The SAGE Dictionary of Criminology

Eugene McLaughlin, John Muncie, Eugene McLaughlin, John Muncie

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526436726, 9781526436719
• eBook ISBN: 9781526480354
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Now in its fourth edition, The SAGE Dictionary of Criminology has established itself as an authoritative reference text for the key concepts, theories, and methods in criminology and criminal justice.

 

Edited by two leading figures in the field of criminology, the book includes over 325 entries from 120 academics and practitioners from Europe, USA, Canada, China, Australia and New Zealand. All concepts are precisely defined, followed by a section outlining the concept's origins, development and general significance, a list of associated concepts, and finally, further reading suggestions to help extend students? knowledge. 

New to the 4^th Edition:

• Up to 30 new entries, covering topics such as cyber security, wildlife crime, crimmigration, and penal populism.
• Updates to entries including new 'further reading' suggestions
• A new section ?Evaluation? is included for concepts considered to have the greatest theoretical weight, allowing for a critical assessment of how the concept can be debated, challenged and reworked.
• Further contributions from international academics. 

An essential reference tool for students and academics within criminology, criminal justice and legal studies.

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Capital Punishment

Definition

Punishment by execution – either by hanging, electrocution, firing squad, gas chamber, lethal injection or beheading. Capital punishment can be imposed for a range of offences, but in Western countries, except in exceptional circumstances, it is usually reserved for murder.

Distinctive Features

Capital punishment by hanging was used in England and Wales between 1016 and 1964, and between 1900 and 1949 there were 751 people hanged, of whom 87 were women. The purpose of capital punishment seems to have been both retributive and to act as a deterrent. Until 1868 hangings were public affairs. The last public execution was that of the Irish nationalist Michael Barrett in May 1868, with some 2,000 people attending (Potter, 1993: 94). These public events were usually drunken occasions, with spectators often using them as an opportunity to commit further crimes, thus turning what was intended as a solemn state ritual – which was supposed to reflect the power of the law – into a shambles (Ignatieff, 1978: 21–4). After May 1868 executions took place behind the prison’s walls with an increasing standardization of the process of death, with the result that a uniform scaffold apparatus was adopted as well as a standard length and thickness of rope, and tables of ’drops’ were published in order that executioners – a profession which also became increasingly specialized – could judge the execution in relation to the condemned’s height and weight. Although executions were private, selected members of the public were allowed to attend. For example, in August 1868 at the hanging of Thomas Wells in Maidstone Gaol (the first person to be executed in prison), 16 reporters were present so as to be able to describe the final moments of the demise of the condemned man for the morning papers (Potter, 1993: 95). The 1965 Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act ended capital punishment except in exceptional circumstances – such as treason, arson in HM Dockyards and piracy – for a trial period of five years. Its actual abolition occurred in England and Wales in December 1969.

This trend towards the abolition of public executions, and thereafter capital punishment itself, has been a process most observed in Western Europe. There has been a tendency to treat capital punishment as a somewhat closed policy issue, especially as those former Warsaw Pact countries which have joined or have applied to join the Council of Europe have signalled their intention to move to abolition. Russia too has also reduced the number of offences for which the death penalty can be imposed. However, the abolitionist cause has not had much impact on several regions of the world. So, for example, as Hood (1996) advises, most of the Middle East and North African states have expressed strong support for the continued use of capital punishment. In 2015 Amnesty International recorded 1,634 executions in 25 countries worldwide – the greatest number since 1989. Most executions took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.

One of the most vocal and visible retentionist advocates of capital punishment has been the United States of America. Between 1976 and 2017 there were 1,465 executions. The majority were in Texas but the practice remains legal in 30 other states. The numbers rose from 1 in 1977 to 98 in 1999 but have since markedly declined. Of note, however, has been the recurrent concern that blatant racial discrimination operates in the application of capital punishment in the USA. So, for example, the killers of white people were 11 times more likely to be condemned to death than the murderers of African-Americans. Discrimination in the application of the death penalty can be seen most obviously by focusing on the murder victim’s race. In Georgia, for example, prosecutors sought the death penalty in 70 per cent of the cases where the murderer was African-American and the victim was white, but when there was a white murderer and the victim was African-American the same prosecutors sought the death penalty in only 15 per cent of cases (Donziger, 1996). Others have drawn attention to how politicians use the issue of capital punishment symbolically for electoral advantage. So, for example, it has been suggested that Bill Clinton scheduled the execution in Arkansas of a brain-damaged black man – Rickey Ray Rector – during his Presidential campaign bid in 1992 so as to demonstrate his toughness on crime and punishment. On the eve of his execution Mr Rector is reported to have been barking like a dog, laughing inappropriately, and on being offered his last meal, asking to save his dessert ’until later’.

The most consistently debated question about capital punishment is whether or not it has a deterrent effect, and this remains the most common justification for the death penalty by retentionist countries. However, comparative studies of neighbouring abolitionist and retentionist states in the USA have suggested that abolition is not associated with higher murder rates in general, or with higher murder rates of police or prison officers in particular (Hood, 1996: 166). Even where a deterrent effect has been detected, critics would still debate whether the decision to murder is a matter of rational choice, and whether data on executions and murder are reliable. In his comprehensive study, initially undertaken on behalf of the United Nations Committee on Crime Prevention and Control, Hood (1996: 167) concluded that ’research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. Such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis’ (see also Hood and Hoyle, 2015).

David Wilson

Associated Concepts: deterrence, punitiveness, retribution, right realism, the state, state crime

Key Readings

Bedau, A.H. and Cassell, P. (2005) Debating the Death Penalty: Should America Have Capital Punishment? New York: Oxford University Press.

Donziger, S. (ed.) (1996) The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission. New York: Harper Collins.

Garrell, U.A.C. (1994) The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hood, R. (1996) The Death Penalty: A World-Wide Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hood, R. and Hoyle, C. (2015) The Death Penalty: A World-Wide Perspective (5^th edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ignatieff, M. (1978) A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Potter, H. (1993) Hanging in Judgement: Religion and the Death Penalty in England. London: SCM Press.

Sarat, A. (ed.) (1998) The Killing State. New York: Oxford University Press.

Carceral Society

Definition

The concept of the emergence and existence of a carceral society was first suggested by Michel Foucault in his (1977) book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison. Not only does Foucault attack the idea that prisons have somehow become more enlightened and humanitarian – that they have progressed – but he also tries to unmask the disciplinary nature of modern society, of which prison is but one manifestation.

Distinctive Features

Discipline and Punish opens with a description of the gruesome torture of the regicide Damiens in 1757, and is almost immediately counterbalanced in the text by the detailed plans for a young offender institution some 70 years later. However, the reader is not meant to infer from these descriptions that somehow punishment has become more humane or enlightened – the book stands as a full-frontal attack on modernism – but rather how prisons punish in other ways, which might be less public and individualized, but which are equally gruesome. Moreover, punishment is no longer intended to alter individual behaviour, but rather becomes the basis on which physical and social structures are created within society and not just within prisons, and which thus alters the behaviour of everyone. For Foucault the key words are inspection, surveillance and power, which in relation to prison were symbolized by Bentham’s Panopticon.

What is of interest is that Foucault saw these ’carceral impulses’ swarming outside of the Panopticon and other penal institutions: ’their mechanisms have a certain tendency to become de-institutionalized, to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a “free” state’ and thus ’infecting’ schools, hospitals and factories. Their purpose was to observe, inspect and ultimately control the general population, a disciplinary impulse that he saw at work in a variety of locations and within a variety of organizations – from religious and charity groups, to the development of a centralized police force in France.

Evaluation

The concept can be applied within a variety of Western societies that have sought to control the behaviour of their inhabitants, not on the basis of controlling the behaviour of individual members of that society but rather of the population as a whole. So many more areas of social life are being subjected to categorization, surveillance, prevention, organized forms of control and ’compliance systems’ of both a formal and informal nature. Inevitably this has also meant that the number of people who come to be managed by the criminal justice system has increased. Hand in glove we have also seen, for example, the increased use of CCTV, airport security checks and random urine checks at work. At another level there is greater awareness of ’lifestyle controls’ in the form of no-smoking zones, or evidence that some businesses may not hire people who are overweight.

Foucault’s work is filled with rich historical insight and has re-emerged as a powerful tool with which to analyse more contemporary concepts such as risk management, actuarialism and population control which are often incorrectly presented as ’theory neutral’.

David Wilson

Associated Concepts: actuarialism, governance, governmentality, net widening, panopticism, penality, situational crime prevention, social control, surveillance, target hardening

Key Readings

Driver, F. (1984) ’Power, space and the body: A critical reassessment of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish’, Society and Space, 3: 425–446.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison. London: Allen Lane.

Gandy, O. (1993) The Panoptic Sort. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Mathiesen, T. (1997) ’The viewer society: Michel Foucault’s “panopticon” revisited’, Theoretical Criminology, 1 (2): 215–234.

Piro, J. (2008) ’Foucault and the architecture of surveillance: Creating regimes of power in schools, shrines, and society’, Educational Studies, 44 (1): 30–46.

Carnival (of Crime)

Definition

A description and analysis of popular festive behaviour as a necessary act of irrational excess and excitement in opposition to the dominant accepted values of the restraint, sobriety and rationality of modern industrial life. Transgression and crime are understood as an integral part of the performance of carnival, no longer restricted to festivals but as an enjoyable part of popular everyday life and a site of resistance to rationality.

Distinctive Features

The most important analysis of the nature of carnival is that of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), who stressed that the structure and imagery of carnival seek to legitimate its participants’ behaviour thus making it a period of licensed misrule. A characteristic of carnivalesque transgression is the open defiance of dominant authority structures and values, thereby putting the transgressor in a position of power as their behaviour turns the social world ’upside down’. Such social behaviour is full of irrational, senseless, offensive acts performed in a time of disorder, transgression and doing wrong in an otherwise ordered world where such acts would be considered criminal.

Contemporary theorists of popular culture (e.g., Docker, 1996) have analysed the place of carnival in popular pleasure including media entertainment, whilst cultural criminologists have looked at the pleasure of doing wrong (Katz, 1988; Presdee, 2000). The latter highlight the notion that carnival functions as a playful and pleasurable resistance to authority where those normally excluded from the discourse of power celebrate their anger at their exclusion. Cultural criminologists maintain that, through the dual processes of the scientific rationality and containment of contemporary everyday life, carnival has shattered and its fragments and debris are now to be found not in the pleasure and excitement of organized carnival but in acts of transgression and crime (Presdee, 2000). Without a partly licensed and organized carnival ’form’, the carnivalesque emerges more unrehearsed and unannounced and often in a more violent and criminal way. Lyng (1990) has described such performance as ’edgework’ – intense and often ritualised moments of pleasure and excitement which accompany the risk, danger and skill of transgression and which come to play a key part in the construction of shared subcultural meaning.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Entries
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• Editors’ Introduction
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Y
• Z