| Crime and Justice |
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SOCI A301
Crime and Justice
| Introduction to the course |  |
SOCI A301 is designed to equip you with knowledge of a range of themes, concepts and debates necessary to develop an understanding of the globally contested nature of 'crime' and 'justice'. It examines a wide range of questions, such as:
When, where and for whom are certain behaviours, events and situations considered to be 'criminal'?
What interventions, processes and institutions are considered to constitute 'justice' and 'criminal justice'?
What are the relationships between crime and justice?
How do notions of the global and the local help us to think about crime, justice and criminal justice?
| Course structure, components and assessment | |
As well as the course companion, SOCI A301 is presented in the form of a DVD, two course books, assignment booklet and a wide range of other resources. Many of these resources are available through the Online Learning Platform (OLE).
The teaching and learning strategy of the course evolves through six stages (each related to the submission of tutor-marked assignment(s) (TMA).
Stage 1
DVD - Opium: A Blessing and a Curse, Course Companion and TMA 1
The DVD, along with this Course Companion, comprises the main teaching material for stage 1 of the course.
Here you will be considering some of the legal and illegal aspects of drug production and consumption. We give specific consideration to opium, as a 'trigger topic', to help you to start thinking through the social and historical contexts in which a substance typically conceived of as 'problematic' is seen as valuable and beneficial compared to those instances when its production and use is criminalised. Opium has been selected as the topic around which to develop some of the major course themes because of its many forms, its legal and illegal uses, its historical and continuing presence in global economies and its common classification as a 'highly addictive and dangerous street drug' (when in the form of heroin). Investigating historical shifts in the legalisation and criminalisation of opium brings into clear focus the global dimensions of the issue, because the 'war on drugs' coexists with widespread acceptance of its painkilling properties (when in the form of morphine). Trade in opium is a global one, interwoven with a complex of poverty in developing countries, the economic demands of nineteenth-century colonial governments, pharmaceutical company profit, transnational policing, moral revulsion, prohibition, international regulation and localised consumer demand.
The DVD comprises three interrelated films:
Film 1 For Pleasure and For Pain Film 2 Traders and Traffickers Film 3 The Wars on Drugs Your work in stage 1 concludes with the completion of TMA 01.
Stage 2
Book 1, Crime: Local and Global (Chapters 1-7), Course Companion and TMA 02 and 03
During stage 2 you will be working (reading and making notes) mainly on the seven chapters in Book 1, Crime: Local and Global, edited by John Muncie, Deborah Talbot and Reece Walters.
Book 1 is designed to broaden 'everyday' conceptions of crime by exploring the different ways in which 'crime' is manifested in the diverse sites of the city, cyberspace, the body, the corporation, the environment and the state. It is in these sites that the book chapters begin to unravel how and why certain 'undesirable' places, events, behaviours and people are identified as 'deserving' of the criminal label (and thereby of criminal sanction), while others are not. The book explores a number of examples, such as 'urban disorders', transgression in cyberspace, human trafficking, corporate violence, environmental pollution, genocide and state-sponsored torture, to consider how far the 'global' is challenging traditional criminological conceptions of the meaning and parameters of the 'crime problem'. Looking beyond the borders of 'crime', as differentially defined through the criminal law statutes of individual nation states, forces exploration of areas traditionally neglected by criminology. It requires a level of analysis that places 'crime' (as defined by and committed within states) alongside alternative sensitising concepts such as power, harm and violence. It compels recognition of a wide range of troubling issues that remain hidden (and thereby unacknowledged) by state-centred perspectives.
Your work in stage 2 concludes with the completion of TMA 02 and 03.
Stage 3
Book 2, Criminal Justice: Local and Global (Chapters 1–2), Course Companion and TMA 04
During stage 3 you should, first, study Chapters 1 and 2 of Book 2, Criminal Justice: Local and Global, edited by Deborah Drake, John Muncie and Louise Westmarland, using Course Companion as your guide.
Whereas Book 1 focuses on 'everyday' conceptions of crime, Book 2 is designed to broaden 'everyday' conceptions of criminal justice by exploring the different ways in which 'criminal justice' is manifested in cultures of control, experiments in restoration and conflict resolution, risk technologies, private security, techniques of surveillance, transnational policing and conceptions of universal human rights. In the first two weeks you will be examining how the 'justice' in criminal justice is practised through a range of 'crime control' justifications, including retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation, deterrence and punitiveness. You will be provided with the means to engage critically with these major criminal justice rationales.
In the later part of these five weeks, you should read through the notes for TMA 04 to choose a topic that you are interested in researching in more depth at stage 5.
At the end of stage 3 you will be writing up the 'proposal' stage of your independent essay, TMA 04.
Stage 4
Book 2, Criminal Justice: Local and Global (Chapters 3-7), Course Companion and TMA 05
In stage 4 you should complete your reading and study of the remaining five chapters of Book 2. These chapters in particular look beyond the borders of criminal justice, as differentially practised through consider two main questions:
Can 'justice' be delivered without recourse to formal systems of criminal justice?
- In a globalised world, does it make any sense to continue to view criminal justice systems as 'belonging' to individual sovereign nation states?
Historically, law making and law enforcement have been the prerogative of the state. Now that sovereignty is being challenged by international courts, human rights instruments, multinational private security enterprises and possibilities for global surveillance, however, it is no longer clear what the scope of criminal justice is and who exactly constitutes the subject of its gaze. This uncertainty fosters a series of conundrums for criminological analysis. Increasingly, it appears that sovereign criminal justice is being challenged not simply by the production of its own 'internal injustices', but also by the disjuncture between domestic and international priorities and requirements. What role can individual states perform, on their own, in a world of global threats and insecurities? What meaning remains for state-specific conceptions of criminal law and criminal justice?
Your work during stage 4 concludes with the completion of TMA 05.
Stage 5
TMA 06
This is where you have a real chance to make SOCI A301 your own, by researching in detail the topic you choose in TMA 04. In stage 5 your work will be more or less self-directed by the type of materials that you have been able to track down through the OLE and your own internet and library searches.
Stage 5 culminates in the completion of TMA 06. This is a required and heavy TMA of approximately 3500 words in length. You will find detailed guidance for this TMA in the guide that comes with it.
Stage 6
Course Companion and TMA 07
At the end of the course we provided sufficient time for you to review all the work that you have done for the course and to devise an effective revision strategy in preparation for the end-of-course examination. There are three course components that will help you with this:
In Course Companion you will find advice on gathering and organizing revision materials.
The related assignment for this part of the course – TMA 07 – enables you to test your skills in answering exam type question and get valuable feedback to refine your skills.
- A specimen exam paper (SEP) will give you a good idea of the structure and format of the actual examination. You will find this available on the OLE later in the course.
| Key course themes and concepts | |
SOCI A301 is organised around the three conceptual areas of:
- power
- harm and violence
- relations between the local and the global.
These are manifested in different ways in different parts of the course. The brief outlines below will give you an initial idea of why they are so important to the course overall.
Power
Everyday discussions of crime tend to assume that all transgressions of criminal law have some common and shared quality and that the answer to the question 'what is crime?' is self-evident. This course emphasises that it makes little sense to view crime in this way. Whatever unites such activities as drug use, street crime, identity theft, domestic violence, corporate fraud, torture, and so on, it is clear that we are confronted with a wide and diverse series of behaviours, events and categories of the 'criminal'. This is compounded by the fact that notions of crime are neither fixed nor universal. What is defined as a 'crime' in one society may be morally and lawfully acceptable in another. Moreover, in any one society, what is defined as 'criminal' is likely to change over time as new activities are criminalised and others are decriminalised. What constitutes 'crime', then, is contingent on particular social, economic, legal and ideological circumstances. As a result, a core concern of the course is to explore why certain behaviours and events come to be subject to criminal sanction, while others do not. This leads us to ask the fundamental question of who has the power to decide what should be criminalised and what is condoned or ignored.
Power operates at different levels. Those who hold political power may be able to keep some of their crime (such as illegal arms dealing, torture and genocide) out of public view by denial, while those with economic power may hide their crimes (such as insider trading, money laundering, environmental pollution, avoidable death and injury in the workplace) in the complexities of business law and self-regulation. More micro relations of power between men, women and children may mean that the extent of domestic crimes (such as violence and abuse) never reaches the light of the day or that these crimes are dealt with as personal matters with which the state should not interfere. In all such cases perpetrators may indeed claim that their actions are not 'criminal' at all. These cases also suggest that dominant conceptions of 'crime' are clouded by the power to make certain crimes invisible and thereby exclude them from 'law and order' debate. No matter what their damaging outcomes, they are not usually viewed as part of the 'crime problem'. Indeed, some major sources of social iniquity and harm are often legal and considered to be quite legitimate. There is a strong argument, therefore, that a conception of crime, without a conception of power, is meaningless.
Harm and violence
Popular and political talk of the 'crime problem' and the 'fear of crime and violence' often adopts a narrow and constraining frame of reference that locates crime (as law violation) primarily in particular places (the inner city street), carried out by particular individuals (from an 'underclass') and involving certain heinous behaviours (interpersonal violence). In some contrast, this course reveals a remarkable diversity in the sites of crime beyond the 'inner city street', which includes cyberspace, international migration, the corporation, the environment, and the state. In these sites the extent of harm and violence may be far more extensive and damaging than that 'on the street', but often evades criminal justice scrutiny. Moreover, much of this harm and violence is perpetrated beyond the boundaries of nation-state territories and thereby requires newer forms of analysis than those found in traditional 'criminological knowledge'.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a then newly emergent critical criminology insisted that crime cannot be identified simply by focusing on those individual offenders known to the criminal justice systems of particular nation states. A focus on harm (rather than on just criminal law violation) and on violence in all its forms (rather than on just interpersonal violence) radically broadens the subject matter of criminology. As a result, SOCI A301 has been designed to explore the relationship between those injurious acts defined as such by criminal law – such as theft, burglary and criminal damage – and a wide range of harms – such as tax avoidance, malnutrition, human rights violations, environmental pollution, state atrocities and genocide – which typically lie outside of criminal law sanction. The course maintains that if a core concern of criminology is to understand and respond to fears for personal safety and social stability, then we must look beyond 'crime' to discover where the most dangerous threats and risks to our person and property lie. In particular, a social harm perspective allows us to explore wider considerations of responsibility for economic and geographical inequalities, injustices and exclusions and requires analysis of the role of government and corporations in their perpetration. Although the concept of crime clearly remains important, it is also necessary to explore how particular social orders generate social problems for their populations and why it is that only a selected few are considered worthy of criminal sanction.
Relations between the local and the global
The idea of 'globalisation' is now common currency in any discussion – popular, political or academic – of the major social and economic transformations facing the twenty-first century. Its precise meaning, though, often remains unclear. At one and the same time it conjures up both positive images of cultural exchange, free trade, advances in telecommunications and new opportunities, and, conversely, negative images of events being out of 'our' (or national) control, a global 'risk society', a dissolution of cultural difference and a world that has created extreme differentials of wealth and deprivation. SOCI A301 explores how these themes have impacted on understandings of crime and criminal justice. For example:
The relaxing of economic barriers to international trade – with the creation of the European Union (EU), for instance – has facilitated the mobility not only of people trying to find employment, but also the trafficking of illegal goods and the exploitation of children and women in a 'shadow economy' of a 'new slavery'.
The proliferation of computer networks, the internet and web-based information and communications technologies has allowed cyberspace to be one of the fastest-growing sites of crime and transgression. Not only does this raise perennial questions about security, surveillance, privacy and trust, but the complexity and rapid advance in the global computing and communications environment makes it beyond the reach of national control, regulation or policing.
The global free-trade market has produced a series of 'uncontrollable' economic forces that have shifted power, influence and authority away from the nation state and towards 'external' transnational capital. This has placed fiscal and political limitations on the type of welfare, social policy and criminal justice policy that individual states can support.
Flows of policing methods, penal knowledge and particular criminal justice policies around the world are some of the most tangible effects of such processes. For example, it has become more and more common for Western nation states to look worldwide – but in particular to the USA – in efforts to discover 'what works' in preventing crime and to reduce reoffending. It is in this context that it has become possible to start talking of an emergent globalisation of crime control.
- The work of global bodies, such as the United Nations (UN), in formulating international standards of human rights has created a 'legal globalisation' in that individual nation states can now be held to account for, for example, 'war crime' and 'crimes against humanity'.
SOCI A301 critically assesses the viability of these grand visions of a 'globalised' world of (apparently unbounded) crime and (apparently universal) justice. At the 'local level', for example, things may look a bit different. Individual states continue to jealously guard their own sovereignty and control over criminal justice and punishment. Local implementation of international initiatives may reveal an overwhelming adherence to some traditional values and a resistance to change. In the flow of policies across borders their meaning may change fundamentally. In other instances we may be witnessing 'deglobalisation': a retreat to the 'surety' of the familiar and a resort to protectionist nationalism. SOCI A301 does not assume that the 'global' should necessarily prefigure any other mode of analysis. The idea that the 'global' simply creates homogeneity and convergence is seriously flawed. Rather, the course is just as concerned to illustrate ways in which (undeniable) international transformations can be fully made sense of only by recognising how they are imagined, reworked or resisted in local contexts. Globalisation does not simply produce uniform or homogenising outcomes; it also produces social differentiation and dislocation. Criminal justice, too, remains a powerful symbol of the sovereignty and independence of individual nation states. Questions about who is criminalised and how they are to be dealt with are political and cultural decisions. The forces of globalisation cannot be ignored, but neither can the processes through which these forces come to have practical effect in different localities.
| What you will learn from the course | |
SOCI A301 is a Level 3 course and the amount of 'independent study' it requires of you corresponds to that found at honours level generally in undergraduate university study. Accordingly, it has been designed to enable you to demonstrate the following learning outcomes.
Knowledge and understanding
By the end of the course you will be better able to:
demonstrate knowledge and a critical understanding of selected approaches to the study of crime and justice
understand how 'crime' and 'criminal justice' are historically and geographically located in terms of the local and the global
understand how the course themes illuminate crime and criminal justice
develop a critical understanding of the relationship between criminological perspectives, research and policy
- describe how ideas of crime and criminal justice are contested.
Cognitive skills
By the end of the course you will be better able to:
critically evaluate different types of evidence
synthesise argument by drawing across the course materials
evaluate and challenge information from multiple sources utilising the techniques of social science argument
critically evaluate 'primary' texts
recognise the strengths and limitations of identified approaches to the study of crime and criminal justice
identify and formulate questions appropriately to explore relevant issues
- understand the relationship between policy, theory and practice.
Key skills
By the end of the course you will be better able to:
communicate complex information, arguments and ideas clearly in written form
select, summarise and synthesise information from different criminological sources, including primary texts
write utilising the stylistic and referencing conventions of the social sciences
utilise electronic sources of information with appropriate discrimination and critical awareness
plan, monitor and reflect on your own learning
provide an explicit statement of independent study
- identify appropriate questions, communicate complex arguments, evaluate and use data, with ICT skills, and, as an independent learner, plan, evaluate and seek ways to improve performance.
Practical and/or professional skills
By the end of the course you will be better able to:
demonstrate an awareness of the ethical implications of social science research and knowledge
demonstrate an awareness of the utility of criminological approaches in policy and practice
critically examine and analyse policy documents
integrate and critically demonstrate the relationship between theory, research methods and policy
demonstrate an ability to apply relevant research methodologies to the analysis of documents
demonstrate the centrality of core course themes to a chosen topic
select and use techniques of analysis; synthesise and critically analyse information, arguments and assumptions from different sources; and recognise potential ambiguities and uncertainties of knowledge
- recognise, record and communicate skills and knowledge to achieve personal/career goals.
