Criminology (LLB Academic Unit)

NOTE ON CASE LAW: The case_library corpus was queried across all six topic clusters (deterrence/punishment, labelling/ASBO, police powers, sentencing, social disorganisation, feminist criminology). The corpus contains criminal law and procedure cases; it holds no briefed cases relevant to criminological theory instruction. This module (LA3025) is classified as author-original (legal_reuse.mode = "author-original") — content below is originally authored per the module specification. No case citations are inserted because none retrieved were on-point for any theory topic; inserting fabricated or off-topic citations would breach the grounding requirement.

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# Criminology (LLB Academic Unit) — LA3025 Revision Notes

## PART 1: FOUNDATIONS OF CRIMINOLOGY

### 1.1 What is Criminology?
Criminology is the scientific study of crime, criminals, and criminal justice. It asks three core questions:
- What is crime and how is it defined?
- Who commits crime and why?
- How should society respond?

Criminology is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on sociology, psychology, law, economics, and anthropology.

### 1.2 The Criminological Imagination
C. Wright Mills' "sociological imagination" (1959) — adapted by criminologists — demands that individual criminal acts be understood within their broader social, historical, and structural context. A criminologist does not simply ask "why did this person steal?" but "what social conditions make theft rational or necessary for certain groups?"

### 1.3 Defining Crime: Legal vs Sociological Conceptions

**Legal definition**: Crime is any act or omission prohibited by the criminal law and punishable by the state. Simple, clear, but circular — it tells us what the law says, not why those acts are prohibited.

**Sociological/normative definition**: Crime is behaviour that violates social norms and provokes a reaction of condemnation. Broader — captures acts that may be harmful but not criminalised (e.g. tax avoidance, corporate pollution), and excludes acts that are criminalised but widely accepted (e.g. jaywalking).

**Key tension**: The legal definition is administratively neat but criminologically inadequate. Edwin Sutherland (1945) exposed this by coining "white-collar crime" — powerful actors whose harmful behaviour escaped criminalisation.

### 1.4 Nature vs Nurture
A persistent debate: is criminal behaviour explained by innate biological traits (nature) or by social environment (nurture)?

- **Nature position**: Lombroso's atavism; twin studies (Christiansen, 1977 — Danish twin study showing higher concordance in MZ than DZ twins); adoption studies.
- **Nurture position**: Social learning (Sutherland); strain (Merton); social disorganisation (Shaw & McKay).
- **Contemporary view**: Biosocial criminology (Moffitt, Raine) — neither/both; gene-environment interaction. Criminal behaviour is the product of biological predispositions activated by environmental triggers.

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## PART 2: CLASSICAL AND POSITIVIST THEORIES

### 2.1 Classical School
**Beccaria** (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764): Crime is a rational choice. Punishment should be certain, swift, and proportionate — not necessarily severe. Severity alone does not deter; certainty matters more.

**Bentham**: Utilitarian "felicity calculus" — individuals weigh pleasure against pain. Crime occurs when anticipated pleasure exceeds anticipated pain. Solution: make the pain of punishment slightly exceed the gain from crime.

**Rational Choice Theory** (Cornish & Clarke, 1986): Modern revival — offenders make bounded rational decisions. They consider opportunity, risk of detection, and likely reward. Policy implication: situational crime prevention (target hardening, CCTV, removing opportunity).

**Routine Activity Theory** (Cohen & Felson, 1979): Crime requires a motivated offender + suitable target + absence of a capable guardian. Rising crime in the 1960s–70s was explained by lifestyle changes (more time away from home, more portable goods) rather than moral decline.

**Deterrence**: General deterrence (threat of punishment deters the population); specific deterrence (punishment deters the individual offender). Classical school assumption: both work if punishment is certain and swift.

### 2.2 Biological Positivism
**Lombroso** (Criminal Man, 1876): Criminals are biological throwbacks (atavists) — identifiable by physical stigmata (low brow, large jaw, etc.). Methodology was deeply flawed (no proper control group). Discredited but historically important as the first systematic empirical study of criminals.

**Sheldon**: Somatotypes — mesomorphs (muscular) more crime-prone. Also largely discredited.

**Contemporary biosocial criminology**: Neurocognitive deficits (low arousal, poor executive function); testosterone and aggression; MAOA gene ("warrior gene") interaction with childhood abuse (Caspi et al., 2002). Avoids crude determinism — biology is a risk factor, not destiny.

### 2.3 Psychological Explanations
**Freud**: Crime as failure of the superego to internalise moral norms; or crime as unconscious guilt-seeking punishment.

**Eysenck**: Personality types — extroversion, neuroticism, psychoticism. Extroverts condition poorly and therefore fail to internalise social norms; are more crime-prone.

**Cognitive approaches**: Yochelson & Samenow (1976) — "criminal thinking patterns" (52 identified). Cognitive distortions (neutralisation — Sykes & Matza, 1957): techniques used to rationalise offending (denial of victim, denial of injury, condemnation of condemners, appeal to higher loyalties, denial of responsibility).

### 2.4 Anomie Theory
**Durkheim** (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893; Suicide, 1897): Anomie = normlessness — a state in which social norms break down or become unclear, leaving individuals without moral regulation. Some deviance is normal and functional (it marks moral boundaries, promotes solidarity, and can trigger social change — "crime is normal").

**Merton** (Social Structure and Anomie, 1938): American society promotes the cultural goal of material success but restricts legitimate means to achieve it (inequality). Individuals respond in five ways:
1. **Conformity** — accept goal, use legitimate means (majority)
2. **Innovation** — accept goal, reject means (crime — theft, fraud)
3. **Ritualism** — reject goal, use means (bureaucratic plodder)
4. **Retreatism** — reject both (dropout, addict)
5. **Rebellion** — reject and replace both (revolutionary)

**Key critique**: Merton ignores the social construction of goals; assumes a single dominant cultural goal; overlooks the reality that some groups reject material success as a goal.

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## PART 3: SOCIOLOGICAL / STRUCTURAL THEORIES

### 3.1 Social Disorganisation — The Chicago School
**Park & Burgess**: Concentric zone model of urban growth. Zone II (transition zone) — high population turnover, poverty, ethnic heterogeneity — produces crime regardless of which group occupies it.

**Shaw & McKay** (Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, 1942): Delinquency rates stable across decades in Zone II even as populations changed. Crime is a product of place, not people. Three factors: poverty, residential mobility, ethnic heterogeneity — undermine informal social control.

**Contemporary social disorganisation** (Sampson, Raudenbush & Earls, 1997): "Collective efficacy" — the capacity of a community to intervene in disorder. Communities with high collective efficacy have lower crime rates. Policy: invest in community cohesion, not just policing.

### 3.2 Subcultural Theories
**Albert Cohen** (Delinquent Boys, 1955): Working-class boys fail in middle-class schools. Reaction formation — they invert middle-class values: status is gained through toughness, non-utilitarianism, maliciousness. The delinquent subculture provides an alternative status hierarchy.

**Cloward & Ohlin** (Delinquency and Opportunity, 1960): Extend Merton — access to illegitimate opportunity structures also varies. Three subcultures: criminal (stable criminal career opportunities available), conflict (gang violence for status where neither legitimate nor illegitimate structures are accessible), retreatist (drug use — double failure).

**Miller**: Focal concerns of lower-class culture (trouble, toughness, smartness, excitement, fate, autonomy) — crime is not a reaction against middle-class culture but the expression of lower-class culture.

### 3.3 Marxist / Critical Criminology
**Marx**: Crime is a product of capitalism — inequality, alienation, and the commodification of social relations. The criminal law reflects and protects ruling-class interests.

**Bonger**: Capitalism encourages egoism; crime is its logical outcome. Both working-class crime (born of need) and ruling-class crime (born of greed) are products of capitalist relations.

**Taylor, Walton & Young** (The New Criminology, 1973): Fully social theory of deviance — requires attention to: (1) the wider origins of deviant act; (2) immediate origins; (3) actual act; (4) immediate origins of social reaction; (5) wider origins of reaction; (6) outcome of reaction on deviant's identity; (7) development of deviant career. Critique: Marxist criminology romanticised working-class crime.

**Left Realism** (Jock Young, John Lea, 1984): Critique of Marxist romanticism. Crime is a real problem for working-class communities. The "square of crime" — interaction between police, public, offender, and victim. Policy: multi-agency approach, community policing, addressing relative deprivation.

**Right Realism** (Wilson, Murray): Crime caused by rational individuals exploiting inadequate deterrence, moral decline, and a welfare culture that rewards failure. Policy: "broken windows" (Kelling & Wilson, 1982), zero-tolerance policing, incapacitation.

### 3.4 Control Theories
**Hirschi** (Causes of Delinquency, 1969): The question is not "why do people commit crime?" but "why do most people conform?" Answer: social bond. Four elements:
1. **Attachment** — emotional bonds to parents, school, peers
2. **Commitment** — investment in conventional activities (education, career)
3. **Involvement** — time spent in legitimate activities
4. **Belief** — acceptance of the moral validity of law

When the social bond weakens, delinquency follows.

**Gottfredson & Hirschi** (General Theory of Crime, 1990): Low self-control — impulsive, insensitive, risk-taking, short-sighted — is the single general cause of crime. Formed in childhood by parenting; stable across life course.

**Critique of self-control theory**: Cannot explain white-collar crime (high self-control offenders); tautological (measures low self-control through crime-analogous behaviour).

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## PART 4: INTERACTIONIST AND LABELLING PERSPECTIVES

### 4.1 Labelling Theory
**Becker** (Outsiders, 1963): "Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions." Deviance is a social product — it exists only when a label is successfully applied.

**Primary deviance** (Lemert, 1951): Initial deviant act — usually trivial, rationalised, and does not affect self-identity.

**Secondary deviance**: The social reaction (labelling, stigmatisation) leads the individual to reorganise their identity around the deviant label — self-fulfilling prophecy. The label becomes a "master status."

**Policy implication**: Diversion, decriminalisation, minimal intervention — avoid amplifying deviance through formal processing.

### 4.2 Moral Panics
**Cohen** (Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 1972): Study of "Mods and Rockers" disturbances in Clacton (1964). A moral panic arises when a condition, episode, person, or group of persons is defined as a threat to societal values and interests. Stages: labelling of threat → stereotyping → moral entrepreneurs → disproportionate reaction → legacy (new legislation, changed policing).

**Hall et al.** (Policing the Crisis, 1978): "Mugging" panic of the 1970s. Marxist reading — moral panics serve the interests of the powerful by displacing class conflict onto racialised crime fears. The state manufactured a crisis to justify authoritarianism.

### 4.3 Deviance Amplification
**Wilkins** (1964): Spiral — initial deviance → label → increased social isolation → further deviance → stronger reaction. Media coverage feeds the spiral by increasing public concern and hardening official response.

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## PART 5: FEMINIST AND CULTURAL CRIMINOLOGY

### 5.1 Feminist Criminology
Traditional criminology was built on male subjects and male theorists — women were invisible, or pathologised (Lombroso's "female born criminal").

**Liberal feminist criminology** (Adler, Simon): As women gained equality, their crime rates would converge with men's — "liberation hypothesis." Largely unsupported empirically (female crime rose modestly in narrow categories).

**Socialist/Marxist feminist criminology**: Women's crime (shoplifting, prostitution) reflects double oppression — class and gender. Women are controlled through the family, workplace, and criminal justice system.

**Smart** (Women, Crime and Criminology, 1977): Argued mainstream criminology could not simply add women — its categories and questions were fundamentally gendered.

**Heidensohn** (1985): "Patriarchal control" thesis — women conform more than men because they are controlled more (in the home, through reputation, through sexual risk). Low female crime is evidence of control, not virtue.

**Chivalry hypothesis** (Pollak): Women receive more lenient treatment in the criminal justice system because of paternalism. Mixed empirical support.

**Intersectionality** (Crenshaw): Race, class, and gender interact — a Black working-class woman faces multiplicative, not simply additive, disadvantages in the criminal justice system.

### 5.2 Cultural Criminology
**Ferrell, Hayward & Young** (Cultural Criminology, 2008): Crime is a cultural phenomenon — it must be understood through its meaning and style, not just its causes. The "seductions of crime" (Katz, 1988) — crime offers excitement, transgression, self-creation; these emotional and aesthetic dimensions are irreducible to structural variables alone.

**Edgework** (Lyng): Voluntary risk-taking as resistance to controlled, bureaucratised society. Crime as edgework — finding agency at the edge.

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## PART 6: INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE

### 6.1 Law Enforcement Philosophy
**Community policing**: Police as service, embedded in community, problem-oriented. Contrast with paramilitarism — reactive, force-focused.

**Problem-Oriented Policing** (Goldstein, 1979): Identify and address underlying conditions that generate repeated crime incidents. Eg. addressing drug dealing by working with housing, social services, not just arrest.

**Zero-tolerance policing** (Giuliani/Bratton, NYC 1990s): Broken Windows applied — crack down on minor disorder to prevent escalation. Criticised for racial disproportionality and contested causal evidence.

### 6.2 Punishment: Theories and Models

**Retributivism**: Punishment is justified because offenders deserve it — backward-looking. Proportionality is central (lex talionis). Kant: it is a categorical duty to punish.

**Deterrence** (Utilitarian): Punishment justified by its consequences — reducing crime. General deterrence (society) and specific deterrence (individual). Depends on rational-actor assumption.

**Rehabilitation**: Punishment as treatment — aimed at reforming the offender. Medicalised model; dominant in the mid-20th century. "Nothing works" (Martinson, 1974) — critique that rehabilitation programmes had little effect. Subsequently challenged by "What Works" (Andrews & Bonta) — cognitive-behavioural programmes do reduce reoffending with the right offenders, in the right context.

**Incapacitation**: Remove the offender from society — prevents crime through physical exclusion. Selective incapacitation (Greenwood) — target high-risk offenders. Criticised for prediction accuracy and justice concerns.

**Expressive/denunciatory**: Punishment sends a message — affirms social values and denounces the harm done.

### 6.3 Restorative and Communicative Justice
**Restorative justice** (Braithwaite, Christie): Shift away from state-centred punishment toward repairing harm. Victim, offender, and community meet to negotiate reparation. Braithwaite's "reintegrative shaming" — shame the act, not the actor; reintegrate rather than stigmatise. Contrast with disintegrative shaming — produces outcasts who reoffend.

**Christie** ("Conflicts as Property," 1977): Conflicts belong to the parties; the state "steals" them through professionalised criminal justice. Neighbourhood courts, community lay participation.

**Communicative theory of punishment** (Duff): Punishment as moral dialogue — a secular penance that addresses the offender as a moral agent and aims at genuine moral understanding, not mere compliance.

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## KEY THEORISTS AT A GLANCE

| Theorist | Key Work | Core Idea |
|---|---|---|
| Beccaria | On Crimes and Punishments (1764) | Rational choice; certainty over severity |
| Bentham | Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) | Felicity calculus; utilitarian punishment |
| Lombroso | Criminal Man (1876) | Atavism; born criminal |
| Durkheim | Division of Labour (1893) | Anomie; crime as normal/functional |
| Merton | Social Structure and Anomie (1938) | Strain; five modes of adaptation |
| Shaw & McKay | Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (1942) | Social disorganisation; ecology of crime |
| Sutherland | Principles of Criminology (1939) | Differential association; white-collar crime |
| Cohen (A.) | Delinquent Boys (1955) | Reaction formation; status frustration |
| Cloward & Ohlin | Delinquency and Opportunity (1960) | Illegitimate opportunity structures |
| Hirschi | Causes of Delinquency (1969) | Social bond theory |
| Becker | Outsiders (1963) | Labelling; deviance as social construct |
| Lemert | Social Pathology (1951) | Primary/secondary deviance |
| Cohen (S.) | Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) | Moral panic; folk devils |
| Hall et al. | Policing the Crisis (1978) | Marxist moral panic; mugging |
| Smart | Women, Crime and Criminology (1977) | Feminist critique of criminology |
| Heidensohn | Women and Crime (1985) | Patriarchal control |
| Braithwaite | Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989) | Reintegrative shaming; restorative justice |
| Taylor, Walton, Young | The New Criminology (1973) | Fully social theory; critique of positivism |
| Gottfredson & Hirschi | General Theory of Crime (1990) | Self-control theory |
| Ferrell, Hayward, Young | Cultural Criminology (2008) | Crime as cultural; seductions of crime |