‘shaming’ the offender, and through working with them,
and the people that their behaviour had had an impact on (whether that be
an individual or the wider community), find ways to reintegrate them into
the community. All kinds of initiatives that endeavour to bring the victim
and the offender together now carry the label ‘restorative’ and this
popularity is echoed in developments in the United States, Australia, and
New Zealand.
However, despite the international recognition given to this work, we are
only just beginning to develop some awareness of what Daly (2002) has
called the ‘real story’ of restorative justice (RJ). She offers a detailed
discussion of the myths of RJ. One of which is that it is normally assumed
that RJ is a ‘soft’ option. However, perhaps there are more fundamental
problems associated with RJ than the myths that surround it. One of which
lies in the following two questions: how is it possible to know that an
offender is truly sorry for what they have done and how is it possible to
know that a victim has truly forgiven them? These are empirical questions
around which there has been a great deal of energy spent by criminologists
and on which that evidence is generally ambivalent. (Though, it should be
noted that such difficulties notwithstanding, the move toward RJ,
constituted as part of therapeutic justice discussed in Chapter 7, has
continued unabated.) A further fundamental problem lies in whether
policies conceived and developed in one part of the world can travel
effectively to another.
The question of how criminal justice policies travel, and the question of
policy implementation are pursued in the conclusion of this book since each
are important in understanding what criminology is about. For now it will
be of value to return to an appreciation of what is hidden by these trends in
crime prevention discussed thus far.

STRUCTURAL DIMENSIONS TO CRIME PREVENTION:

CRIME OF THE STREETS, CRIME OF THE SUITES, AND
CRIME BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

The above heading is a fairly simplistic way of trying to capture the full
range and diversity of the contexts in which criminal behaviour, and
consequently criminal victimisation, is likely to occur. However, hidden
within it is a strong message about not only the diverse nature of crime but
also about the relative visibility/invisibility of different crimes and their
presence and/or absence in thinking about crime prevention. Traditionally,
much activity in relation to crime prevention has been focused on the
crimes that people see and know about (crimes of the streets). In more
recent years, increasing attention has been focused on that crime that people
see less of and often know less about: crime behind closed doors (think
particularly about child abuse, domestic violence, or abuse of the elderly).
Even less attention, in crime prevention terms especially, is paid to the kind
of criminal activity multinational business corporations might engage in
(crimes of the suites).
In this chapter we have thus far paid attention to the different
developments in thinking about crime and crime prevention that have
fuelled different policy initiatives in different countries without paying too
much attention to the question of what kind of crime these policies have
assumed to be problematic. For the most part, it is perhaps fair to say that
those policies have frequently worked with the idea that street crime,
burglary and car crime are problematic for people and have focused their
attention in this way. Indeed, it is fair to say that for the victim of such
crimes, this is certainly the case. However, within that activity, especially in
the development of multiagency and partnership working (where it has to
be said there has always been a concern with child abuse) different foci of
activity have developed. These developments have tried to address issues
relating to the less obvious types of criminal activity like domestic violence
and/or racially motivated crimes. These we might loosely think of as
‘crimes behind closed doors’ so it will be useful to think about the kinds of
issues that thinking about these kinds of crimes raises for crime prevention
policy.

CRIMES BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: COMMUNITY,

GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND CRIME PREVENTION

In the discussion on community above, the question was raised as to

whether all members of any particular community share in the same
economic power or have the same personal resources to participate in
community life including crime prevention. In your own thinking about
community you may also have concluded that communities are made up of
different groups whose sociostructural position means that they participate
differently in their locality. For example, think about the position of young
unemployed people in your community as compared with those who have
worked all their life and are now retired. These differences, in relation to
age and employability, put them in different positions in relation to their
community. The same argument can also be made along the lines of gender
and ethnicity. In this section then we shall consider what kind of crime
prevention activity has tried to take these kinds of structural positions into
account.

GENDER AND CRIME PREVENTION

Thinking about the gendered potential of crime prevention can lead to

thinking about a number of different kinds of crimes. Rape especially
comes to mind where much advice is directed toward the different ways in
which women can keep themselves safe from rape. For example, not
walking home alone, taking a registered taxi service, or preferably a female
only taxi service, not accepting drinks from people you do not know very
well, etc. All of which can sound either rather patronising or common sense
or, if you think a little more deeply, rather misses the point since the
majority of rapes occur between people who know each other. Nevertheless,
much crime prevention advice with respect to rape takes this form. You
might want to reflect on who is included and excluded from this kind of
advice. Think about how such advice might look if the focus were men as
victims of sexual assault.
The questions this raises in terms of crime prevention are returned to
below; however, another crime in which there has been some crime
prevention related activity in recent years has directed attention toward the
issues of domestic violence. Women working both within and outside of the
feminist movement have made strenuous efforts since the 1960s to make
people more aware of the kinds of violence perpetrated for the most part by
men on their female partners. However, it has only been over the last 20
years or so that that campaigning work has been taken on board and
recognised as an issue requiring more than the intervention of feminist
informed volunteers.
Some issues relating to the nature and extent of domestic violence were
discussed a little in Chapter 3. Needless to say that far from being an
abnormal crime it is for some people the normal and routine experience of
their everyday lives. What follows is a quote from a British researcher,
Hazel Genn, who was involved in the research that informed the
establishment of the British Crime Survey and she has this to say about
some people’s experience of crime.

I . . . eventually moved in for a short period with the woman who had
suffered the greatest number of victimisations in our survey . . . the
events reported to us in the survey were not regarded as particularly
remarkable. They were just part of life.
(Genn, 1988: 92–93)

The idea that criminal victimisation is ‘just part of life’ is a very powerful
one in coming to terms with understanding some peoples’ experiences of
crime in general and women’s experiences of domestic violence in
particular. The same observation might also be made of racially motivated
crime. (Indeed this is an issue that we shall return to at the end of this
section.) However, policy responses in this area have been largely informed
by developments in North America, where based on research by two
American criminologists, Berk and Sherman published in 1984, much was
made of the case for arresting the offender. Moreover, despite follow-up
findings published by Sherman and his colleagues in 1991 indicating that
the case for arrest was not proven, crime prevention policy in the United
Kingdom embraced what came to be called this ‘pro-arrest stance’. (In the
terms of the discussion here, an offender-centred approach.) Since that time,
responses to domestic violence, and the priority given to it as a crime, have
been endorsed through the establishment of Multi-Agency Risk Assessment
Conferences (resonant with the multiagency working commented on above)
and the establishment of Independent Domestic Violence Advisors. Both
initiatives work with the ‘at risk’ victim to try to devise ways of keeping her
safe. The question is, do these kinds of initiatives constitute an effective
crime prevention response?
It is important to remember that this chapter started by pointing out that
in order to prevent crime it was necessary both to know its cause and to
know what might impact upon that cause. At this point the reader might like
to reread this chapter and think about the following questions.

1. How would you classify the emphasis in the policy response to

domestic violence as outlined above; offender-centred, victim-centred,
community-centred, environment-centred, or integration-centred?
(Remember, any particular policy might contain elements of all these
or none of them.)
2. Having classified this policy response, what do you think are the
strengths and weaknesses of its approach?
3. Again, having classified this policy response, what policy elements are
missing from it? Might they be important? What about men?
4. Do you think that this kind of approach is likely to impact on the
nature and extent of domestic violence? (You might like to think about
the implications of the quote taken from Genn and cited above in order
to develop an answer to this question.) Make a list of the reasons why
you think it might and, why you think it might not, work.

Hopefully what the questions above have led you to think about are the
range of issues relating to the crime of domestic violence and how to tackle
it. Indeed, you may have thought about a number of things including who is
the object of these policies, is their behaviour likely to change as a result of
interventions of this kind, like, for example, being arrested. You might even
have reached back to Chapter 4 and reflected on the various explanations
for crime and their relevance for domestic violence. Put simply, the
evidence suggests that in cases of domestic violence (and rape with which
this discussion began), the perpetrators are male and the victims are female.
So, one of the questions to be tackled might be, if we are serious about
addressing these kinds of crimes preventatively, how might it be possible to
address male behaviour? Would this be a truly gendered crime prevention
policy?

ETHNICITY AND CRIME PREVENTION

The general complaint frequently made by members of ethnic minority

communities whether in the United Kingdom, United States or other
countries in Europe is that they are over-policed and under-policed all at the
same time. Put simply, this means that in their view they suffer
disproportionately from too much attention from the criminal justice
authorities when it comes to the question of crime, but when they are the
victims of crime they suffer disproportionately from too little attention from
those same authorities. Chapter 7 covered some of the issues in relation to
this complaint, but for the purposes of the discussion here it is important to
consider, as with the case of gender, whether the experience of people from
ethnic minorities is similar to other sections of society who might make the
same complaint (like those communities of predominantly poor,
unemployed, white people) or whether some of their experiences are
qualitatively different. It is possible to draw different conclusions to this
question but it is important to consider at least two areas in which the
experiences of people from ethnic minorities might be qualitatively
different and therefore carry different implications for crime prevention
policy. These are ‘hate’ crime and current policy responses to terrorism.
The potential significance of both ‘hate’ crime and responses to terrorism
lies within thinking about the ‘lived reality’ of people from ethnic
minorities in a similar way as the Genn quote above talks about the lived
reality of living with violence for women. It is important to remember that
for many ethnic minority people their routine daily life is constituted by
racial harassment to such an extent that it becomes their normal experience.
Basia Spalek (2006) working in the United Kingdom, refers to this as ‘spirit
injury’. Despite efforts made from different criminal justice agencies and
the law to recognise such ‘racial’ incidents, the question remains, how do
you tackle/prevent what has become normal for people?
A further issue for ethnic minority people lies with their experiences of
the criminal justice system itself as an institution. Since the murder of
Stephen Lawrence in the United Kingdom in 1993, much has been made of
the issue of ‘institutional racism’ within that jurisdiction: the question of the
‘collective failure’ of an organisation to provide an appropriate service to all
members of a community. This issue has provoked much debate within the
United Kingdom (as was discussed in Chapter 7) since it is clearly the case
that such embedded racism must permeate all institutions not just the
criminal justice ones. Thus, the crime prevention question that might flow
from this kind of awareness is neither simple nor straightforward. However,
this awareness does ask us to think very carefully about whether crime
prevention looks the same for all sections of a community.

Summary
So thinking about ‘crime behind closed doors’ or perhaps more generally,
that kind of crime that tends to be less visible, raises all sorts of questions
about crime prevention policy, what kinds of crimes it is intended to
effect, and how it might work, as well as by implication, all kinds of
questions about what is meant by community and community safety.
Indeed, whether the idea of community safety means the same thing to
all sections of a community. As a result, the reader might like to think
about the following questions:

1. When people talk about community safety, whose community and

whose version of safety is being invoked?
2. Do those terms mean the same for all members of a community?
3. What other dimensions to a community (in addition to gender and
ethnicity) might make a difference to the kind of crime prevention
policy that is prioritised?
4. Finally, in thinking about ‘difference’ that the previous discussion
has encouraged, are we in danger of exaggerating the differences
 between people and ignoring the similarities in what people expect
from their routine daily lives? What might those similarities look
like?

There is, however, one further structural dimension to thinking about

community, crime and crime prevention that the previous discussion does
not make very obvious. That structural dimension raises again the
question of ‘crime of the suites’.

STRUCTURAL DIMENSIONS TO COMMUNITY CRIME

PREVENTION: CRIME OF THE SUITES

As has been indicated elsewhere in the book, crimes of the suites, all the
kind of crime that might be associated with the world of business, whether
that be the local builder taking a cash-in-hand payment to ensure the early
completion of a job or ‘insider dealing’ of the stock market, receive much
less attention from criminologists, politicians and policy makers.
Nevertheless this is an area of crime and criminal activity that carries
‘costs’ even if those costs are frequently hidden from view. What such costs
look like is not of concern here, but what is of concern is the hidden nature
of this kind of crime, and given its hidden nature whether crime prevention
policy could impinge upon it.
In an interesting and novel consideration of the development of crime
reduction programmes emanating from the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act in
England and Wales, Whyte (2004b), a British criminologist, conducted a
survey of the nature and content of those crime reduction strategies in the
Northwest of England. His study revealed the top target issues for the 26
crime and disorder partnerships in that region replicated, almost exactly, the
Home Office’s list of priorities in a part of the country where there is a
recognised problem with other kinds of transgressions. For example, Whyte
reports that in that same area:

• The Environment Agency instituted 98 prosecutions in 2001–2002;

one for flood defence offences, one for industrial process offences, two
for radioactive substance offences, 62 for waste offences, and 32 for
water quality offences.
 • In that same region there is one of the most heavily concentrated sites
of chemical production in Western Europe where just two plants
release about 40% of all the factory produced cancer-causing chemical
in the United Kingdom into the air every year.

Whyte’s argument is that there is no logical reason why activities such as

these should not be incorporated into local crime and disorder partnership
agendas, and yet, despite their actual and potential impact on local
communities, they are not. Given what you have read in this chapter and the
previous chapter about this kind of crime, you might like to think about
why this is the case. In particular, think about:

• What is and is not recognised as crime?

• Who is and who is not recognised as a criminal offender?
• What is the role of the victim in these circumstances?
• Why do locally constructed agendas take the form that they do?
• Who and what is included and excluded from these agendas?
• What messages do these agendas convey about concepts of
partnership, community and safety?
• What role, if any, might the media play in all of this?

CRIME PREVENTION: FROM THE LOCAL TO THE

GLOBAL

The discussion above might have led you to think critically about the
problem of crime as it is conceived by the crime prevention agenda outlined
above. It is evident that much of this agenda understands the problem of
crime as a ‘local’ problem. Local here can be taken to mean within a
community, within a household, within a business or within a nation state.
Indeed much of the crime that occurs in all of these settings from hate crime
to fraud committed by and/or against business corporations does concern
people and therefore paying attention to how it might be best responded to
(prevented) is justified. However, it is also evident in the contemporary
world that people’s concerns about crime transcend these local agendas.
They are global. We shall discuss the questions posed for contemporary
criminology by the processes of globalisation in more detail in the
Conclusion. Nevertheless, in the context of crime prevention, some
recognition must be given to the ways in which ease of international travel
on the one hand but perhaps more pertinently the nature of global
communications, particularly through the Internet, on the other, raise all
kinds of sticky questions for a crime prevention agenda. This leads
inevitably into a consideration of what is now commonly referred to as
cybercrime.
Cybercrime includes any crime or criminal activity that uses a computer
or the Internet in the commission of crime. Given the growth in access to
the Internet and use of computers in everyday life, this kind of criminal
activity now permeates all aspects of social life. Indeed, for the first time in
2015 the Office of National Statistics (www.ons.gov.uk) included
cybercrime in its overall assessment of the extent of crime resulting in a
reported 107% increase in the amount of crime being measured. So
cybercrime includes a wide range of criminal behaviour from ‘grooming’
(using Internet chat rooms as a conduit to meeting, particularly underage
children, for the purposes of sexual activity); ‘trolling’ (harassment); the
distribution and sharing of illegal pornographic material (which might also
include ‘revenge porn’), computer hacking, financial fraud, identity theft,
the disclosure of documents considered a threat to national security
(‘whistle-blowing’ as perhaps in the case of Edward Snowden), to engaging
in activities considered preparatory to terrorism. The list is very long
indeed! Moreover, because of the inherent global context in which all of
this activity comes into being, the offender and the victim could be living
next door to one another or could be on different continents. The crime
could be personally damaging (as in trolling) or could be damaging to the
nation state (as in the case of whistle-blowing). The crime prevention
challenge for cybercrime is therefore substantial. How might such an
agenda be put together?
Think about the following kinds of cybercrime. Explore what kind of
information there is available about each of them from the different sources
of data referred to in Chapter 3. What will your answers to the questions
that follow look like?

• Identity theft
• ‘Grooming’ in an Internet chat room
• Engaging in activities preparatory to terrorism
 1. What kind of crime prevention strategy could you use in each of these
examples?

• Offender-centred, victim-centred, or community-centred?

• Which of these strategies would work best? Would you need some
element of all of them? What shape and form might these strategies
take?
• In choosing your strategy, what are you saying about the cause of these
different kinds of crime? (Think back to our earlier use of psyche,
opportunity and structure.)

2. How organised are these different kinds of crimes? Does this matter?
3. Does the Internet make some kinds of activities easier than others?
Does ‘victim-responsiveness’ account for these kinds of crimes?
(Think back to our discussion of this concept in Chapter 5.)

It will have undoubtedly taken you some time to work through all of the
issues above. However, in doing so, hopefully the complex challenges
posed for crime prevention policy in this area will have become apparent, as
will have the tricky questions posed for criminology’s capacity to take
account of globalisation.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has been concerned with offering an understanding of the ways
in which different thinking about crime links with different policy agendas
and to encourage some critical thinking about those links and the kinds of
agendas that are constructed. It is important to remember that the chapter
started with a fairly simple framework for making sense of the links with
which we have been concerned. Using the labels offered by Pease (2002), if
you think the psyche is the cause of crime then you will think of some way
of dealing with the offender, if you think that circumstance results in crime
you will try to reduce those opportunities; if you think that structure is the
cause of the problem, then you might focus on a deeper understanding of
the nature of social structure and longer-term strategies designed to impact
upon that. Throughout, the concern is with the question: What works? How
might the nature and extent of crime be reduced? Despite the difficulties
associated with putting together an answer to this question, whether that is
offered in relation to psyche, circumstance or structure, it is nevertheless
one that still drives the crime prevention/reduction agenda and still drives
much criminology.

EXERCISE

Think about the following scenario.

Your next door neighbour, whom you did not know very well, apart
from their name, has recently moved to new accommodation. Several
months after they have moved you get a telephone call from a detective
in a police force elsewhere in the country asking your name, address,
and for your activities in relation to securing a loan. During the course
of the conversation, it becomes apparent to you and the detective that it
was not you who secured the loan but the recent neighbour. They had
used your name and address to secure a loan (on which they had
defaulted) during the course of which other fraudulent activities had
taken place using your name. The detective thanks you for your
assistance in this matter and asks you to contact them should any further
information about the neighbour come to light.

How might this kind of criminal activity be prevented?

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

The literature on crime prevention is now quite vast but a sound analysis of
recent developments in crime prevention is provided by G. Hughes (1998)
Understanding Crime Prevention (Buckingham: Open University Press).
Karen Evans (2010) offers a useful and critical introduction in her book,
Crime Prevention (London: Sage). Some of the dimensions to crime
prevention touched upon in this chapter are more fully developed in G.
Hughes, E. McLaughlin, and J. Muncie (2002) Crime Prevention and
Community Safety (London: Sage). This offers a much more advanced
theoretical and political analysis of developments in crime prevention and
so is really for the more committed reader but this book does offer some
useful comparative material. A sound overview of ‘Crime prevention and
community safety’ is offered by Adam Crawford and Karen Evans, in M.
Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of
Criminology (2012 5/e) (Oxford: Oxford University Press) though this
again might be for the more serious reader. In any event, thinking critically
about any crime prevention leaflets and other material you come across is a
good exercise for any potential criminologists to engage in.

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9 DEVELOPING YOUR CRIMINOLOGICAL
IMAGINATION

INTRODUCTION

Hopefully what you have read thus far in this book has made you sensitive
to the diversity and range of criminological interests. It should have also
made you aware of the differences between media and common sense
images of crime, the criminal and the victim, as compared with
criminological understandings of these issues. As was said in Chapter 1,
criminology as a discipline is peopled by a wide variety of individuals from
a wide variety of academic backgrounds tied together by their common
interest in crime. However, this interest in crime is not only an academic
one. It is also an interest in crime as a social problem. In other words (again
as you will remember from Chapter 1), the discipline is also concerned with
looking for ways of not only understanding the nature and impact of this
social problem but also for ways of alleviating it. Hence, the links between
what it is that criminologists study and do, and the question of criminal
justice policy. By way of conclusion this chapter will explore the changing
nature of those links in the light of the questions posed for the discipline by
the process of globalization. First of all, it will be valuable to offer a few
comments on the growth and development of criminology itself over the
last 25 years.

GROWTH IN CRIME? GROWTH IN CRIMINOLOGY?

Those of you reading this book as a way of finding out whether you wish to
study criminology further may be surprised to discover that in the United
Kingdom 30 years ago there were no undergraduate courses in criminology,
though post-graduate training was available. Moreover at that time the
biggest employer of criminologists in the United Kingdom was the Home
Office. A brief look at undergraduate university courses now would reveal a
very different picture. The first undergraduate course in criminology related
subjects was launched at the University of Northumbria in the late 1980s
and since that time such courses teamed with subjects like law, sociology,
psychology, and cultural studies have blossomed. In addition, of course,
during that time in England and Wales there was considerable growth in the
kinds of jobs for which a criminology related qualification might be deemed
appropriate. This is particularly the case in the areas of youth justice and
community safety. Indeed the job title of ‘Community Safety Officer’ did
not exist 30 years ago! All of these developments may or may not be related
to the changing nature of the crime problem. Indeed some of them have
become especially acute at a time when the officially recorded rate of crime
appears to be in decline. (Hopefully, by now the reader knows how
problematic statements of the previous kind can prove to be!) Nevertheless
crime, as a subject of study, as a subject for media viewing, and as an
opportunity for many different kinds of employment seems to be a
significant feature in contemporary life. It is useful to reflect upon these
developments.

CRIMINOLOGY, CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY AND

GLOBAL TRENDS

As was suggested in Chapter 1, criminology traditionally has had, if not a

close, at least an informed relationship with criminal justice policy. Much of
the early research work conducted by Lombroso and others, for example,
was specific in the impact that they had in changing attitudes and practices
toward offenders. However, in more recent years, and arguably particularly
over the last 30 years, that relationship has become rather more complex.
This, in part, is connected to the way in which issues around ‘law and
order’ have become far more central to the political process and have
featured in more important ways in securing the election of governments
especially in the United Kingdom. Some of this has become particularly
acute in Western societies as the threat from terrorism has risen up political
agendas though this is not the only factor that has made crime a central
feature of these agendas. The processes of globalization, as alluded to in
Chapter 8, have had an impact on the shape and form of crime and its
impact and had encouraged governments to think beyond national
boundaries when thinking about crime.
Newburn (2007: 868–869) reminds us that globalization has a number of
key features. These are:

• Instantaneous communication (crucial here is the role of the Internet)

including the ability to communicate in ‘real’ time
• The speed of technological development
• The growth and extensive influence of multinational corporations
• The move toward a global free market
• Increased movement of people

Against this backcloth national governments have looked to other

jurisdictions for ways of managing all kinds of social problems (including
crime). In the context of the United Kingdom this has meant more often
than not looking to the United States for appropriate policy interventions.
In considering the question of how criminal justice policies travel, Jones
and Newburn (2002) offer an interesting critical analysis of the extent to
which this is practically possible. Using a conceptual framework on policy
designed to distinguish between the policy process and policy levels, they
present a convincing argument of the need for more detailed studies of how
criminal justice policy takes its shape, especially when borrowing ideas
from other jurisdictions. Using the example of zero tolerance policing, they
conclude that the policy process is not a linear one. It is also necessary to
understand the complex interplay between content (which bits of the policy
are being addressed), substance (how it is put into practice in reality), style
(an appreciation of cultural context) and rhetoric (the difference between
what politicians may be claiming to take place and what is actually taking
place). Using this analysis they conclude that ‘. . . zero tolerance policing
has barely been copied at all in the U.K.’ (ibid. 195). To this conceptual
framework I would also add the importance of understanding the policy
network (see inter alia Ryan, Savage and Wall, 2001) and the impact of
particular policy champions. Both of these features of travelling policies
alongside the opportunity given to particular policy voices have been
especially prescient in the arena of policies directed toward the victim of
crime.
 At this juncture you might want to take a moment to reflect upon how
some of the issues alluded to above might apply to:

• Restorative justice
• Victim impact statements
• ‘Three strikes and you’re out’ approaches to punishing offenders
• Zero tolerance approaches to domestic violence
• Megan’s Law (informing local communities when a sex offender is
released into their community)

All of the above are examples of policies that have ‘travelled’ from one
jurisdiction to another. What questions does this process raise for you? (You
may want to think back to some of the issues discussed in relation to the
importance of comparative work within criminology in formulating your
questions.) In particular, you might want to reflect on the following:

1. How, if at all, do criminal justice policies travel?

2. Can criminologists apply the same kinds of understandings from one
place to another to policies that have travelled?
3. Can criminologists use the same ways of researching problems and
policies in different places?
4. What importance, if any, should be given to national and/or
international politics in these processes?
5. What importance, if any, should be given to questions of culture in
these processes?

Lying behind the drive to look to other jurisdictions for different/better

ways of responding to crime has been the rise of what Feeley and Simon
(1994) called actuarial justice. This refers to ways of managing the crime
problem in ways similar to those adopted by the world of business:
economy, efficiency and value for money. It puts in the foreground the
concept of risk. This is a concept that has become embedded within the
criminological endeavour as the discipline has grown so it will be useful to
examine what that looks like.

CRIMINOLOGY AND RISK

‘Risk oriented thinking’ has become central to the criminal justice system,
in areas such as crime prevention, offender behaviour, victim protection,
policing, and debates on imprisonment. Pat O’Malley (2010), an Australian
social scientist, charts the influence of risk on criminology as both a macro
form of structural regulation and a micro form of self-management, in how
people are categorized, ordered and regulated. You only need to reflect
upon how debates around immigration, asylum, policing, detention,
sentencing, probation, and human rights are formed to become very aware
of how they are shaped by understandings of risk. Think for example about
the perceived risks associated with global terrorism that now affect all of us
who want to, or need to, travel by plane. The tightening of security
processes is a very good example of how structural regulation (what
governments and the airport authorities consider to be risky) impacts upon
self-management (what you are and are not allowed to take on to an
airplane), and the inter-relationship between the two.
Risk of course is a widely expansive concept and is differently
interpreted by different social theorists and for the purposes of this
conclusion we need not be too concerned about the similarities and
differences between these different theoretical positions. However, it is
important to recognise that risk and risk assessment, informed either by
asking questions about what was in order to make decisions about the future
(a feature of parole decisions for prisoners, for example), or by asking the
question ‘what if’ based on information about what might happen in the
future, are powerful influences within the discipline of criminology and for
criminal justice practitioners. Indeed the operationalisation of risk – what
counts as risky behaviour and who is perceived to be risky – are very
central questions in the delivery of actuarial justice. Moreover, it should be
remembered that this focus on risk and riskiness takes its toll in different
ways. In the example above (travelling by air), it could be argued that the
present day preoccupation with global terrorism has taken its toll in the
same way on all those people who choose to travel in this way. Yet if we
take a closer look at how the question of risk (against the backcloth of
global terrorism) has been operationalised in more local contexts, then it
can be seen that these practices take their toll on particular groups in
society. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that even in different societies
these groups share in similar characteristics. In Western societies they
comprise ethnic minority Muslim groups in particular.
 So, in responding to the changing socioeconomic conditions in a wider
global context, the concept of risk has become a central feature of much
criminological work and practice. Similarly, as the processes of
globalization have changed, the nature of the crime problem to be faced
(from terrorism discussed here to cybercrime discussed in Chapter 8), so the
nature of what constitutes risk in terms of crime has changed even though
those most likely to be targeted as problematic consequent to these changes
remain remarkably the same. These developments provide an interesting
conundrum for the aspiring criminologist: is it the risks of globalization that
we should be concerned about or is it the globalization of risk? Here we
have focused attention on the first of these rather than the second. It will be
worth reflecting upon the discipline itself that might be implicated in the
globalization of risk and what that might entail.

CRIMINOLOGY AND WESTO-CENTRIC THINKING

Throughout this book, unsurprisingly, the author has drawn upon fairly
conventional and well-regarded approaches to criminology in order to
introduce the reader to the shape and form of the discipline. However, much
of that work, if not all of it, emanated from the Anglo-speaking world, and
within that the dominance of work emanating from the United States is
apparent. Given that the major growth areas for criminology are in China
and Southeast Asia and South America, the question must be asked: is there
a risk here for the discipline? If there is, what might that risk look like? Put
more simply, do the ideas and theories generated within the United States fit
in other quite different cultural contexts? How might they be influencing
the kind of criminology developing in those parts of the world and is that
influence rational and/or reasonable? In an impassioned critique of the
dominance of American criminology, Jock Young (2011) has talked of the
‘bogus of positivism’. Given that this book started with an appreciation of
positivism, both biological and sociological, his critique is worth
considering in a little more detail.
In this, his last book, Young (2011) offers a thorough going critique of
what he understands as scientific criminology. He invites us to reconsider
the relevance for the discipline of the seminal work of C. Wright Mills and
his observations on the dangers of abstracted empiricism: being
preoccupied with counting without necessarily being able to assign any
meaning to what is being counted. (At this point the reader might want to
revisit the discussion on the relations between meaning and explanation in
Chapter 4.) In Young’s view, the dangers of abstracted empiricism have
been ignored in criminology and have resulted in a discipline tainted by the
‘bogus of positivism’. The ‘bogus of positivism’ is characterised by an
obsession with numbers: counting crimes, statistical correlations about
crime, estimating the risk of crime, and so on. For him, this kind of
criminology has a strong presence in the United States and that presence
and influence is found elsewhere, especially in China, and Southeast Asia,
and as such takes its toll on what counts as criminology. Perhaps more
importantly for Young, this version of criminology rests on a number of
faulty assumptions about the nature of social reality, and the capacity for
number to capture that reality. In particular, as Young (2011: 73) expresses
it, a key faulty assumption lies in ‘the momothetic impulse [that] is at the
heart of positivism: the search for generalizability which is independent of
nation or locality’. In other words, this version of criminology smooths out
culture and difference. It assumes that the general statistical findings
associated with this version of criminology are applicable across the globe.
Herein is the risk of globalization for the discipline. What do you think?

CRIMINOLOGY AND INTERSECTIONALITY

Almost following on from Young’s (2011) preoccupation with the ‘bogus of

positivism’ there have been developments within the discipline reflecting
different tendencies yet also simultaneously challenging the dominance of
positivism. These challenges focus attention on the search for specific
understandings of what propels people into crime or impacts upon their
experiences as victims, or their practice as criminal justice professionals.
These tendencies draw attention to the ways in which not one variable, but
a range of different variables may differently intersect and impact upon how
it is possible to make sense of criminal and criminalising events. This is
referred to as intersectionality and has its origins in qualitative feminist
informed work rather than the ‘abstracted empiricism’ that Young felt
characterised much North American criminology. As Messerschmidt (1997:
113) observed:
 Gender, race and class are not absolutes and are not equally significant
in every social setting where crime is realised. That is, depending in the
social setting, accountability to certain categories is more salient that
accountability to other categories.

Observations like these mean that as criminologists it is important that we

are aware of not only masculinities and femininities (something that was
commented on in Chapter 4) but how and under what conditions gender
may interact with ‘blackness’, ‘brownness’, or ‘whiteness’, alongside class
and sexuality, for example. As Hillary Potter (2015) points out, taking the
different and differential ways in which these variables interact with one
another both in terms of professional practice and experience of criminal
justice, both disrupt and revolutionise how criminology is done. This
agenda puts to the fore the tensions between which knowledge is general
and universal and which knowledge is specific and relative and under what
conditions. You may recall our discussion of different understandings of
justice discussed in Chapter 7 and that we have also referred to the work of
Alasdair McIntyre. His view, that there are many rationalities and so many
justices, gels well with the questions raised by intersectionality for
criminology. Such issues pose a real challenge for a discipline born under
the umbrella of positivism and its associated search for universal
explanation.

CONCLUSION

As can be seen, many of the contemporary problems that are emergent

within criminology in some ways transcend the problem of crime itself but
their existence serves to illustrate the vibrancy and debate within the
discipline as well as its variety of approach both in theory and in subject
matter. So the discipline continues to grow and develop despite what some
might see to be its inherent weakness of being a ‘rendezvous’ subject. It is
within that meeting place that there is challenge and diversity that exists not
only at an academic level but also at the level of politics and policy. If this
book has given you a taste for the challenge, diversity, and difficulties
associated with the discipline, then it has succeeded in one of its aims. If it
has encouraged you to think more critically and carefully about common
sense and media presentations of crime, then it has succeeded in another of
its aims. If it has also broadened your understanding of not only the
discipline of criminology but also what counts and does not count as crime,
then it has succeeded in another of its aims. What you now do with all of
this is up to you!

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER READING

A short and very useful book on crime and risk is written by Pat O’Malley
and was published in 2010 in the Sage Compact Criminology Series
(London: Sage). If you want to take your understanding of criminology
further, then it will be useful to have The Sage Dictionary of Criminology
(2006 2/e) as a companion. It has useful definitions and key terms along
with evaluations by experts in the field that will be invaluable if you decide
to study the discipline further. For those particularly interested in some of
the issues raised in this chapter, then consider reading Jock Young’s (2011)
The Criminological Imagination (Cambridge: Polity). In addition, Hillary
Potter’s (2015) book, Intersectionality and Criminology (London:
Routledge) is a challenging and provocative read for the brave hearted. The
range of introductory textbooks designed for the first-year student of
criminology is vast with many of them offering a very similar diet of
material to consider. Your pocket might help you decide which if any of
these you purchase. Good luck!

OceanofPDF.com
GLOSSARY OF TERMS

There is a clear danger in offering a glossary of terms in a book of this kind

that one fails to do service to the terms themselves or simply replicate what
is available elsewhere. The reader is advised to use The Sage Dictionary of
Criminology as the first bus stop in any of your investigations of the terms
and ideas used in this book. It is also advisable to use the recommended
further reading at the end of each of the chapters here and the recommended
further reading in The Sage Dictionary to help further your ideas and
understanding.
The terms that appear here are the ones that have not been fully defined
in the text.

Abstracted empiricism Centring data in the absence of understanding what

it might mean.
Access to justice The difference between those who can afford to pay for
barristers and so on and those who cannot.
Actuarial justice Decision making made on the basis of risk assessment.
Adversarial system A way of describing the process whereby cases are
won or lost in the criminal justice system of England and Wales.
Atavism A throwback to an earlier stage of biological development.
Attrition rate The process whereby offenders and victims are ‘lost’ as
cases go through the criminal justice process.
Biological positivism A search for the cause of criminal behaviour that can
be measured in biological differences.
Bounded rationality A recognition that criminal rationality is limited by
the information they have available to them and therefore is not perfect.
Classical criminology A way of thinking about crime that gives the
individual free will and the ability to make rational decisions.
Comparative criminology Criminology that is concerned with what can be
learned from comparing the response of different societies to crime.
Concentric zone theory A way of thinking about cities in terms of ever
larger circles radiating outward from the city centre.
Control balance theory Associated with the work of Tittle, it is a view that
recognises both too much and too little control may result in criminal
behaviour.
Crime reduction Policies intended to make the crime problem more
manageable.
Crime science A commitment to seeking technical, design, and opportunity
reduction solutions to the problem of crime.
Criminal Other This depicts who is normally included and excluded from
criminological attention.
Criminal victimisation survey Data gathering from a general sample of
the population designed to measure their experiences of crime.
Cybercrime Crime committed using the Internet or a computer.
Dark figure of crime The amount of crime that does not come to the
attention of anyone.
Determinism Those variables that impact on behaviour but are beyond our
control
Differentiation The things that mark the differences between individuals or
groups.
Discretion The gap between what the law says can and cannot be done and
what is actually done.
Evolutionary psychology An approach to understanding human behaviour
that connects psychological development with evolutionary (biological)
development.
Gender The differences between men and women that are socially
constructed.
Genocide The systematic extermination of an ethnic minority group or
nation.
Indirect victimisation The impact that crime has on those not directly
involved in the particular event concerned.
Inquisitorial system A way of describing a criminal justice process that is
concerned with establishing what happened and whether there is a case to
answer.
Intersectionality A focus on the ways in which different features of an
individual’s biography differently interact in explaining their experiences
 of crime, being a victim of crime, or working as a criminal justice
professional.
Justice gap The difference between offences recorded and securing a
conviction for the offence.
Left realism A way of thinking about the problem of crime that emerged in
the United Kingdom during the 1980s in order to reclaim the law and
order debate from right wing politics.
Moral panic Responding to an event out of all proportion with its
importance and/or impact.
Pathology Abnormality.
Patriarchy A concept employed by (radical) feminists to emphasise the
structure of male power over women.
Pre-crime Crime that has not yet happened but might.
Primary victimisation The impact of crime on the victim.
Proportionality A principle of sentencing concerned to ensure that the
punishment fits the crime.
Responsibilisation The widespread way in which ordinary citizens have
been made to take increasing responsibility for crime and the response to
crime.
Restorative justice A view of justice rooted in the belief of the need to
reintegrate the offender into society through involvement of the victim.
Right realism Largely emanating from the United States during the 1980s,
this label refers to a collection of theoretical and policy concerns which
centre the cause of crime within the individual.
Secondary victimisation The way in which contact with the criminal
justice system may exacerbate already existing feelings of victimisation.
Situational crime prevention Used in relation to crime prevention policy
that emphasises the opportunity basis of crime.
Social disorganisation Associated with the Chicago School of sociology
during the 1920s and 1930s, this concept was used to describe the kinds
of adaptations people made to their environment at a time of rapid social
change.
Social crime prevention Used in relation to crime prevention policy that
emphasises the social cause of crime.
Sociological positivism Locating the cause of individual behaviour within
the measurable pattern of differences that could be observed across social
 groups.
Survivor A term used by feminists to capture the way in which women
resist and overcome their oppression by men.
Victim responsiveness The willingness, conscious or otherwise, to be
victimised.
Victim culpability The extent to which the victim can be held responsible
for what has happened to them.
Victim precipitation A focus on what is was that the victim did that
resulted in their victimisation.
Victim proneness The idea that some people or groups of people are more
likely to be victims than others.
Victimological Other The way in which victimology makes some groups
of people more likely to be included as victims rather than others.
Victimology The study of victimisation.
Vulnerability A way of emphasising that the impact of crime is likely to be
greater on some people than others.
Zemiology An approach focusing on harm rather than just crime.
Zero tolerance A proactive strategy designed to eliminate targeted crime.
Zone of transition That part of the city contemporarily referred to as the
inner city.

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INDEX

9/11 terrorist attack 141

abstracted empiricism 205, 209

Abu Ghraib 71–2, 142
access to justice 209
accounting crime 125, 127
actuarial justice 203, 209
adversarialism 159, 163
adversarial justice system 116, 148, 154–5, 209
age fallacy 58
age of offenders and victims 58, 107, 121
Allen, J. 67
Alvarez, Alex 120
Amir, M. 16, 18
animal rights activism 142
anti-social behaviour 176
anti-terrorism legislation 203
atavism 9, 11, 209
attachment 86
attrition 34, 38, 49–51, 210
Australia 18, 39, 67, 148, 203; restorative justice initiatives 186

Bacon, Sir Francis 8

Becker, Howard 55
beliefs 86
Berk, R. A. 189
Bhopal disaster (1984) 70–1, 134
biogenetics 9
biological positivism 9–12, 210
Boba, R. L. 57
bogus of positivism 205
Bonger, Willem 129
Borgia, Lucretia 21
born criminal 9
bounded rationality 210
Box, S. 124, 133, 134
Braithwaite, John 96; ideas on restorative justice 164–5, 185–6; thirteen
facts about crime 78–9, 91–2
Britain. See England and Wales; United Kingdom (UK)
British Crime Survey (BCS) 17, 60–1, 67, 89, 189
British Society of Criminology 52
British Transport Police 33
Brogden, M. 157
‘broken windows’ thesis 175
Brown, B. 93
Bundy, Ted 24
Burgess, Ernest 13
burglary 58; crime prevention policies 187; impact of 114; recording
statistics of 34; victims of 117
Bush, George W. 144
business corporations. See corporate crime
business life and white-collar crime 70, 126, 128
Byrd, James 119

Cameron, D. 26
Canada: court system 148; feminist campaigns for zero tolerance 175;
official crime statistics 34, 39
capitalism and white-collar crime 129, 137, 138
capital punishment: in past centuries 48; in USA 149, 155
car crime prevention policies 187
Carrabine, Eamonn 106
CCTV (closed circuit television) 179–80
Chambliss, W. J. 137
Chesney-Lind, M. 106
Chicago School of Sociology 12–14
child abuse 66, 69, 181
China 204, 205
Christie, Nils 105, 106, 135
Clark, R. V. 81
class: and criminality 14, 168–9; in Marxist view of causes of crime 137;
and offending rates 79; and social context 89; and victimisation 107–8
classical criminology 80, 210
classism and UK criminal justice system 169
Code of Practice for Victims of Crime 163
Cohen, L. 83
Cohen, Stan 55–6
Coleman, C. 6, 24
commercial crime 125
commitment 86
common sense idea of crime 59, 74, 77, 91, 100, 105, 123
community: belong to real or virtual 98; building resilience 182–5; crime
prevention strategies centred on 174, 180–1
community safety 179, 181–2, 192
comparative criminology 210
comparative research 49
Comprehensive Spending Review 152
computer hacking 29, 195
Comte, Auguste 8, 12
concentric zone theory 13, 210
Connell, G. W. 94, 95
conscience and criminality 10
constabulary fallacy 58–9
constitutional rights, USA 161
continuum of terrorism 142
control balance theory 87–8, 210
Cook, Dee 152
Cornish, D. 81
corporate crime 96, 115, 116, 124
corporate fraud 125
Council of Europe 34
court system 154, 159–61
credit card crime prevention strategies 179
crime: cause 7, 173–4, 189–90; definitions and determining elements 3–6;
different theories informing policies 76, 77–8, 88; displacement 179–80;
and human rights 5; impact on victim 104, 114–16, 121, 162–4, 177;
maleness of 93, 94, 95; offences not criminalised 124, 167; picture
presented by official statistics 38; question of how much 54–5, 59–60;
recognising, reporting and recording crime 35–38; risk from and impact
of 115; as a social problem 172, 200; state 96–7; typology of 138;
understandings of 5; visible and invisible 41, 46–7, 51, 173
Crime and Disorder Act 1998, 33, 37, 193
Crime and Everyday Life (Felson) 57
Crime and Human Nature (Wilson and Herrnstein) 10
crime control 150, 151
Crime in the United States (CIUS) 34
crime prevention 64; critical thinking on policy agenda 184–5, 194–5;
policies on domestic violence 189–90; and rational choice theory 81–2;
relationship with criminology 7, 172–3; structural dimensions 173–4,
187–8, 193–4; trends 174–87
crime rates: appearance of decline 200; increases 79; problems of
comparison 47–9, 62
crime reduction 193, 196, 210; local policies 33; by zero tolerance policy
175
crimes behind closed doors 60, 65–70, 73, 101, 110, 172; crime prevention
strategies 188–93
crime scene investigators (CSI) 2
crime science 84–5, 210
crimes of accommodations and resistance 138
crimes of domination 138
crimes of globalisation 125, 126
crimes of the streets 60–5, 101, 123, 172; crime prevention activity 174;
England and Wales 60–4
crimes of the suites 60, 70–4, 96, 118–20, 123, 125–7; and criminology
136–41; structural dimensions 193–4; victimisation aspect 133–6
crime trends 37
Crime Victims Ombudsman 163
criminal behaviour: issues of definition 35; motivation viewed in social
contrast 83; recognising, reporting and recording 35–8
criminal damage 37–8, 58
criminality/criminals: biological explanation 9–11; Felson’s fallacies 57–9;
Marxist view 136, 137; popular media images 2; sociology of 14
criminal justice system: awareness only of reported crimes 35–6, 65;
complexity of 166–7; contemporary relationship with criminology 200;
context of justice and punishment 148, 150; different principles of justice
149–52; failure to recognise crimes of the powerful 134; importance of
understanding 147–8, 154–6; key components 154–62; maleness of
professions 94; and the media 51; problems of attrition and discretion 34,
38; role of victims 16–17, 104, 116–17, 155–6, 165–6
Criminal Other 10, 11, 210
criminal statistics. See also official criminal statistics: Chicago School
project 13; Reiman’s challenge to conventional thinking 124; USA
murder rate 169
criminal victimisation statistics 38–9, 49–50, 67, 83, 104, 108, 115; and
measuring fear of crime 42; problems regarding respondent 39–41
criminal victimisation surveys 17, 40, 210
Criminological Other 11–12, 14, 20, 27–9, 87, 92
criminological theory 41, 77
criminologists 2–3; and crime of the suites 73, 74; definitions of crime 3–6;
interest in terrorism 142–3; interest in victims of crime 106; involvement
in crime prevention 172–4; monitoring changes in criminal justice system
116; popular media images 2; problems of comparison 47–9, 64;
relationship with crime prevention 169–70; relevance of the British
Crime Survey 60; research findings 32, 41, 59; restorative justice policies
186; victimisation surveys 40, 42, 49–50
criminology: comparative research 49, 55; compared to crime science 84–5;
and crimes of the suites 140–1; dealing with white-collar crime 136–40;
diversity of interests within 27, 199; feminist influence 19; growth and
development 200, 207; historical development 8–14, 48; influence of
 positivism 8–9; and intersectionality 205–6; issue of invisible crime 46–
7; as modern academic discipline 1–2, 6–7, 27–8, 51, 76, 95, 140, 199,
200; multidisciplinary nature of 3; research knowledge 32, 41, 55, 206;
and risk 202–3; and Westo-centric thinking 204–5; zero tolerance policy
201–2
critical criminology 139–40
critical thinking 207; about maleness of crime 93; about media images 55,
56, 74; criminological research 43–4; criminology as academic discipline
27–8; developments in Marxist theory 137; policy agenda for crime
prevention 196–7
Croall, Hazel 125–6, 129, 130, 132
Crown Court 159, 160
Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) 158–9, 161
cultural criminology 56, 97–100, 123
cultural victimology 120–1
culture. See also popular culture: and understanding crime 14, 48–9, 202
culture of fear 143
Customs and Excise 33
cybercrime 81, 195, 210

Dafur 96
Daly, K. 186
dark figure of crime 33, 38, 41, 65, 210
Darwin, Charles 9, 11
data/information sources 32–34, 41, 51–2
Davies, P. 46, 72
Denmark 121
designing out crime 179
detective stories 2, 57
determinism 9, 10, 210
deterrence: and crime prevention 81, 174; and punishment 81
Dick, Phillip 143
differentiation: in criminology 9, 10, 210; in victimology 15
‘disasters’ 71, 131
discretion 38, 156–61, 166–7, 210
disorder policing 176
displacement 82–3
domestic violence 40, 66, 67; feminist research and views 19, 189; recent
focus of crime prevention 189; recent police concern with 158;
sometimes not recognized as criminal 35
dramatic fallacy 57
drug offences 86, 106
due process 150, 151
Durkheim, Emile 12

Economic and Social Research Council (UK) 68

economic crime 128
economic imperatives for law breaking behaviour 124–5
Edinburgh 175
elder abuse 66, 69, 187
elderly women: fear of crime 42, 43; impact of crime on 115, 117; media
construction of as victims of violent crime 17, 58, 106; victims in
Shipman case 28; as victims to serial killer 25
Elias, R. 134, 135, 146
England and Wales: chemical production offences 193; crime rates 61;
criminal justice system 155, 157; government information following 9/11
and 3/11, 141–2; growth of criminology 200; incidence of reported rape
and sexual assault 67; nature and extent of crime 60–4; official criminal
statistics 32, 39; policies for victims’ rights 160–1; public’s reporting of
incidents to police 35–6; victim personal statement 163
environmental crime 128; chemical production offences 193; prevention
centred strategies 174, 179–80
Etherington, K. 113
ethnicity: bias behind hate crimes 119; and criminal justice 149, 153; in risk
society 203; and sociology of criminality 14, 94; in thinking on crime
prevention 191–2; and victimisation 107, 121
ethnic minorities: in context of hegemonic masculinity 94; high proportion
of US offenders 62; males as main object of research 28; and racism of
UK criminal justice system 167–8; in statistics of offenders 62–3, 167;
victims of crime 107, 115
Europe: criminal justice system 155–6; official criminal statistics 33, 34, 39
European Court of Human Rights 153
EUROSTAT 34
evolutionary psychology 23–4, 210; perspective on Shipman 23, 26
evolution theory 9
exercises: corporate crime 131–3; criminal justice system 145–6, 170;
criminological explanation 101–2; Criminological Other 29; identity theft
197; Internet resources 51–2; social policy and crime 152–4; victim
impact statements 165–6; victimisation 122; war on crime 74

family and dynamics of child abuse 69

FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) 34, 63, 118–19
fear of crime 42–4, 85, 114, 176; in global world 143; influence of media
55–6; meaning and understanding 42–4
Feeley, M. 203
Felson, Marcus: identification of fallacies about crime 57–9, 60, 65; view of
crime as ordinary 57, 63, 83
feminism: campaign for victims of sexual offences 116; campaign on
violence against women 66, 175, 188–9; concern over attrition rate 50;
influence on criminology 19, 25; and justice for women 153; perspective
on serial killers 25–6; stance on domestic violence offenders 189; stance
on justice 149; work on gender and crime 93–94; work on victimology
18–19, 25–6, 103, 104–5, 110–12
Ferrell, J. 97
Final Warning scheme 37
financial crisis 131
Finland 67
flood defence offences 193
forensic psychologists 2
France 29, 32, 156; idea of community 185
Francis, Dick 145
Francis, P. 46, 72
Fraser, E. 26
fraud 70. See also tax evasion/fraud; corporate 124, 125; financial 58, 195
Friedrichs, David 96, 126, 131
Furedi, F. 120, 143
Garland, David 178
Garofalo, J. 108; eight propositions on criminal victimisation 83
Geis, G. 133
gender 73, 92–4, 211; dynamics of child abuse 69; hegemonic masculinity
94–6; in thinking on crime prevention 188–91; and victimisation 107,
121
genocide 72, 96, 119–20, 211
Germany: idea of community 185; police and criminal justice system 156;
World War Two events 15
Glenn, Hazel 189, 190, 191
globalisation of crime 194–5
global world 194–5, 199; events with major impact 200–1
‘golden age’ of the past 47, 48
Goodey, J. 112
Gottfredson, M. 83, 87, 108; eight propositions on criminal victimisation 83
grooming in Internet chat room 195

Hall, R. 67
Hall, S. 99, 138
harm: corporate 129; as determining element of crime 6, 126
hate crimes 118–20, 191; U.S. statistics 34, 119
Hayward, K. 99
Health and Safety Executive 124, 130
health and safety legislation: offences against 41, 70, 73, 115, 126, 139;
problem of keeping up with changes 128
hegemonic masculinity 76–7, 94–6; and criminal victimisation 108, 112–13
Heidensohn, Frances 92
Henry, S. 6
Hentig, Hans von 15, 18
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate’s of Constabulary, Probation and Prisons 33
Herrnstein, R. 10, 11
heterosexuality, normative 94
higher education courses to criminology 200
Hillsborough football event 134
Hindelang, M. 83, 108; eight propositions on criminal victimisation 83
Hirschi, T. 85, 87
Hobbes, Thomas 85
Holmes, R. and S. 21, 22
Holmes, Sherlock 2, 57
home: crimes behind closed doors 65; hegemonic masculinity 95; idea of a
safe haven 65, 68
Home Office 200; lists of targets for crime reduction 193; research on
incidence of rape 67; victimisation survey 39; website 33
homosexuality 94
Hood-Williams, J. 94, 95
Hopkins-Burke, R. 85, 90
House of Lords 159
Hudson, B. 171
humanistic understanding of crime 5
human rights: and crime 5; legislation 153
Human Rights Watch Report 68
Hutu 72
Hyde, Greater Manchester 20

ideal victim 105–6, 117, 121, 135

immigration to Chicago 12–13
incidence studies 66
Independent Domestic Violence Advisors 190
India. See Bhopal disaster (1984)
indirect victimisation 114, 211
industry’s attitude towards safety of workers 131
ingenuity fallacy 58
Inland Revenue 33, 39
inner city 13
inquisitorial justice systems 116, 155–6
inquisitorial system 211
insane 9
insider dealing 46, 70, 87, 125, 193
institutional racism: and UK criminal justice system 167–9, 192
institutions: crimes behind closed doors 65; focus of critical criminology
139
integration crime prevention strategies 185–7
International Red Cross 71
International Violence Against Women survey 67
Internet 97, 120; cybercrime 195–6; fraud 48, 58; sources of official
information 33, 51–2; white-collar crime 70
Internet chat rooms 98, 195
intersectionality and criminology 205–6
intra-state crime 96
invisible crimes 46–7, 70, 72
involvement 86
Iraq war 71–2, 96
Italy 156, 185

Japan 67, 79
Jefferson, T. 94, 157, 168
Jones, T. 201
Jupp, Victor 46, 72
justice: access to 50; ideas of 148–50, 164; and role of criminal justice
system 148, 150, 151
justice gap 50, 211

Kant, Immanuel 148

Kelling, G. L. 175, 176
Kendall, Kathy 152, 153
Kerviel, Jerome 29
Kurdi, Aylan 134

law: changes impacting on crime 48; and definitions of crime 4–5, 35, 48,
66–7, 153; as different in each American state 155; issues affecting
official statistics 36, 37; and legitimation of state power 120, 136; need
for focus towards white-collar crimes 136, 138
law abiding behaviour 85, 86
law and order: centrality to political process 201; police’s role in upholding
157–8
law breaking behaviour 124–5
Lawrence, Stephen 119, 167, 168, 192
Laycock, G. 84
left realism 88–9, 211
legal system. See law
lifestyle and criminal victimisation 16, 83, 108–10
local authorities 33, 182
logic and Greek view of justice 148
Lombroso, Cesare 9–10, 11, 15, 84, 200
London 68, 119, 138
London 7/7 terrorist attack 141

Madoff, Bernard 129

Madrid 11/3, 141
magistrates’ court 159, 160
Maguire, M. 63, 75
male rape 68–9
males/male behaviour. See also white, heterosexual male: and crime 79, 94–
5; crimes behind closed doors 69; fear of crime 43; in feminist ideas on
crime 19, 26; and offending behaviour 73–4; sexual drives and serial
killers 23–4; as victims 106
man of law principle 149, 153
Marx, Karl 136
Marxist criminology 137–8
masculinity. See also hegemonic masculinity: concept in understanding fear
of crime 43; feminist perspectives 25–6, 93–4
Mawby, R. 115
McCulloch, Jude 144
McGarry, R. 134
McIntyre, Alasdair 148, 206
McMullen, R. 68
McPherson Report (1999) 167
measurement of crime: crimes behind closed doors 66; problems 47; studies
63
media: coverage of crimes of the suites 125; coverage of crime statistics
46–7; and culture of fear 143; experience of events through 207;
influence on our ideas of crime 55–6; popular images of crime and
criminologists 2, 56, 97, 125; portrayal of crime victims 17, 57, 106; role
in creating moral panic 55, 56; as source of information on crime 31–2,
45–6, 56, 97–8; viewing of crime in contemporary life 199
Megan’s Law 202
men. See males/male behaviour; masculinity; patriarchy; young men
Mendelsohn, Benjamin 15, 16, 18
“Mentalist, The” 2
Messerschmidt, J. 94, 95, 206
middle classes. See also white, middle class male: and white-collar crime
127
Miers, D. 16
migrant crisis in Europe 134–5
miners 124
Ministry of Defence Police 33
Ministry of Justice 33
mods and rockers 55–6
Montreal 175
Mooney, J. 68
moral panic 55–6, 211
moral principles of Kant’s 148
moral understanding of crime 5
motivation 99
mugging 138–9
multi-agency cooperation (crime prevention) 179, 181, 190
Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences 190
Mumbai November 2008 terrorist attack 141
Muncie, J. 137
murder: approach of evolutionary psychology 25; media portrayals 57
Myhill, A. 67

Naffine, Ngaire 149

National Offender Management Service 33
natural justice 150, 151, 153
neighborhood watch schemes 180, 181
Nelken, D. 125; on ambiguity of white-collar crime 127–31
Nelken, David 49
Newburn, T. 7, 201
new terrorism 142
New York 141
New Zealand 18, 148; restorative justice developments 186
Nielson, Dennis 24
Norris, C. 6, 24
Northern Ireland 67, 142

offenders: characteristics of 168; crime prevention strategies centred on

174, 175–7; crimes behind closed doors 65, 66; crimes of the street 57–
64; factors in behaviour 64–5; media stereotypes 56; rational choice
theory 81–3; recording of data 34; ’reintegration’ of 185, 186;
relationship with victims in criminal justice system 153–4, 163; self-
report studies 44–5; ’shaming’ of in restorative justice 186; white-collar
crime 133–4
Office for National Statistics (U.K.) 33
official criminal statistics 32–5, 44–5; cybercrime 195; measurement of fear
of crime 42; recognising, reporting and recording crime 35–38; on
victimisation 38–9
old terrorism 142
O‘Malley, Pat 203
opportunist criminal 9
opportunity 174; and offending behaviour 57–8, 64
order maintenance 158

paedophiles 98
parenting 87
Paris 2015 terrorist attack 141
partnerships 180, 182
Pasko, L. 106
passionate criminal 9
pathology 211; in criminology 9
patriarchy 211; and criminal victimisation 66, 110–12; feminist view on
violence against women 66
Pease, K. 64, 80, 173, 196
personal experience as source of knowledge 43
pharmaceutical industry marketing of unsafe products 125
Pierot, Hercule 2
Poland 67
police: declaring institutional racism 167–8; different roles in European
countries 156; function in criminal justice system 154, 157–8; official
statistics of crime 32, 33–4, 37, 39, 41; popular myths 58–9; reporting of
incidents to 36; role in upholding law and order 157–8; stop and search
powers 143, 158; targeting of ethnic minority groups 158, 167; zero
tolerance policy 201–2
policing organisations 33
policy 60; connecting justice and punishment 149–50; crime prevention
agendas and initiatives 175, 176–7, 184–5, 186, 187; criminologists’
involvement 172–4; failure of restorative initiatives to travel 201–2;
involvement of victims in criminal justice process 16–17, 19, 117, 160–1;
relationship with theory 78; response to domestic violence 190; response
to victims in England and Wales 161; role of criminal victimisation
survey 39; role of research on transnational crime 50; travelling to
jurisdictions 202
politicality of crime 137
politics: in Marxist view of crime 137; rhetoric about crime statistics 47–9
popular culture: and consumption of crime 56
popular images 69; media 1, 2
popular myths: around rape 68; and moral panic 55–6; of restorative justice
186–7
pornography 94, 111, 195
Portugal 67
positivism 8, 76, 77, 204; impact on victimology 119; influence on
criminology 8–11
positivistic victimology 16
post-traumatic stress syndrome 114
Potter, Hillary 206
power relations: in defining criminal behaviour 74; and hegemonic
masculinity 94–5; in Marxist view of crime and criminology 137, 148; in
thinking about crime prevention 185; underlying crimes behind closed
doors 69–70, 74
pre-crime 143–4, 211
prevalence studies 66
primary victimisation 114, 211
prison: as crime prevention strategy 173, 175; incidence of male rape 68
probation service 154
profit motive of white-collar crime 129
property crime 39, 41, 119
proportionality 211; and punishment 149
prostitution 106, 156, 176
psyche and offending behaviour 64, 69, 77, 174
psychiatry: investigation of serial killers 21–2; observations on Shipman
21–2
psychology. See evolutionary psychology
public perception: drama of crime of the suites 70; influence of media 56;
white-collar crime 130
punishment: and deterrence 81; and justice 149–50; prison as 175, 177;
versus rehabilitation 175

qualitative research method 41

quantitative research method 41
Quetelet, Adolphe 32, 33, 35
Quinney, R. 120, 137, 138

racial harassment as sometimes not recognized as crime 35, 190

racially motivated crime 191
racism. See also institutional racism: hate crimes 191
Radford, J. 110
radical criminology 138–9
radical feminism and work on victimology 110–12
radioactive substance offences 193
rape: Amir’s idea of victim precipitation 18; crimes behind closed doors 66,
178; feminism view 19; incidence and prevalence studies 67–8; men as
offenders 114; men as victims 68; women’s efforts in prevention of 188–
9
rational choice theory 76, 77, 80–5, 87, 92
rationality 149
reading recommendations 30, 52–3; crime and risk 207–8; crime prevention
197–8; crimes behind closed doors 74; criminal justice and criminology
102; criminal justice system 170–1; victimology 121; white-collar crime
146
reasonable doubt 159
recognition of criminal behaviour 35, 37, 40; problem of crimes behind
closed doors 67; problem of crimes of the suites 73; and white-collar
crime 118, 128
recording criminal behaviour 36–7, 39
regulatory agencies 125, 130, 167; financial 73
rehabilitation 175
Reiman, J. 124
relative deprivation 76–7, 88–91
religious bias and hate crimes 119
reporting criminal behaviour 35–6, 39
respondent to survey 39–41
responsibilisation 178, 211
restorative justice 160–1, 162, 164–5, 185–6, 202, 211
right realism 84, 211
risk society 202–3
robbery, victims of 58
Rock, Paul 3
Rorty, Richard 148
Rothe, Dawn 96, 126, 131
routine activity approach 57, 77, 80, 83
Rwandan genocide (1994) 72

Sage Dictionary of Criminology (2006) 3, 80, 84, 94, 97, 110, 209
‘scandals’ 72
scientific criminology 205
Scraton, Phil 134
secondary victimisation 114, 116, 211
self-control 87
self-report studies 44–5
sentencing 160
September 11, 2001 events 141
serial killers 20–1. See also Shipman, Harold; approach of evolutionary
psychology 23–4; approach of sociology 24–5; feminist perspectives 25–
6; typology 21–2
seven features of invisibility 46
sex: difference with gender 93; in evolutionary approach to serial killer 23–
4; as key motive of serial killers 21
sexism: UK criminal justice system 168–9
sexual abuse of children 69, 113
sexual assault: attrition rate 50; crimes behind closed doors 66; feminist
campaign for victims of 116; incidence and prevalence studies 67–68;
men as offenders 112; men as victims of 68–9
sexuality. See males/male behaviour; masculinity
sexual orientation bias behind hate crimes 118
Sherman, L. W. 189
Shipman, Harold 1, 20, 26–7, 28, 57, 126, 133, 153; approach of
evolutionary psychology 23; approach of sociology 25; feminist
perspective 25–6; psychiatric observations 22–3; sociological
perspectives 25
shoplifting 58
Simon, J. 203
situational crime prevention 82, 212
Snowden, Edward 195
social agreement as determining element of crime 6
social bonds 85–6
social constructionist understanding of crime 5
social control theory 76, 77, 85–8, 92
social crime prevention 180, 182, 212
social disorganisation 13, 212
socialisation and criminality 10
social justice 150, 151–2
social psychology 88
social relations: normative heterosexuality 94; social bonds 85–6
social sciences development 8
social structure: and offending behaviour 64, 68, 76, 78, 180, 195;
patriarchy 110; and relative deprivation 88
social theory of deviance 138
social understanding of crime 5
societal response as determining element of crime 6
Societe Generale Bank 29
socio-cultural context in comparative research 49
sociological positivism 12–14, 76, 77, 184, 212
sociology 8; perspective of crime prevention 177; perspective on serial
killing 24–5; perspective on Shipman 25; research on role of media 55–6
Soothill, K. 32, 78
South America 204
Southeast Asia 204, 205
Spalek, Basia 119, 191
spirit injury 119, 191
square of crime 89
state crime 96–7
statistics. See criminal statistics; official criminal statistics
stereotypes: ’ideal victim’ 105; media portrayals of offenders 57
stop and search powers 143, 158
structure. See social structure
surveillance crime prevention strategies 179, 181
survivor 212; feminist use of term 18, 105
Sutcliffe, Peter 24, 26
Sutherland, E. 70, 127
Sweden 67
Sweeting, A. 163

target hardening 82–3, 179

targets and police forces 37
Task Force on Victims of Crime (1982) 155
tax evasion/fraud 73; problem of statistical records 33, 46
Taylor, I. 138
terrorism 138, 141–5, 191, 195, 203
thefts: statistics 61; workplace 45
theory 77–8, 91–2, 96–7
therapeutic justice 162
the state: collusion in white-collar crime 139; criminality of 136; Marxist
view on power of 138
‘Three strikes and you’re out’ 202
thrill seeking as motive for crime 99
Tittle, Charles 87–8
Tombs, S. 124, 126, 130
Tong, R. 110
trade unionism 134
transnational crime 49
trust: in cases of fraud 126; victim-criminal relationship in Shipman case
25, 28
Tutsi 72

UK Atomic Energy Authority Police 33

Uniform Crime Reporting 33
Union Carbide Company of India 70–1
United Kingdom (UK). See also British Crime Survey (BCS); England and
Wales; Home Office: adversarialism 155; crime prevention initiatives
190; crime prevention strategies 176, 178, 181, 182, 183; criminal justice
policy 152; criminal justice system as racist 167–9; culture of fear 143;
findings on attitudes to domestic violence 68; growth of criminology as a
discipline 200; Health and Safety 130; lack of delineation of hate crime
118–19; law and order issues 201; policing of ethnic minority groups
191; radical criminology 138–9; relationship between risk and impact of
crime 115; restorative justice initiatives 160, 164–5, 186; serial killers
with sexual motive 24; terrorism 142; use of criminological theories 84,
88, 89; variables in criminal victimisation 107, 108; victim oriented
initiatives 16–17, 116; zero tolerance policy 175, 177
United Nations (UN) 119
United States Bureau of Statistics 75
United States of America (USA). See also New York: adversarialism 155;
capital punishment 149, 155; corporate fraud 124; court system 163;
crime prevention strategies 175, 181, 183; criminal justice system 154–5;
criminal statistics 169; live reportage of criminal trials 98; moral panic
over drugs 55; nature and extent of crime 62–4; official criminal statistics
32, 33–4, 38–9; origins of victimology 15; rational choice approach 84;
research on white-collar crime 124; restorative justice developments 186;
rise of imprisonment 11; serial killers with sexual motives 24; use of
victims in criminal justice process 17; variables in criminal victimisation
107, 108
University of Northumbria 200
urban decline 176

vandalism: petty offences 35, 58, 88

victim culpability 16, 212
victim impact statements 162, 163–4, 202
victimisation 103. See also criminal victimisation statistics; “hierarchy” of
106; and masculinity 95; patterning 83, 107–9; types 114–16; typologies
of von Hentig and Mendelsohn 15–16, 18; vulnerability 114–16; by
white-collar crime 129, 133–6; women’s resistance to 106
Victimological Other 17–20, 27, 28, 92, 105, 112, 212
victimology 1, 15–17, 103, 108, 212; cultural 120–1; feminist work 18–19,
25–6, 110–12; in left realism 88–9; positivist 16, 119
Victim Personal Statement Scheme 160
victim precipitation 16, 18, 212
victim proneness 15, 212; study by Genn 189
victim responsiveness 212; to white-collar crime 133–6
victims 6, 103; assumptions and images 17–18; crime prevention strategies
centred on 174, 177–9; of crimes behind closed doors 65–66; of crimes
of the suites 73, 133–6; criminal victimisation survey 17; deserving or
undeserving 106; media stereotypes 56, 106; policy development 16–17,
117; problem of term “victim” 104–6; relationship with offenders in
criminal justice system 154, 160–1; and restorative justice 160–1, 162;
role in justice process 104, 116–18, 155–6; role in justice system 165–6;
 in Shipman case 25, 28; typologies of von Hentig and Mendelsohn 15–
16, 18
Victims’ Advocates Scheme 163
victims’ rights laws (USA) 155
victim support work 116
violence against women campaigns: feminist campaigns 66, 175, 188–9
violence and leisure 99–100
violent crimes. See also domestic violence: committed by men against men
112; and ’golden age’ of the past 47, 48; as hate crimes 118; self-report
studies 44–5
vulnerability 212; to criminal victimisation 106, 112, 114, 115, 117; elderly
women and fear of crime 42, 43

Walby, Sylvia 67
Wales. See England and Wales
Walker, M. 168
Walklate, S. 7, 67, 88, 90, 110, 115, 131, 134
Walton, P. 138
war on crime 74
water quality offences 193
Westo-centric thinking and criminology 204–5
white, heterosexual male 94; Darwin’s theory of evolution 11; as
Victimological Other 19; in victim typologies 15, 16, 18
white, middle class male: as Criminological Other 28
white-collar crime 45, 70, 125; ambiguity 128; and criminology 129;
Marxist thinking 137–8; victim responsiveness 133–4
Whyte, D. 124, 126, 130, 140, 193–4
Wilmott, Peter 183–4
Wilson, Dean 144
Wilson, J. Q. 10, 11, 175, 176
Winlow, S. 99
women. See also elderly women; young women: Amir’s idea of victim
precipitation 18; biological positivistic ideas 11–12; control over 92–3; as
Criminological Other 28; feminist view of crimes most affecting 18–19;
incidence and prevalence of rape and sexual assault 67; jail inmates in
 USA 62; as perpetrators of child physical abuse 69; victimisation of 121;
victims in Shipman case 25, 28; working in criminal justice system 170
workplace crime 46–7, 115; deaths from health and safety crimes 124
World War Two 15
Wuornos, Eileen 21

Yorkshire Ripper. See Sutcliffe, Peter

Young, Jock 88, 89, 90, 97, 98, 138, 175, 184, 205, 206
young men: attitudes toward domestic violence 68; as least fearful of crime
43; as likeliest offenders 58; as most likely to be victims 58
young offenders: Final Warning scheme 37; social justice approach 153
young people: failure of restorative justice scheme in England and Wales
186; as greatest offenders and victims 55; likelihood of engaging in crime
79; self-report studies 44–5; violence and leisure 99–100
young women: attitudes toward domestic violence 67; as victims 106
youth justice system 154, 177, 181

zemiologists 5
zemiology 212
zero tolerance 175, 201–2
zone of transition 13, 212

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