Using Theories of Social Control

1. Using Theories of Social Control

2. Assessment 2 • Write a 2,500 word letter to a government minister concerning an instance of ‘organized crime. Due 28.04.17 • Your letter should include the following: • An Introduction • Theory • Outline theory of social control, relate to organized crime • Discussion of competing definitions of organized crime • Discussion of the ways in which organised crime has been constructed looking to history and the present day • Discussion of how to measure harms from organized crime • Outline your chosen instance of organized crime, considering: • How this matches the definitions of organized crime discussed above • The construction of this instance of organised crime • Discuss levels of harm associated with this instance of organized crime • A Conclusion

3. Introduction • Tell the reader which issue you will be discussing • Note the theoretical perspective you will be writing your essay from • Lay out your plan for the essay • Express the point you will be making in the essay

4. Theory of Social Control • Your essays must be based around at least one of the following: • Liberal/social contract theories • Conflict theories • Post modern theories

5. Liberal theory • Relates to functionalist idea of social order, dysfunction, socialisation, social values & bonds • Hobbes’ Leviathan – liberal • Human nature – ‘war of all against all’ • Rational self-interested individuals choose law • Social Contract • Criticism: • A-sociological – no social context, no discussion of power, social construction

6. Liberal Theory “Rousseau the French writer of the 18th century in his famous book The Social Contract wrote that man in the state of nature was a noble savage who led a life of primitive simplicity and idyllic happiness. He was independent, contented, self-sufficient, healthy, fearless and good. It was only primitive instinct and sympathy which united him with others. He knew neither right or wrong and was free from all notions of virtue and vice. Man enjoyed a pure, unsophisticated, innocent life of perfect freedom and equality in the state of nature. But these conditions did not last long. Population increased and reason was dawned. Simplicity and idyllic happiness disappeared. Families were established, institution of property emerged and human equality was ended. Man began to think in terms of mine and yours. When equality and happiness of the early state was lost, war, murder, conflicts became the order of the day. The escape from this was found in the formation of a civil society. Natural freedom gave place to civil freedom by a social contract. As a result of this contract a multitude of individuals became a collective unity- a civil society .Rousseau said that by virtue of this contract everyone while uniting himself to all remains as free as before.” http://www.sociologyguide.com/individual-society/social-contract-theory.php • Hobbes: Without the state their would be chaos, we must obey the state • Locke: If the state becomes despotic, we must rebel • Rousseau: Things were fine before we had overpopulation. Then we had concepts such as private property. Then we needed social contract

7. Implication of liberal/social contract theory • People should obey the law • People should accept their punishments • Social control theory suggests that social problems (e.g. crime) can grow in the family... So • Justifiable for state to be concerned with the family • Encroaching on civil liberties can be acceptable • Threats to society must be dealt with

8. Marxism – A brief review • All history explained through the economic base • Three relationships: • Slavery: Slave-Master • Feudal: Serf-Lord • Capitalist: Proletariat-Bourgeoisie

9. Marxism: A Very Brief Review • Society essentially about conflict – Hobbes • People naturally co-operative • Divided by economic process into classes • All history class struggle – teleological • Proletariat/bourgeoisie - inequalities • Power resides in control of means of production/super structure • Law, State, education, social values

10. Classical Marxist Theory • Marxist – defining deviancy allows social agencies (police, school, media, government) to determine the law in the interests of a particular social class • Determines social morality & conformity • Crime itself is a defect of the social order arising from inequalities • Exploitation and poverty leads to crime • Acts against the leading ideology considered as crimes – strikes, benefit fraud • Crime not defined by harm – ideological tool for social control • Low pay, poor housing, insecure employment, stress and alienation which shorten lives are ‘real crimes’ with ‘real harm’ (Gordon 1991) (Box 1981, 1983, 1986)

11. Neo-Marxism • Stuart Hall, Jock Young, Paul Gilroy, LoicWaquant • Corporate crime • ‘Race’ and crime • Social construction of the ‘mugger’ • Alien conspiracy theory – illegal cigarettes • Crisis of capitalism – policing and law used as mechanism for capitalist contradictions • Consumerism breeds crime – cultural dimension of crime. • Organized Crime and Pure Capitalism

12. Assessment 2 • Write a 2,500 word letter to a government minister concerning an instance of ‘organized crime. Due 28.04.17 • Your letter should include the following: • An Introduction • Theory • Outline theory of social control, relate to organized crime • Discussion of competing definitions of organized crime • Discussion of the ways in which organised crime has been constructed looking to history and the present day • Discussion of how to measure harms from organized crime • Outline your chosen instance of organized crime, considering: • How this matches the definitions of organized crime discussed above • The construction of this instance of organised crime • Discuss levels of harm associated with this instance of organized crime • A Conclusion

13. Theory of Social Control • Your essays must be based around at least one of the following: • Liberal/social contract theories • Conflict theories • Post modern theories

14. Post Modernism: Foucault

15. Power/Knowledge • The constitution of knowledge • New forms of domination and subjection • Interested in Power relations not power itself • Power not in social structures or human agents • Power is a creative force, constituting individuals’ identities • Field of power or discourse • Only act within a particular discourse • Power is knowledge/knowledge is power

16. Carceral Society • Power has changed as society has changed • Power not possessed but circulates • All complicit in maintaining discourses • All creating our own chains • Carceral or disciplinary society • Subtle mechanisms of social control • Limits our freedom and our identities • Constitution of selves

17. Example: Sexuality • Sexuality, madness, prisons, the body • Bio-power – use of technologies of the body to constitute sexuality • Ancient world erotica & sexuality tied to pleasure & friendship • Non-western cultures sexual pleasure sophisticated & impersonal – non-moral • 18thC Renaissance new scientific techniques to chart population, disease • Perversion – homosexuality, promiscuity, women’s sexuality, masturbation • 1960s counter-discourse but created different categories of normal/abnormal • Liberation and resistance impossible in carceral society • Power ubiquitous

18. Discipline & Punishment (1979) • The Panoptican a model for this society • Constant surveillance, social control • Panoptican a more ‘liberal’, humane form of punishment over public display • But meant self-disciplining subjects • Seeped out of the prison walls into society • Schools, hospitals, military, family, government

19. Applying theories • Your essays should be based around at least one of the following perspectives: • Liberal/Social Contract • Conflict • Postmodern • You can use one perspective to critique another • Your theoretical approach should be visible throughout your essays • I will put further reading considering theories of control on weblearn

20. Discussion of competing definitions of organized crime • What problems are there with definitions of Organized crime? • Which definition will you use? • Why have their been problems in defining organized crime? • Can your chosen definition be justified or criticised with use of theory?

21. Discussion of the ways in which organised crime has been constructed looking to history and the present day

22. Social Construction • Crimes are not inherently criminal (no ontological reality) • Illegal behaviours and Deviant Acts are only so due to social construction • "Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitute deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders-deviance is not a quality of the act of a person commits, but rather a consequences of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an 'offender' The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied” (Becker 1963 p9) • Not all criminal behaviours and criminal people are treated equally criminally • http://www.scoop.it/t/drugs-society/p/4068883948/2016/09/10/video-julian-buchanan-the-social-construction-and-demonisation-of-drugs

23. Moral Panic Moral Entrepreneurs (Becker 1963) • Self Interested and highly mobilized groups who seek changes • Becker looked those involved in the prohibition of both Alcohol and Cannabis in the USA • Enjoyed by highly mobilised moral entrepreneurs and interested parties • Organize around something that appears a threat to norms and values • Media helps mould public opinion to be favourable to prohibition of substance, or enforcement of prohibition

24. Race and Drug Prohibition • Not a focus of Becker’s (1963) account • Moral entrepreneurs traded on American racism, xenophobia and fear of the other (Coomberet al 2013) • Important in stigmatization and prohibition of other drugs: • The Cocaine negro • The Chinese opium devil

25. Effects and causes of the War on Drugs (Garland 2001) • Huge extra workload for the Police • Mass imprisonment of young black males • Garland suggests that when war was declared that drug use already in decline, that it is unlikely to be changed by criminal justice punishments and the criminalization amplifies harms • Motivated by the politically urgent need to do something • The WoD was the USA’s attempt to ‘just say no’ – make a powerful statement that they were doing something • Garland sees this as denial, a government dealing with it’s limitations by pretending they don’t exist. • WoD was in effect declaring war on minorities in America

26. How does the state respond? Denial • ‘Prison works’ – official endorsement of the power to punish and denial of its limitations led to sustained increase in UK prison population to this day. • Pales in comparison to America’s ‘War on Drugs’ – “This massively expensive and largely futile to change a widespread and deeply entrenched pattern of behaviour by means of criminal punishments has all the hallmarks of a sovereign state dealing with its limitations by denying they exist” (p.132). • Measures are designed to be expressive, cathartic actions, undertaken to denounce the crime and reassure the public. • That their capacity to control future crime is doubtful is less important than their ability to enact public sentiment, to provide an instant response, to function as a retaliatory measure that can stand as an achievement in itself (p. 133).

27. Acting Out • Typically these measures are passed amidst great public outrage in the wake of sensational crimes of violence. • Political actors: “Their most pressing concern is to do something decisive, to respond with immediate effect to public outrage, to demonstrate that the state is in control and is willing to use its powers to uphold ‘law and order’ and to protect the law abiding public” (p. 133). • Community notification, sexual predator laws, supermax prisons, electronic monitoring and the recriminalization of youth justice involve public safety considerations. • “A show of punitive force against individuals is used to repress any acknowledgement of the state’s inability to control crime at acceptable levels. A willingness to deliver harsh punishments to convicted offenders magically compensates a failure to deliver security to the population at large” (p. 134

28. ‘Organised Evil’ to ‘Organised Crime’ • In 1812, in a series of sermons, Reverend Lyman Beecher “expressed the fear that America's republican virtue was about to be corrupted by vices once only associated with monarchist Europe” (Woodiwiss and Hobbs, 2009: 106). • He called for collective pressure to be brought upon this 'organised evil' via a “nationwide network of voluntary moral-control societies” (Woodiwiss and Hobbs, 2009: 106). “Beecher's sermons thus prefigured several of the themes and patterns that would connect moral panics with what would later be called organised crime control, absolving mainstream society of responsibility for a perceived decline in moral values and exaggerating the threat from an alien and nebulous enemy – 'the ruff-scruffs'. These were his 'folk devils' that had to be attacked by collective action” (Woodiwiss and Hobbs, 2009: 106). • So this ‘organised evil’ eventually morphed into ‘organised crime’ – popularly associated with immigrant groups and urban environments.

29. Alien Conspiracy Theory Hobbs and Antonopolous (2013) outline the basic tenets or propositions of Alien Conspiracy Theory as follows: • 'Organised crime is a foreign thing. Something that is imported from abroad and is often associated with established ethnic minorities or recent unassimilated migrant groups; • 'Organised crime' is the business of powerful, rigid, hierarchical, Mafia 'organisations' similar or identical to those in cinematographic accounts (e.g. The Godfather) that resemble legal businesses, corporations or even law enforcement agencies; • 'Organised crime' groups have the objective of monopolising an illegal market and expanding it even to an international level; • 'Organised crime' groups engage in an active 'campaign' to corrupt public officials, who are seen as essential for the smooth running of the business; • 'Organised crime' groups engage in a campaign to corrupt the fiscal structures; • Ethnicity s a key variable by which individuals are selected in / recruited by 'organised crime organisations'.

30. Meanwhile… Problem of ‘organised crime’ and suspect groups served to divert attention away from: • the organised criminal activities of early outlaw gangs on the American Western frontier; • the political machines and bosses control over organised criminal activities (Kelly and Schatzberg, 2003); • and from the “violence upon which many of America's industrial and commercial empires were founded” (Hobbs and Antonopolous, 2013).

31. Who attempted to objectively rank drugs in terms of harmfulness? • Why was this done? • How was this done?

32. Is harm important? Paoli and Greenfield 2012

33. Is harm important? • Construction of organised crime as alien conspiracy • So harm not important? • European countries favouring ‘Serious crime’ or ‘transnational crime’ • More important to them?

34. What Aspects of Organised Crime To Prioritise? Problems? Hobbs 2013

35. Measuring harms from crime • For just deserts proportionalists (e.g. Kant), time must match the crime (von Hirsch and Jaborg 1991) • Increasingly important as budgets are squeezed • E.g. MillyDowler • Traditionally harm ignored in favour of amount of crime • E.g. Official crime data, CSEW • Heaton (2010) discussed three main approaches to assessing harms • Accounting • Value Contingent • Hedonic Valuation

36. Accounting based approaches (Heaton 2010)

37. Harms of Organized Crime (Greenfield and Paoli 2013) • Included were harms to: • Individuals • Private entities • Government • The environment (including both social and physical) • Experts were relied on to rate harms. • What might that remind you of? • Good or bad practice? • Harm far do you go with harms? • Is having to listen to this lecture on harms a harm of organised crime? (see Levi and Burrows 2008) Greenfield and Paoli 2013

38. Measuring harms from Organized crime • They do not measure: • CJS expense as a harm, as then not policing something makes it less harmful. Also, we cannot assume objectivity in what is policed. • Private security costs • Thefts between criminals • Benefits also excluded. • Consumption by criminals • Failing businesses saved

39. Also excluded.... Should ‘consensual harms’ be excluded? Greenfield and Paoli 2013

40. Why are the harms of drug use excluded? Paoli and Greenfield 2012

41. Outline your chosen instance of organized crime, considering how this matches the definitions of organized crime discussed above • Choose a phenomenon which is associated with organised crime • Choose one where you can cite academic sources • Be critical as whether this fits existing definitions of Organised crime • Also be critical as to how this matches social constructions of organised crime

42. Discuss levels of harm associated with this instance of organized crime

43. Conclusion • Based on evidence reviewed in you letter to a minister • What definition of organised crime should be favoured and why • How does this relate to social constructions of organised crime • What points did you make regarding social control in our current historical/political context • What do we know about your chosen organised crime related phenomenon • Should they be a concern for the government?

44. What sort of start can you make? • You can • Make a plan • Read up on definitions and constructions of organised crime • Research your chosen phenomenon • Read up on measurements of harms

45. Tips • YOU MUST READ • Plenty of literature on weblearn • More to be added • Essays which include extra literature will do better • Utilise University Library

46. Feedback and drafts etc • We can provide feedback on plans • We can look at introductions and conclusions of draft • But we cannot do more than to skim read full drafts • Revision session/feedback on plans/drafts closer to the due date