Instructor's Manual To Accompany Criminology

Kimberly Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429711312
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The goal of this resource manual is to help students understand crime, the origins of criminological theory, the emergence of sociological criminology and the subcultures of delinquency. It also provides information on the different types of crimes that exist.

1
What is Crime?

Chapter Outline

1.1 Images of Crime

Encourages students to open their minds about the study of crime, beyond their own personal observations and opinions.

Crime as a Social Problem

1. Thirty years ago a national study predicted an increasingly barricaded society in the near future. To a large extent these predictions have come true, especially in relation to increasing security measures taken by private citizens and the government.
2. Fear of crime seems to be generating much of this quest for security at the beginning of the 21st Century. As a result, we live in "anti-crime fortresses" in the modern world.
3. The overall cost of crime (not counting political crime or white collar crime) to victims, $450 billion, is twice that of the federal defense budget in the United States.
4. This "fortress building" is fueled by special interest groups (like the ΝRA and MADD) whose crusades have left the public increasingly fearful of crime victimization.

Crime in the Mass Media

1. The vast majority of information the general public gets about crime comes from the mass media (TV, movies, newspapers, magazines, etc).
2. Crime is a big seller in the mass media and consumes one-third of television programming in the United States. Most of this coverage focuses on violent crime, leading to a distorted image within the public mind about the crime phenomenon.
3. Three major points Beime and Messerschmidt make:
   1. "The enormous volume of crime-related items in the media wrongly creates the image of a society with an enormous amount of violent crime."
   2. "The media have created the misleading impression that crime rates consistently increased during the last decade."
   3. "The media distort the incidence of non-violent crime."

1.2 Crime, Criminology and Criminalization

No universally clear definition of crime exists, it varies from place to place and often depends on a wide variety of circumstances. These points must be stressed when teaching this segment of the course. Captain Kidd's story illumates how difficult it can be to definitely state the nature of crime.

Crime as a Legal Category

1. An act must be forbidden by criminal law (no crime without law and no punishment without law). Criminal law is separate from canon (religous) law and civil law. Criminal law distinguishes misdemeanors from felonies.
2. An act must be voluntary, or a voluntary omission. No one can be prosecuted for bad thoughts, only for voluntary behavior or voluntarily failing to act. Criminal responsibility relies on establishing intent to commit the crime (levels of intent: purposefully, knowingly, negligently, recklessly).
3. Criminal responsibility can be avoided with proper defense or excuse, such as "justification" which includes duress, necessity and duty; entrapment; and/or insanity. This assumes, of course, that the person commiting the act has "free will" do it; this may not always be valid and should be stressed.
4. Criminology, as a discipline, cannot limit itself to the study of crime based solely on the legalistic definition because it is often too narrow and tautological.

Law and State

1. Law is something other than simply a statement about what is permissible and what is prohibited. Law is an expression of the will of the power elites in society, and ought to be seen as a social phenomenon that is dynamic, not static, and exists within specific historical conditions.
2. As societies have become more complex, laws have become more abundant; specifically the greater the social inequality exists, the more laws are passed. Hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies experienced relatively little social inequality and therefore had minimal laws governing daily life. With increasing complexity and inequality in society more laws have been enacted to preserve the privilege and interest of the powerful.
3. Law is a form of social control, aimed at producing conformity to the expected rules of daily interaction. When those expected rules are violated, laws are applied to generate an official response to those violations. Within criminology, penal solutions are usually the most widely studied.

Law and Criminalization

1. Refers to "the process whereby criminal law is selectively applied to social behavior." It involves: a). The enactment of legislation that outlaws certain types of behavior, b). The surveillance and the policing of that behavior, c). If detected, its punishment.
2. Important questions must be explored when studying the criminalization process, such as whose vested interests are being protected in the process? How/why did this particular law take shape when it did? Does this law maintain the status quo?

1.3 Sociological Definitions of Crime

Because the legalistic definition of crime is limiting in terms of scope, sociologists have developed alternative definitions of crime. The academic roots of criminology stem from the social sciences and require incisive examination of the concepts and terms used within the discipline. Discuss the Enlightenment's influence and the Progressive Era's influence, briefly.

Crime as a Violation of Conduct Norms

1. Sellin objected to relying exclusively on the legal definition of crime because it simply reinforces the conventional public perception of crime, and thereby limits criminological investigations.
2. Instead, Sellin advocated that "conduct norms" should form the basis of a sociological definition of crime. These include conduct norms stemming from formal and informal controls: custom, tradition, ethics, religion and criminal law. Since every society has conduct norms within them, Sellin believed this sociological definition would offer new opportunities to investigate crime.

Crime as a Social Harm

1. Sutherland's response to Sellin's arguments expanded the definition of crime to incorporate the social harms that result from white collar crimes as well as conventional crimes. Sutherland was especially keen to see the definition expanded to include violations of regulatory laws that are not necessarily violations of criminal law.
2. Michalowski takes this idea even further to discuss the realities of "analogous social injury" perpetrated by "legally permissible acts or sets of conditions whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts" (1985). Useful examples are provided in the text.

Crime as a Violation of Human Rights

1. Human rights ought to be the criterion for defining crime, according to other criminologists. That is, all human beings have inalienable rights (life, liberty, etc.) and violations of these rights should be viewed as criminal acts. Amnesty International's recent report on the state of human rights violations in the United States indicates that many people currently suffer violations of their human rights. Examples are provided in the text.
2. Herman and Julia Schwendinger argue that criminologists should employ a definition of crime based on human rights. Specifically, they argue that all humans should be granted rights that are absolutely essential to life (health, food, etc.) and those that are essential to a dignified human existence (freedom of movement, free speech, education, employment, etc.).
3. This approach recognizes that criminology is an inherently political field of study because we make political choices when we decide how to define the phenomenon and what we will study.
4. Focusing on human rights, however, obscures the rights of nonhuman animals, and violations thereof.

Crime as a Form of Deviance

1. Defining crime contingent upon definitions of deviance must also be considered. Deviance is a culturally specific concept, that leaves the criminologist with an unending list of interesting topics to study.
2. Deviance varies based on race, class and gender, and the study of crime must also incorporate these realities. However, not all deviant acts are criminal acts, and not all criminal acts are considered deviant. This definition raises important questions, as outlined by the text.

1.4 Toward an Eclectic Definition of Crime

Beirne and Messerschmidt focus on crime as a sociological problem, therefore, they employ a variety of definitions of crime as appropriate in the given contexts. It should be noted, however, that the emphasis is on the overriding patterns of criminal behavior and victimization (i.e., gender, class, race, etc.) beyond the reductionist tendencies of individual explanations.

Class Exercises

1. Have students collect popular news magazines and newspapers to bring into class. Require students to work in small groups to evaluate how their magazines and papers portray crime. Use this exercise to illuminate the biased coverage of crime in the mass media.
2. Have students watch reality-based crime programs on television for a week. During this week they should record the race/ethnicity and gender of the police officers as compared with the suspects. Also have students record who the advertisers are during the commercial breaks.
3. Split the class into large groups (10-15 per group) and have them establish a criminal code based on one of the sociological definitions of crime. Ideally, there ought to be one group per sociological definition. Their criminal codes should reflect issues related to white-collar offending, race, gender and class inequalities.

Test Bank

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In 1970 the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence predicted that:
   • a. private homes would be increasingly monitored by security equipment.
   • b. armed guards would be monitoring public schools.
   • c. gun ownership would be nearly universal.
   • *d. All of the above
2. In 1970 the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence predicted that:
   • a. American cities would experience widespread ethnic pluralism.
   • b. American suburbs would no longer exist due to terrorism.
   • *c. streets and neighborhoods would be unsafe in differing degrees.
   • d. slums would be transformed into places for urban renewal.
3. The predictions of the National Commission...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1: What is Crime?
• Chapter 2: The Measurement of Crime
• Chapter 3: The Origins of Criminological Theory
• Chapter 4: The Emergence of Sociological Criminology
• Chapter 5: The Emergence of Criminology in the United States
• Chapter 6: Delinquent Subcultures and Subcultures of Delinquency
• Chapter 7: Theoretical Diversity
• Chapter 8: New Directions in Criminological Theory
• Chapter 9: interpersonal Violence
• Chapter 10: Property Crime
• Chapter 11: Public-Order Crime
• Chapter 12: Syndicated Crime
• Chapter 13: White-Collar Crime
• Chapter 14: Political Crime
• Chapter 15: Inequality, Crime and Victimization
• Chapter 16: Comparative Criminology