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Introduction
 Introduction
Resource- ‘Tough on the causes of crime.’ A
famous phrase, but what is crime? This unit examines how we as a
‘society’ define crime. You will look at the fear that is generated
within communities and what evidence...
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1 What is a crime?
- 1.1 The meaning of crime Resource
- What is a crime? Good question,
but how to go about answering it? For most of us, most of the time,
crime is something other people do. So why not check that against
personal experience? Have a go at the...
- 1.2 The recognition and pursuit of
crime Resource
- Whatever crime might mean, it can
still land you in trouble. So given our answers to the questionnaire,
why aren't we doing time at Her Majesty's Pleasure, or paying off an
enormous backlog of fines? Not...
- 1.3 Summary
Resource
- Crime has multiple meanings. Those
meanings are socially constructed. The most important differences in
the meanings of crime occur between strictly legal definitions and those
that relate crime to the...
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2 Tales of fear and fascination
- 2.1 Social attitudes towards crime Resource
- Crime, then, is a social
construction. We had to break down the definition of crime and the
process of recognising crimes to explore that. This is an analytical
approach to the issue, which simply means...
- 2.2 A society frightened by crime? Resource
- We do not have to look too far to
find someone saying that the UK is a society gripped by rising levels of
crime, anti-social behaviour and incivility; or that disorder threatens
social stability. The...
- 2.3 A society fascinated by crime? Resource
- To make an analogy with the now
outmoded vinyl record, if ‘the fear of crime’ track is the A-side of
this hit record, the track on the B-side is ‘the fascination with
crime’. Fascination may seem an unusual...
- 2.4 Summary
Resource
- While social scientists think
about crime analytically, most of the time individuals think about crime
in terms of narratives or stories. Narratives which describe and
explain their lives.
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3 Beyond common sense?
- 3.1 Claims about crime Resource
- Definitions beg questions. So do
social narratives and stories. Again, we need, as social scientists, to
begin with an analytical task. What are the key claims that are being
made in the common-sense story...
- 3.2 Counting the crime problem Resource
- What kind of evidence would
support the claims of the common-sense narrative? Where would it come
from and where would you find it? Most social scientists would start
with the people who actually spend...
- 3.3 Quantitative and qualitative
evidence Resource
- The Tables above provide official
quantitative evidence: evidence, data or information which is expressed
in numerical terms. On the face of it, this clearly shows that recorded
crime increased significantly...
- 3.4 Interpreting the crime problem Resource
- The Whole City, My Lord, is
alarm'd and uneasy. Wickedness has got such a Head, and the Robbers and
Insolence of the Night are such that the citizens are no longer secure
within their own Walls or safe...
- 3.5 Evaluating claims, using
evidence Resource
- Where does this exploration of
evidence lead us? Can we decisively confirm or refute the common-sense
stories of the crime problem in the UK?
- 3.6 Summary
Resource
- The common-sense narratives of the
crime problem in the UK can be broken down into a series of distinct
claims that make assessing them easier.
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4 Explaining crimes
- 4.1 Exploring the claims about crime Resource
- The claims of the common-sense
story of crime that we unearthed in Section 3 were, broadly speaking,
about the start of the story (how things were then) and the end of the
story (how things are now). But...
- 4.2 Structure and agency in the
explanation of the crime problem Resource
- The social sciences are both
united and divided by the debate over structure and agency. That debate
turns on the degree to which people are either free to act as they
choose or are constrained by forces...
- 4.3 Structural explanations I:
biology Resource
- There is a long and uneven
tradition of claims that the origins of crime and deviance are
biological. In the nineteenth century it was claimed, for example, that
brain sizes and skull shapes could explain...
- 4.4 Structural explanations II:
families Resource
- Our second example of structural
explanations of criminal behaviour takes a different starting point. It
looks at pathological or problem families and the transmission of
criminal careers within them....
- 4.5 Structural explanations III:
cultures Resource
- An early and influential body of
research by the Chicago School of sociology explained criminal behaviour
in terms of cultural structures. The school studied American male
juvenile delinquents – or young...
- 4.6 Agency explanations: rational
choice theory Resource
- The work of the Chicago School,
despite the potential pitfalls of participant observation, does
demonstrate that if you want to know why people commit crimes it makes
sense to ask them. In his memoir of...
- 4.7 Summary
Resource
- The social sciences have generated
a range of explanations of criminal behaviour, running on a spectrum
from overwhelmingly structural causes to overwhelmingly agency-driven
causes.
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5 Questions, questions
- 5.1 How did we get here? Resource
- We began this unit by posing the
question: what is a crime? Shouldn't we be finishing with a clear and
unambiguous answer to this? Well we are sorry to disappoint you, if that
is what you were expecting,...
- 5.2 Where can we go from here? Resource
- As this discussion has unfolded we
have progressively shifted the focus from a description of crime,
either through the common-sense story or through the detailing of
statistical evidence, to competing...
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References and Acknowledgements
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