New Right
“Fight against crime" being lost.
Solution: Develop ways to limit impact of crime.
New Right: “Conservative” approach to dealing with crime, focused oncrime-prevention and crime-reduction:
Ecological ideas about people’s relationship to their immediateenvironment.
How cultural and physical environment encourages or discouragesdeviant behaviour.
Attempts to solve offending ineffective.
In UK, late-1960s, early 1970s, belief that:
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Denying opportunities to potential offenders.
More effective territorial controls.
Advertising campaigns to increaseawareness of criminal opportunities andhow to deny them by protecting property.
Increase in community-based surveillance:
▪ ‘informal-policing’
▪ information gathering.
▪ Closer police and community relations.
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Unchecked criminality leads to disorder within a community.
Disorder feeds the development of more and greater criminality.
Kleiman (2000): where people fear crime they take steps to avoidit, to the detriment of community life. The streets becomepreserve of lawbreakers.
Establishing order breaks the "cycle of disorder“; it reduces bothactual crime and the fear of crime.
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People make rational choices about conformity / deviance.
This involves a ‘cost/benefit’ explanation of offending:
Potential offenders rationally weigh the likely benefits ofcrime (money, status...) against likely costs (being punished).
Punishments, however severe, are not deterrents; do peopleever commit a crime believing they will be caught?
Wilson (1983): Crime control involves:
Rational choice operates through sourcesthat ‘supply a crudely accurate estimate ofthe current risks of arrest, prosecution, andsentencing’.
Offenders may have knowledge of situational variables, such as the best places andtimes to commit crimes with the least possible risks.
Wiles and Costello (2000): burglars choice of target influenced by:
poor security.
unoccupied premises.
isolated / quiet location.
People may have little idea of actualchances of being arrested.
increasing the risk for offenders.
raising crime costs to outweigh benefits.
making people think rationally about risk.
highly visible measures to deter crime.
Clarke (1980): Crime theory should focus onprevention and management, rather than"causes of crime".
Most crimes have two characteristics that make them preventable:
Criminal behaviour takes many different forms:
Makes little sense to assume theyhave similar causes or outcomes.
Theft is different to rape.
Fraud is different to burglary.
Prevention strategies, based around changes to the cultural and physicalenvironments, make crime more difficult, less attractive and more costly forthe perpetrator.
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Clarke (1980): Most crimes result from "the immediate choicesand decisions made by the offender”.
Most crime is opportunistic - unplanned and carried out
"on the spur of the moment“.
If an opportunity presents itself - a car is left unlocked andunattended, for example - an offender may be tempted if thechances of being detected are less than the likely benefits.
Based around a cost / benefit analysis of crime.
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Wiles and Costello (2000): Localised crime - ‘Average distancetravelled to commit burglary is 2 miles’.
Routine activity theory: Offences committed outside local areamainly involve opportunities presenting themselves ‘duringnormal routines’, rather than being consciously planned.
If measures taken to reduce opportunities, crime rates fall.
Denial of opportunity plus territoriality, means most crime notdisplaced to other areas.
Realist: note evaluative comments in terms of two broad areas:
Right Realism: Critical evaluation here initially involves looking at two ideas:
Although both Realist (initally in the UK)and Right Realist (initally in the USA)approaches have influenced crimestrategies and polices in recent years,both have attracted criticisms:
Leads to control agenciessuch as the policediscovering more crime
among the target groups.
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Cultural strategies like criminalprofiling - where the policebuild-up pictures of typicalcriminals - result in somegroups being targeted as‘potential criminals’.
Individuals and marginalisedgroups investigated less forwhat they’ve done and morefor what they are...
This, in turn, confirms their
initial profiling and feeds into
continued profiling to create
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Cultural environments
Osborn and Shaftoe (1995):evidence for crime reduction notclear cut; physical measuresreduce fear of crime, not crimeitself.
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Crime reductions = statisticalartefact; people "feel safer“ andreport fewer crimes. Policies likereducing poverty or inequality
provide better long-term solutionsto crime reduction.
Town (2001): CCTVsurveillance doesn’t resultin crime displacement.
Physical environments
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Exception fallacy: a situation where the characteristics of anindividual are applied to all similar individuals - can be used tocriticise Right Realist link between minor and major disorder:
Individuals not the same as communities - latter contain people,such as the police, who help to prevent disorder.
While low-level individual disorder may develop into majordisorder, communities can experience low-level disorderwithout ever developing major disorder.
Minor - major disorder link neither inevitable nor valid.
Exception Fallacy
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Right Realism: direction of causality is from crime to disorder.Unchecked low-level crime means neighbourhood declines intodisorder - removing crime removes the cause of disorder.
Lea (2007): causality is actually reversed; disorder creates crime:
More crime in working-class areas not because it is uncheckedbut because crime is a consequence of disorderly socialrelationships, such as unemployment and single-parenthood,caused by inequality.
Removing the causes of disorder removes the causes of crime.
Causality
