CRIMINOLOGY

Criminology



Criminology

Introduction

The purpose of this research report is to give an overview on the topic that in recent years the criminological and crime control agendas have come to be dominated by the issue of risk minimization. Describe this process and examine its consequences.

Discussion

Since Estonia regained its independence in 1991, crime and crime control have been at the centre of political debate: in fact the new political party, Res Publica, has made 'strong order' a central plank of its platform. A rising trend in crime during the transitional period after independence levelled off after 2000(ALBONETTI, 1997). The rate of imprisonment in Estonia remains very high compared with Western European countries, but about half of the rate in Russia. A major reorganization of the prison system has been introduced, with the aim of improving management and prisoner conditions. Since independence, the small body of criminologists in Estonia has formed links with scholars elsewhere in Europe and has carried out substantial empirical research, for example on crime patterns and trends(DALY, 2008). It is argued that developments in criminal justice policy have been uneven because the Estonian state was re-established at a time when the role and nature of the state were everywhere undergoing transformation.

Situational crime prevention destroys the disciplines' biographical individual as a category of criminological knowledge, but the criminal does not disappear. Opportunities only exist in relation to potential criminals who convert open windows into windows of opportunity for crime.

Situational crime prevention's rejection of concern with biographical-causal approaches to understanding crime, and the focus on the targets of crime rather than on offenders, combine to deflect attention from the social foundations of offending(CHESNEY, 2006). The effect is achieved in the case of the rational choice model by its rejection of our agnosticism toward conditions which may have given rise to the offenders' action, but also and especially by constructing the offender as abstract, universal and rational. Such abstract and universal, equal and voluntary individuals are free to act in a perfectly 'rational' self-interested fashion, maximizing gains and minimizing costs(BROWNMILLER, 2005). They are free to commit crime or not to commit crime.

This latter point suggests that not only is the knowledge of the criminal disarticulated from a critique of society, but in turn, both of these may be disarticulated from the reaction to the offender. As Foucault made clear, what he saw as the 'criminological labyrinth' was constructed around the assumption that crime is caused, and that cause reduces responsibility.

Elimination of cause from the discourse of crime obviously restores responsibility and this has its effects on punishment. Thus the logical corollary of situational crime prevention from the point of view of a New Right discourse is a policy of punitive or just desserts sentencing, rather than a program of sentencing for reform(BERTRAND, 2001). Compatibility of crime prevention thinking with these models is furthered by the argument that salutary punishment in the form of imprisonment incapacitates offenders and thus acts directly as a means of behavioural crime ...