Essential Criminology

Mark M. Lanier, Stuart Henry, Desire' J.M. Anastasia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429973512
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the fourth edition of Essential Criminology, authors Mark M. Lanier, Stuart Henry, and Desire.M. Anastasia build upon this best-selling critical review of criminology, which has become essential reading for students of criminology in the 21st century.

Designed as an alternative to overly comprehensive, lengthy, and expensive introductory texts, Essential Criminology is, as its title implies, a concise overview of the field. The book guides students through the various definitions of crime and the different ways crime is measured. It then covers the major theories of crime, from individual-level, classical, and rational choice to biological, psychological, social learning, social control, and interactionist perspectives. In this latest edition, the authors explore the kind of criminology that is needed for the globally interdependent twenty-first century. With cutting-edge updates, illustrative real-world examples, and new study tools for students, this text is a necessity for both undergraduate and graduate courses in criminology.

1

What Is Criminology?

The Study of Crime, Criminals, and Victims in a Global Context

“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly becomes any of us to talk about the rest of us.”

—Thornton Wilder, Pullman Car Hiawatha

The horrendous events of September 11, 2001, in which the World Trade Center in New York City was totally destroyed, and the Pentagon in Washington substantially damaged, by hijacked commercial airliners that were flown into them, killing 2,982 people, have proved to be the defining point of the past decade, and perhaps for decades to come. Clearly, the nature of war, the American way of life, what counts as “crime,” and how a society responds to harms, internal or external, changed on that day. This act of terrorism was undoubtedly aimed at the American people. The terrorist organization al-Qaeda, whose members were predominantly from Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, claimed responsibility. As recently as April 15, 2013, two pressure-cooker bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring an estimated 264 others. The suspects were identified as Chechen brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who were allegedly motivated by extremist Islamist beliefs as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Interestingly enough, both men were residents of the state of Massachusetts at the time.

The purpose of this introductory chapter is to show how the changing geopolitical landscape and other factors shape our renewed discussion of crime and its causes, as well as possible policy responses. Six fundamental changes can be identified that demonstrate the changed nature of our world. These changes all move toward increasing interconnection and interdependence. They are: (1) globalization; (2) the communications revolution, particularly the Internet; (3) privatization and individualization; (4) the global spread of disease; (5) changing perceptions of conflict and national security; and (6) the internationalization of terrorism.

Globalization

Globalization is the process whereby people react to issues in terms of reference points that transcend their own locality, society, or region. These reference points include material, political, social, and cultural concerns that affect the planet, such as environmental challenges (e.g., global warming or overpopulation) and commercial matters (e.g., fast food, in particular so-called McDonaldization [Ritzer, 2009; Pieterse, 2009], which describes the rationalization of culture along the lines of fast-food restaurants depicted by the spread of McDonald’s throughout the world’s economies). Globalization is a process of unification in which differences in economic, technological, political, and social institutions are transformed from a local or national network into a single system. Globalization also relates to an international universalism, whereby events happening in one part of the world affect those in another, none more dramatic than the collapse of world financial markets (Stiglitz 2002, 2006), which went global in September 2008. Indeed, the emergence of worldwide financial markets and under- or unregulated foreign exchange and speculative markets resulted in the vulnerability of national economies. In short, “‘Globalization’ refers to all those processes by which peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society, global society” (Albrow 1990, 9). Conversely, while globalization relates to the way people in different societies identify with values that cut across nations and cultures, it also relates to the recognition of different cultures’ diversity of experience and the formation of new identities. As globalization integrates us, these new identities and our sense of belonging to differentiated cultures are also driving many of us apart (Croucher 2004, 3). We argue that globalization is particularly pronounced in the areas of communications, privatization, and individualization, health, conflict, and terrorism; each of these has relevance for the study of crime and deviance.

Prior to 1985 global communication was largely restricted to the affluent. The advent of the personal computer and the development of the Internet transformed the way we communicate. Now people connect daily with others all over the world at little or no expense. At the same time, the development in global communications has led to a massive shift of jobs from manufacturing into service, communications, and information (called the postindustrial society), and because the latter jobs require higher education and training, increasing numbers of people the world over are underemployed or unemployed. Increased global communication has also brought a rush of new crimes that are perpetrated on and via the Internet, such as fraud and identity theft, drug smuggling, and bomb making. The growing dependence on global communications has also made national infrastructures and governments vulnerable to Internet terrorism through hacking and computer viruses. Consider the case of Aaron Swartz. Swartz was a cofounder of the news website Reddit, which aims to make online content free to the general public and not the exclusive domain of the affluent. In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of scientific journal articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to make them freely available. Just weeks before his federal trial began the twenty-six-year-old hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. Swartz faced thirteen felony charges. David Segal, the executive director of Demand Progress, an Internet activist organization founded by Swartz, stated, “It’s like to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library” (www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/01/13/swartz-reddit-new-york-trial/1830037).

Related to globalization and global unemployment are two trends: a decline in collective social action and increased economic polarization. Increasingly, we are seeing the “death of society,” that is, the decline in collective action and social policy requiring some to give up part of their wealth to help the less fortunate or to increase the public good. The 1980s and 1990s saw massive deregulation and privatization, from transportation, communications, and energy to finance, welfare, and even law enforcement. We have also seen the increasing tendency for family members to stay at home, not as families but as appendages to technology, such as televisions, computers, and video games. The result is an impersonal society, one where we are living in isolation from other real people, “bowling alone” (Putnam 1995), where media images and game characters become interspersed with real people who are seen as superficial objects, like caricatures. Moreover, because of the impact of globalization on the economic structures of societies, there has been a polarization of rich and poor, with numerous groups excluded from opportunities (J. Young 1999). In their relatively impoverished state, these groups are vulnerable to violence, both in their homes and in their neighborhoods.

Although epidemics such as the black death, smallpox, and polio have demonstrated that throughout human history disease can be a global phenomenon, the systemic use of hygienic practices, including clean water and effective sanitation and sewerage, and the discovery and use of antibiotics, vaccines, and other drugs meant that for much of the twentieth century the global spread of disease was seen as a thing of the past, or at least occurring only in underdeveloped countries. But by the end of the twentieth century, through the advent of increased global travel, the terror of disease on a global scale was given new meaning, first with HIV/AIDS, then with mad cow disease, West Nile virus, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), and resistant strains of tuberculosis. In 2014 Ebola became a threat. Worse was the fact that, unlike times past, groups could potentially introduce disease, such as smallpox or anthrax, on a global scale as part of a terrorist operation against individuals or governments. Like the previous developments, the dual effect was, on the one hand, to render people increasingly fearful of contact, especially intimate contact with strangers, tending to undermine interpersonal relations, while, on the other, demonstrating just how interconnected we have become. Disease pathogens can now be used as criminal attack tools or threats.

The single most feared event, and according to surveys of public opinion the “crime” considered most serious, is a terrorist attack. Events such as the September 11, 2001, suicide airliner bombings and the Mumbai hotel takeover in December 2008 illustrate that the threat of terrorism on a global scale has become part of the daily fear of populations around the world, not least because of the ways these events are instantly communicated to everyone, everywhere, as they happen. No longer restricted to the tactics of a few extreme radical or fringe groups in certain nations, terrorism has become the method of war for any ethnic or religious group that does not have the power to succeed politically. It has been facilitated by developments in communication, transportation, and technology that have enabled explosives and other weapons to become smaller and more lethal. Whether there is an interconnected web of terrorism around fundamentalist Muslim religious extremism (such as that claimed by followers of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda), an Arab-led terrorist movement opposed to Western culture, more specific actions such as those in Northern Ireland by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and splinter groups against Protestants and the British government, or in Indonesia or Bali against supporters of the West, it is clear that terrorism has become a global threat. Data assembled by the Center for Systemic Peace show that, since 2001, both the number and the severity of terrorist incidents have increased.

However, what is less heralded, but which presents an even greater and more realistic threat, is the threat posed by cyber terrorists and cyber criminals. Computers, cell phones, and things such as electronic banking now dominate virtually every aspect of modern society. The use of cyber devices has far exceeded the law and technology required to combat and prevent this type of crime. Nation-states, such as China, reportedly devote considerable resources to infiltrate computer systems in other countries; corporations engage in corporate espionage on an unprecedented scale; and terror organizations rely on the Internet to recruit, raise funds, and organize. Other countries such as Iran and the United States have already been successfully targeted by cyber attacks. So far, many governments have been slow to adapt to this emerging and present crime threat. Criminologists have also been slow to develop theories to explain the characteristics of people likely to engage in cybercrime or cause harm from within—so-called insider threats.

So how do societies reconfigure their vision of crime to deal with its global dimensions? Should acts of terrorism and acts of war be considered crimes? What about the actions of states that abuse human rights? Are there new criminologies that can deal with these more integrated global-level forms of harm creation?

What do these various crimes have in common? What kinds of cases grab media attention? Which do people consider more criminal? Which elicit the most concern? How does the social context affect the kind of crime and the harms suffered by its victims? How are technology and the media changing the face of crime? What do these events have to do with criminology? How does globalization affect the way we conceive of crime, punishment, and justice? (See Box 1.1.) After reading this book, you should have a better understanding of these issues, if not clear answers.

BOX 1.1 The Global Market Context of US Crime and Punishment

ELLIOTT CURRIE

The United States was distinctive among the advanced nations in the extent to which its social life was shaped by the imperatives of private gain—my definition of “market society”—and it was not accidental that it was also the nation with by far the worst levels of serious violent crime because a market society created a “toxic brew” of overlapping social effects. It simultaneously created deep poverty and widened inequality, destroyed livelihoods, stressed families, and fragmented communities. It chipped away at public and private sources of social support while promoting a corrosive ethos of predatory individualism that pitted people against each other in a scramble for personal gain. … The empirical research of the past seven years … confirms the importance of inequality and insecurity as potent breeding grounds for violent crime, so does the evidence of experience, as the spread of these problems under the impact of “globalization” has brought increased social disintegration and violence across the world in its wake. … Violence has been reduced in many other advanced capitalist societies, without resorting to correspondingly high levels of incarceration, to levels that seem stunningly low by US standards. The variation among those societies in street violence remains extraordinary, and I’d argue that it is largely due to the systematic differences in social policy that can coexist within the generic frame of modern capitalism. It is true that some of these differences in levels of crime (and in the response to crime) are narrowing, especially to the degree that other countries have adopted parts of the US social model. But it also remains true that the United States isn’t Sweden, or even France or Germany, when it comes to violent crime, or rates of imprisonment. And this difference isn’t merely academic. It translates into tangible differences in the risks of victimization and the overall quality of life. … Social policy in the United States, and in many other countries too, has, if anything, gone backward on many of the issues raised by this line of thinking about crime. We continue to chip way at our already minimal system of social supports for the vulnerable while pressing forward with economic policies that, by keeping wages low and intensifying job insecurity, foster ever-widening inequality and deepen the stresses on families and communities that many of us have singled out as being crucial sources of violence. We continue to rely on mass incarceration as our primary bulwark against crime despite an abundance of evidence that doing so is not only ineffective but also self-defeating. … These tendencies are especially troubling because they are increasingly taking place on a worldwide scale. What we somewhat misleadingly call “globalization”—really the spread of “market” principles to virtually every corner of the world—threatens to increase inequality, instability, and violence wherever it touches, while simultaneously diminishing the political capacity for meaningful social change. Formerly stable and prosperous countries in the developed world are busily dismantling the social protections that traditionally helped to keep their rates of violent crime low: parts of the developing world that were once relatively tranquil are becoming breeding grounds for gang violence, official repression, and a growing illicit traffic in drugs and people. The world will not be able to build enough prisons to contain this volatility. The future under this model of social and economic development does not look pretty. Fortunately, it is not the only future we can envision.

Source: Extracted from Elliott Currie, “Inequality Community and Crime,” in The Essential Criminology Reader, edited by Stuart Henry and Mark M. Lanier (Boulder: Westview Press, 2006), 299–306.

Elliott Currie is a professor of criminology law, and society in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California-Irvine.

What Is Criminology?

Criminology is mostly straightforwardly defined as the systematic study of the nature, extent, cause, and control of law-breaking behavior. Criminology is an applied social science in which criminologists work to establish knowledge about crime and its control based on empirical research. This research forms the basis for understanding, explanation, prediction, prevention, and criminal justice policy.

Ever since the term criminology was coined in 1885 by Raffaele Garofalo (1914), the content and scope of the field have been controversial. Critics and commentators have raised several questions about its academic standing. Some of the more conventional questions include the following: Is criminology truly a science? Does its applied approach, driven predominantly by the desire to control crime, inherently undermine the value-neutral stance generally considered essential for scientific inquiry? Is criminology an autonomous discipline, or does it rely on the insights, theory, and research of other natural and social science disciplines, and increasingly the media and public opinion? Which, if any, of the several theories of criminology offers the best explanation for crime? Should the different theories of crime causation be integrated into a comprehensive explanation? As we expand the definition of crime to include harms of commission or omission that are not defined by law as crime (such as harms by powerful interests and state agencies), is criminology equipped to study these phenomena, or do we need to abandon criminology for a more encompassing analytical framework? Answers to these questions are complex, and they are further complicated by criminology’s multi-disciplinary nature, its unconvincing attempts at integrating knowledge (though see Agnew’s Toward a Unified Criminology, 2011, for a rebuttal of this argument), its relative failure to recommend policy that reduces crime, and its heavy reliance on government funding for research. The complexity of these issues has been further compounded by increasing globalization, which has spawned crimes across national boundaries, and the failure of national enforcement agencies to prevent crime’s global effects.

Although criminology’s subject matter is elastic, or flexible, the categorical core components include: (1) the definition and nature of crime as harm-causing behavior; (2) different types of criminal activity, ranging from individual spontaneous offending to collective organized criminal enterprises; (3) profiles of typical offenders and victims, including organizational and corporate law violators; (4) statistical analysis of the extent, incidence, patterning, and cost of crimes, including estimates of the “dark figure” of hidden or unreported crime, based on surveys of victims and self-report studies of offenders; and (5) analysis of crime causation. Less agreement exists about whether the scope of criminology should be broadened to include society’s response to crime, the formulation of criminal laws, the role of victims in these processes (which is a focus of victimology, discussed later in this chapter), and the extent to which criminology needs to adopt a comparative global perspective.

In the United States, the inclusive term criminal justice generally refers to crime-control practices, philosophies, and policies used by the police, courts, and system of corrections (in Europe “corrections” is called penology). Those who study such ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 What Is Criminology? The Study of Crime, Criminals, and Victims in a Global Context
• 2 What Is Crime? Defining the Problem
• 3 Classical, Neoclassical, and Rational-Choice Theories
• 4 “Born to Be Bad”: Biological, Physiological, and Biosocial Theories of Crime
• 5 Criminal Minds: Psychiatric and Psychological Explanations for Crime
• 6 Learning Criminal Behavior: Social Process Theories
• 7 Failed Socialization: Control Theory, Social Bonds, and Labeling
• 8 Crimes of Place: Social Ecology and Cultural Theories of Crime
• 9 The Sick Society: Anomie, Strain, and Subcultural Theory
• 10 Capitalism as a Criminogenic Society: Conflict and Radical Theories of Crime
• 11 Patriarchy, Gender and Crime: Feminist Criminological Theory
• 12 New Directions in Critical Criminological Theory
• 13 Conclusion: Toward a Unified Criminology
• References
• Index