Foundations of Critical Criminology – Week 3 Lecture
Foundations of Criminology: Antiquity to the Enlightenment.
Criminology is the “scientific” study of crime, and it has three foci:
Lawmaking
the breaking of law.
Societal reaction.
Criminology presumes that it is measuring an objective reality, but it’s really a social constructed reality. It is not something that occurs objectively outside of human intervention. This is because social relations are result of social relations. We create them in one way or another.
All criminology’s are DETERMINISTIC: they all assume crime:
Is ontologically real
Has objective causation. (Biological, cultural, psychological, social) Ch 3,4,5, stating that criminologists say there is a cause for crime, poor, marginalized, police force etc.
Greek Antiquity – they developed their own civilizations, learning from the ancient world (derived a lot from ancient Egypt)
Debating the causes of sin and crime and what to do about it.
REVIEW: Section 25 of the Criminal Code of Canada. It states that the Canadian state can break the law to uphold the law, and that this is a universal fact of any social formation that premises itself on law.
Crime will always exist to the extent of the law which also always exists, which will always exist to create a prescription on some means of conduct that some ruling class behavior to be restrained or control. If we have a social order predicated over some conception of a social consensus that we will always have crime.
Idea to control, prevent or deter crime is an utter fiction
Plato – argues that crime results from what is today called RELATIVE DEPRIVATION (That is envy and jealousy of others who possess socially valued goods acquired by legitimate means.)
Example, private property (intangible value, relationship of exclusion) (Some ppl have the capacity by superior means of force to exclude others from owning certain goods)
Hepburn p. 77 – Political society is built on the foundation of repressive force. Force is the first means for the construction of law.
Eugenics argument (Good birth/breeding) – The best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior as seldom, and that they should rear offspring of the one sort of union but not of the other. If the flock is to be maintained in first rate condition.
The Laws of Plato quote (See Phone Screenshot, NEED to be familiar with this quote)
No one has any right to think for themselves, control means of production by themselves)
– Aristotle – argues that crimes arise because of Destitution and Desperation. land would prevent theft arising from cold and hunger. Crime is also committed for pleasure and man is thus by nature a slave (some people are naturally born slave). If he can become (and this is the reason why he also actually becomes) the property of another.
Man differs from animals, which do not apprehend reason, but simply obey instincts.
IMPORTANT: Pay attn to Formal Logic (L1 Part 3). Which states that people can make a case or a series of propositions which are contradicted fundamentally when they explain and provide evidence to support their proposition.
Hobbes – wrote Leviathan, while in France, as Cromwell was conquering the monarchy
Social Contractarian: we give over our right to protect ourselves from others to the Leviathan state, which protects us from each other. (Basically, it is the state that protects us from other people who would seek to pursue and meet their own interests at our expense.)
Humans are evil and self-seeking by nature. (Does not explain why the ruling class were evil in role in creating the means of production)
In the state of nature, life is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.
It is thanks to the Leviathan state that we now have civil society and the social contract.
Cromwell – need to think about colonialism
John Locke – Social Contractarian. “Though the Earth and all-inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This no Body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.
(WE HAVE PROPERTY IN OURSELVES!!!)
Statement of Liberal Democratic Law Section 2 64-65 of the Criminal Code
Focus on Property (who ran the government or ruling class if they controlled the currency.)
Labour Theory of Value: applying one’s labour to nature creates value and ownership of things. (You make it yours? It’s not a thing, it’s a relationship of exclusion that you have)
Since First Nations have no conception of property as understood by the English, they violate God’s law and must be deprived or removed from their lands. (Applied Rel. of Exclusion here)
Jean-Jacques Rosseau – Noble savages (talking about Indigenous and African peoples) living in a pristine state of equilibrium with each other, and their environment exists in a state of nature, which is a state of peace.
Civilization requires that human’s contract to respect each other’s rights.
Inequality and human imperfectability. Our problems to overcome through individual and social progress.
Given the squalor abounding in European societies, civilization is an evil, but a progress over being in the state of nature without the arts of government.
Thomas Malthus – the poor are a threat to civil society. The poor are irrational are given to vice and live-in misery and ill health.
Populations, especially of the poor, will grow unchecked (geometrically, rapidly). While food production grows (arithmetically) as a slower rate.
If society is not to be overrun by unchecked population growth of the poor, then government must:
A.) Cut public assistance which promotes large families and vice. (Referring back to Plato)
B.) Promote abstinence. (Eugenics) To prevent misery, disease, and death.
(The problem with this was that every single state measured its wealth in population. The population of every state was the source of its wealth because that was the source of your cheap labour pool. As well as your cannon fodder for your military.)
Immanuel Kant – humans are free and rational agents. (ONLY REFERRING TO EUROPEANS, not indigenous or Africans)
Each person must accept the consequences of their actions and reap their deserts.
Failure to punish the guilty and punishment of the innocent are violations of justice. (Because they’re rational actors, doesn’t explain whose interest are protected by the law, but does say that ppl who abide by the law are not to be punished.)
Punishment is a necessary evil. To punish the innocent is just as evil as to not punish the guilty.
Prevention and deterrence of crime are incidental to punishment as punishment. (YOU DO NOT PUNISH INDIVIDUALS TO REFORM THEM OR TO GET THEM TO BE BETTER PERSONS). Why?
Because “Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.”
Do you recognize humanity in yourself then? That recognition of humanity in yourself is a mere image of the other person that you see outside of you.
The Negroes of Africa have received from nature no intelligence that rises above the foolishness. Hume Invites anyone to quote a single example of a Negro who has exhibited talents. To beat the Negro efficiently requires a cane, but it must be split one so that the cane will cause wounds large enough that prevents suppuration underneath the Negroes thick skin, because all inhabitants of the hottest zones are without exceptions, lazy.
Where did he get this idea? (From the exact same place Rosseau got his work, from sailors of the New World, getting the ideas from Ancient Greece, Plato’s time)
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria – Punishment must be shirt and sharp.
He contradicts himself, presuming that he can maintain his proposition as being legitimate. How can you talk about property being sanctified without the same moment that you as a Baron exist as a bearing because you deprive other people of land and access to resources and yet say that people are committing crimes because they don’t have access to land and resources?
(Refers back to John Hepburn statement again regarding political society is built on a foundation of repressive force.)
This then becomes the basis for the state using the police to enforce law. Which produces the data that criminologists take to be the essence of criminology.
Laws are the condition under which independent and isolated men united to form society.
He who endeavors to enrich himself within the property of another should be deprived of a part of his own. But this crime, alas, is commonly the effect of misery and despair. The crime of that unhappy part of mankind, to whom the right of exclusive property, (a terrible and perhaps unnecessary right) has left, but a bare existence.
As pecuniary punishments, any increase the number of robbers by increasing the number of the poor, Anne may deprive an innocent family of substance the most proper punishment will be that kind of slavery, which alone can be called just. That is, which makes society for a time. Absolute Master of the person and labour of the criminal to oblige him to repair. By this dependence the unjust despotism he usurped over the property of another, and his violation of the social contract.
Jeremy Bentham — the moral health of a society could be gouged by how much crime occurred (Pepinsky/Jesilow p. 18)
Panopticon – (Pan = everywhere + Opticon (vision) the all-seeing eye
Pastoral governance of the multitude by the discipline of constant surveillance.
In Contemporary terms: He had an image of ‘full spectrum dominance’.
He derived his idea of the Panopticon from his brother’s slave plantation.
He appreciated the full view of the mounted overseer but opposed the brutality of plantation slavery.
He believed that surveillance reduced the need for brutality and achieved compliance by the total visibility of guardians, be it schools, hospitals, or factories.
No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: The more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them. The more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been attained. (Punishing the evil, guarding the insane. Reforming the vicious. Employing the idle. Curing the sick etc.) TOTAL. ABSOLUTE. FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE ^. SURVEILLANCE WILL DISCIPINE YOUR CONDUCT TO OBEY AUTHORITY.
Above passage refers to Aristotle about how we do almost nothing without the approval of our overlord.
APPLE PARK, THE PENTAGON – good example of Panopticon, they all see each other
Refers to vaccine mandate, what law are you referring to that grants you power over my body? You still have a right to say no on that basis because it is immoral. Because you have the property rights in and of yourself.
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