The body of law that relates to crime.

Rules that defines conduct that is prohibited by the state because it is held to threaten, harm or otherwise endanger the safety and welfare of the public, and that sets out the punishment to be imposed on those who breach these laws

A formal authorization or proposition of law after the crime has been committed.

a wrongful act or an infringement of a right (other than under contract) leading to legal liability.

Not culpable if "as a result of severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality of the wrongfulness of his acts."

The defendant must prove insanity, by "clear and convincing evidence."

Penal Sanction

Uniformity

Politicality

Specificity 

Believed:

• Injury is to the state
• Prevention trumps punishment
• Prison was better than bizarre torture

Believed:

• "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" (utilitarianism)
• Felicity Calculus
• Punishment should fit the crime
• The amount of pain necessary to deter criminal behavior

Insight:

• Exactly what we call crime depends on how law emerges
• Where does law come from?
• Consensus
• Conflict

Utilitarianism: the doctrine that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority.

Beccaria and Bentham 

The school employs a rationalist, direct and scientific approach to policy-making for the prevention and control of crime.

Introduced the concept of 'free will.'

• Focus on counts of things
• Often employ statisitcal analyses
• Demonstrate prevalence

• Tend to be more rich in the details, but weaker on counts
• Rarely employ statistical analyses
• Explain how and why something might happen
• Demonstrate presence
• Cannot demonstrate prevalance

Often in-depth documentation of phenomena that flow from open-ended and/or unstructured interviews and observation.

Similar to surveys, but generally have fewer respondents and less structured questions.

Differ from other studies because these focus on events from the past. Sometimes secondary analyses of older surveys. 

Often require innovative techniques.

Pros:

• Generalizability
• Can survey lots of people for less money than ethnography

Cons:

• Relies on current state of knowledge for hypothesis
• Data is less rich, as it is restricted by the questions researchers thought to in advance

Pro: experiments are the best type of study for getting at causality.

Con: monetary cost and ethics

Ethnography

Archival

Survey

Experiment

Time Order

Non-spuriousness

Intervening?

Correlation

a mutual relationship or connection between two or more variables

Is there a presence of variables that come between the two variables you are comparing?

Most people will not include intervening variables in discussions about criteria for causality.

In order to be sure that two variables are causally related, you need to eliminate any other explanations that could work.

Spurious: not valid, fake, false, counterfeit

Begins with the idea that some things have no essential nature. 

A process that results in shared meanings.

(e.g. hand gestures mean different things in different countries)

'A Tale of Five Administrations'

(Beckett and Sasson)

Examines how crime and the appropriate response to crime was socially constructed.

Key argument: contemporary war on crime/drugs reflect the ascendance of a particular framing of the crime problem as the result of permissiveness, leniency, and too much support.

Lyndon B. Johnson's social wlefare programs:

• Civil rights
• Medicare
• Medicaid
• Public Broadcasting
• Environmental protection
• Educational aid

Welfare and other social welfare policies account for increase in crime rate.

Welfare is not the government's job, policing and protection is.

Clinton cut welfare a lot (1996):

• Capping length
• Requiring work
• Cutting benefits to abnormal immigrants
• Requiring unwed teens moms to live at home and continue school

• Concaine moms originally framed as repentant, white females

• Institutional bias: Black women were significantly more likely than white women to be tested for drugs at time of delivery

Cohen (1980):

• someone or something is defined as a threat to values or interests
• this threat is depicted in an easily recognizable form by the media
• there is a rapid build up of public concern
• there is a response from authorities or opinion makers
• the panic recedes or results in social changes

1. technical: "a cluster of cases greater than the background noise level"
2. public: "rapid, prehaps deadly, spread of a disease...multiplying risk of infection"

The system of rules that a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and may enforce by the imposition of penalties

A natural product of the informal rules of interaction of society.

The dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.

• Darwinian
• Focused on biological determination 
• Described the criminal as "atavistic," meaning of a lower phylogenetic level

the scientific study of mental disorders

"The interstitial areas of our major cities reflected a high degree of sociocultural heterogeneity; resulting in a breakdown in social organization and norms, which made deviant behavior much more common place."

"Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders."

'Focus their analysis on the state as a political system controlled by the interests of the "ruling capitalist class," especially through the use of law as a tool to preserve existing inequalities.'

When media images are consistant with the lived experience, media and experience mutually reinforce citizen's fear.

Fear increases with greater television exposure, but only in high-crime neighborhoods.

• Control
• Anger
• Jealousy

Blumstein believed there has been an arms race associated with the growth of crack cocaine markets. 

Large cities --> Small cities

The are higher rates of violence in neighborhoods, which exhibit:

• High levels of poverty
• Unemployment 
• Family disruption
• Residential instability

(1) Linkage of trust and cohesion with shared expectations for control.

(2) A task-specific construct that highlights shared expectations and mutual engagement by residents in local social control

Unit of Analysis: Person

Crime Outcome: Criminal Acts

Type of Explanation: Social Psychology

of or denoting circles, arcs, or other shapes that share the same center, the larger often completely surrounding the smaller

• Deteriorated housing
• Factories
• Abandoned buildings
• Most crime occurs here

• Single family homes
• Yards/garages

1. Transitional zone delinquency (ZiT)
2. Less delinquency wiht distance from city center
3. Crime rates remained consistent despite Ethnic Succession
4. Ethnic groups who moved to suburbs experienced declining rates of delinquency

• Education
• Jobs
• Home loans
• Health care