SOC 2760 - Final Exam

Why companies take risks and shortcuts

- Size/Complexity: Contributes to lack of control, deviant subcultures, poor communication, and defiance of authority - Goals: Necessity to achieve organization goals may enhance practices where the ends are held to justify the means e.g. profit, control markets, competition, power - Culture: Corporate culture is often related to a rule-breaking mentality e.g. BCCI bank - Personality/Identity: Motives and behaviours of the managers - Ideology/rationalization - Business as war - Fun and excitement

Intimate partner homicide victimology

- 39% of all female homicides were committed by a intimate partner - Higher among women; especially in high income countries and southeast Asia - For women, their greatest risk of homicide is from a current/former intimate partner

Limitations to early research on sexual homicide

- Limited in sample size, rarely occurs (only 1-4%) - Can be very difficult to solve, usually stranger/casual acquaintance - Sampling bias

Filicide offender

- Low socio-economic status - High incidence of substance abuse - Depression and schizophrenia common in mothers - Fatal abuse and suicidal common in fathers

Public Reaction to mandatory life Sentences

- Majority of people preferred life imprisonment without parole - 4/5 of the sample endorsed the death penalty

Sexual homicide victims

- Majority of victims are female, white - Aboriginal are also a large ethnic group - Alcohol and drug abuse (32%, 26%) - Engagement in prostitution increases risk (17%) - Homeless (11%)

Parricide offender

- Males are most likely to kill parents (84-87% of cases) - Children aged 7-11 are usually not held fully responsible (sent to mental hospital) - Aged 12 and older are prosecuted in adult court - Severely abused child: kill parents in terror to protect themselves - Severely mentally ill child -Dangerously anti-social child

Accidental filicide

Death due to various forms of child abuse, including battered child syndrome and Munchausen syndrome

Herald of Free Enterprise

Ferry boat capsized in Belgium because the front loading doors were left open during sailing, water rushed in and destabilized the ship and caused the death of 197 passengers - Assistant bosom responsible for closing the doors was asleep - Department of Transport did not recommend criminal prosecution, but it did become a criminal enquiry shortly for "corporate manslaughter" before the judge dismissed it for difficulty of tracing culpability to managerial decision making

Discriples

Follow a leader and do anything to please them e.g. Charles Manson

Outdoor and victim's residence

Locations of sexual homicides

Retaliating filicide

Murder of a child to punish a spouse

Set and Run killers

Set a trap and run off

Groupthink

Shared illusion of unanimity and mind guards

Youth homicide trends since 1990s

Since the early 1900's, there has been a general increase in the United States in youth-perpetrated homicides -Against strangers -Involving instrumentality -Involving accomplices

Male Proprietariness theory

The union of marriage must be understood as ultimately sexual and reproductive in nature, men believe that they purchase women's productive and reproductive capacities (and if women violate this idea they have the right to abuse them)

Parricide

When an offspring kills his or her parent, the event is often referred to as a case of parricide. Although technically this word means the killing of a close relative, in the last 30 years it has been generally used to designate the killing of one or both parents (patricide is the murder of a father, matricide is the murder of a mother)

Battered Woman Syndrome

Women feel trapped in a relationship due to financial dependence and fear/harm and kill in a response of a threat (usually to child)

Self-Defence Theory

Women who killed their male partners were likely to have been battered women whose experiences of abuse resulted in the killing, response as victims to violence and kill to protect themselves from a trapped situation

Instrumental Homicide

You receive tangible gain and achieve a goal - Committed by a person who uses them as a stepping stone to goods or services that they cannot get on their own (strangers and less intimate relationshiops)

Provocation

crimes between intimate partners are more often perceived to involve some degree of victim responsibility than crimes that occur between non-intimates

Premeditation

murder that is planned and deliberated gets a harsher sentence. Killing out of anger or strong emotion can often mitigate an accused person's culpability because their emotion is assumed to undermine their rational capacity for planning and deliberation

Love Canal

the Hooker Chemical Company dumped toxic chemicals in Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, New York. The toxic site was sold to the community for a dollar, and local officials decided to build a school there. School children, as well as the families living near Love Canal, were exposed to toxic waste. The results were increased health problems in the community, including significantly higher rates of miscarriages of pregnancies, increased rates of birth defects, and chromosomal abnormalities in the children born to mothers exposed to the toxins

Outcomes for toronto homicide cases

- 1974-2002, 1,612 homicides recorded in Toronto - 288 remain unsolved. 1,137 charged - More than ¾ of accused were convicted for their crimes - Majority killed acquaintance with less close relationships such as family members, friends, or strangers - The general trends in Canadian homicide sentencing is that 43% of accused of homicide were charged with first-degree murder, 50% were charged with second-degree

Intimate Partner Case Outcomes

- Accused persons who killed intimate partners were significantly more likely to be convicted overall compared to those charged with killing non-intimate partners in more recent years - Intimate partner killers received shorter sentences in the early period of the study, this was no longer evident in more recent years

Multiple perpetrator youth homicide

- As social distance increased, the probability of being a victim of multiple perpetrators also increased - One third (36.2%) of offenses involved only one offender, 26.7% involved two offenders, 15.2% involved three offenders, and 21.9% involved four or more offenders - Multiple perpetrator offenses were greater if the offenders were age 12-15

Interventions aimed at reducing homicides

- By integrating the perspectives this would help create risk and protective factors as well as violence reduction strategies. - Typically, homicide is strictly viewed as a sociological criminology problem due to the inability to compare it to a health outcome. - High rates of violence create fear, uncertainty, and stress among community members, thereby negatively influencing individual's health

US vs. Canada youth perpetrated crime

- Canada's rate is 2-3 times lower that U.S. (due to gun laws, population density, races) - Canada youth more individual perpetrator killings than US - High rate of multiple-perpetrator offenses now exceed the rates of multiple-perpetrator homicides committed by U.S. youth nearly two decades ago - Killed family members, acquaintances, and strangers are equal rates

Criminal Justice System Intervention in Intimate Partner Violence

- Data for the victim offender relationship are often only derived after a police investigation and these police data will only be available if the case is closed - Some murders remain unsolved and perpetrators are never identified - Proportion of unsolved murders: quality of crime investigations and willingness to pursue female/intimate partner homicides - Criminal justice system cannot ignore that they are an important proportion of female homicides - Improved systems needed to reduce homicide, appropriate responses, policies to reduce, etc.

Regional disparities in homicide clearance

- Decline appears to be steeper in urban areas (gang activities, weapons, etc.) - High level of organized crime in Quebec and increase of Gang violence in BC

Stuart Palmer

- Determined in 1960 that offenders often had frustrating and problematic childhoods - More likely to be dissatisfied with their prestige or status, suffered physical defects, done poorly in school, fewer friends

Parricide method of killing

- Fathers were more likely to be killed by firearms (63%) than mothers - Juveniles were more likely than adults to use firearms to kill fathers - Majority of the time one parent is killed, double parricide is rare and mostly committed by a son

Managerial Behaviour

- Fully conscious; usually not making a decision leading to death, but a decision making process that calculates negative side effects and safety demand - Incompetence/negligence: Failure to pick up warning signals (e.g. disasters, accidents, injuries) - Forceful managers convincing employees to take short-cuts on safety procedures e.g. NASA incident when 7 astronauts died as a cause of a risky launch that engineers opted against

Perceptions of murder trends in England

- Half the public favours some form of mandatory sentencing for murder - Only 5% chose the right answer, most thought murder rates have increased over the last decade - Most thought that 20% of murderers go back to jail for reoffending (only 1%) - Majority thought that England had higher homicide rates than western countries, but they are similar - Guessed the length of prison sentences correct

Reasons why offenders avoid sanctions and penalties

- Legal systems have difficulty tracing the decision making from the board to the actual incident - The law is mainly focused on individuals not corporations - Clean cut, professional business people in powerful positions do not have the stereotypical criminal characteristics and are given the benefit of the doubt - Financial, legal, and social power of business makes it easy to bargain their way out of trouble

Youth motive to kill

- More than half had no homicidal intentions - Power, retribution, excitement - Nearly half of all homicides were committed concurrent to a crime - 38% theft, money, property, or substances and only 8% sexual assault

Themes in intimate partner violence

- Most of the time domestic abuse occurred by the husband prior to the murder - Greatest risk for teenage wives - Familicide: Men who are considering suicide may kill their wives and children due to feelings of ownership and control, believing that his family cannot survive without him - Immediate post-separation is the most risky time - More severe in alcoholic women than non-alcoholic women - Unequal power relations encourage abuse and increase risk of homicide - Most battered women were more likely to have been sexually assaulted during childhood, dropped out of high school, erratic work history, lived with their partner before marriage, experienced a drug problem, attempted suicide, and had access to their partner's guns

Research on Criminogenic needs of men vs. women

- Needs based on employment, family, associates, substance abuse, community functioning, and personal are assessed - The assessment showed that 76.1% of lifers were high need upon admission, 20.4% were addressed as medium and 3.5% as low - Less than 1/5 were motivated to change - A significantly greater proportion of MALE offenders were assessed as having higher needs

Intimate Partner violence intervention

- Needs to be early especially in children - Individual AND societal level - Help must be available to women who want to leave - Increase in communication and coping mechanisms help reduce the likelihood that a conflict will end in homicide - Sub-lethal threats and abuse need to be taken seriously as they can easily escalate

Health Sector Intervention in Intimate Partner Violence

- Needs to improve identification of and response to intimate partner violence - Assessing the severity of violence an potential homicide risk among women experiencing intimate partner violence - Safety assessment aids have been developed as protocol

Death penalty in England

- No politician has been inclined to support any initiative that may represent making the sentencing of the most serious crime more lenient - Being perceived soft on crime

Lifeline Program

- Provides support for lifers while they are in custody while they are transitioning back into the community - 3 key elements: In-reach services, community resources, public awareness

Causes for the scarcity of information on intimate partner violence

- Scarcity of information in many regions of the world, and large amount of missing information of victim-offender relationships - Very different dynamics than typical male-male homicide - Improved information is crucial for devising of strategies to prevent intimate partner homicides - Gaps due to nature of homicide data and poor link between different systems e.g. police, crime

Reduction in Intimate Partner Homicide in men since 1975

- Sharp drop among men since 1975 - Only a moderate decrease for women in the same period - Likely due to increased availability and transformation in criminal justice responses to intimate partner violence - Women's increased ability to leave abusive relationships

Barriers to service delivery

- Size and distribution of the lifer population - Relatively few in reach workers delivering services to a large proportion of lifers

Victim-Defendant Relationships in Court Decisions

- Some research has demonstrated that defendants who victimize intimate partners are treated differently at some stages of the criminal justice process. Others found no association between victim-defendant relationship at the allocation of criminal sanctions - Another study found that defendants who killed intimate partners were less likely to be charged with first degree murder, less likely to have cases resolved at trial and received shorter sentences that other types of defendants - The trend of "less law" applied in cases of Intimate Partner Violence has diminished

Health and homicide

- The health burden of homicide in the US is several times that in other developed market economies and the risk of homicide for Blacks in the country is unacceptable - Violence has posed a public health threat for African Americans for decades and only now recognizing it

Similarities between men and women filicide offenders

- The presence of significant life stressors - Social isolation and lack of social support - History of abuse in childhood - 22% of parents commit suicide after the offence - Fathers commit filicides as often, or more often, as mothers

Age of youth perpetrators

- Typically, older youth, 9 times as many homicides were committed by youth aged 17 compared to aged 13 - 16-year old offenders were the most frequent youth homicide perpetrators, then age 17, 15

Clearance and victimology

- Victims who appear more vulnerable may in fact receive more attention from the police - Homicide cases with victims over the age of 65 are least likely to be solved - Children are often believed to be helpless and vulnerable and therefore elicit strong support from the public - White victims receive more law, however studies found that clearance rates for black and First Nation groups are higher than white victims - More social distance = less likely to be clearer -More likely to know the offender - Case is more likely to be solved if the body is found at home, dumped bodies are the most difficult - Weapons that require close proximity to the victim leave more physical evidence = easier to solve - Fewer details about the victim or how they died negatively affect clearance rates - Children rarely travel far from people they know (people they know)

Problems with mandatory sentences for murder

- Violate the principle of restraint - Violate proportionality in sentencing - the fundamental principle of sentencing in all common law jurisdictions - Inaccurate 'labelling' killings that are at different scopes and severity are sentenced the same - May paradoxically undermine rather than promote public confidence in sentencing - Groups all murderers into the same category

Victim-offender relationships

- White people kill people close to them, black people kill strangers -Acquaintance homicide is the most common, usually killed instrumentally (with reason) - More than 80% of romantic homicides came from emotional response and not planning - Majority of victim-offenders are male on male - Friend relationships are least common

Youth homicide victimology

- White youth victimized intraracially - First Nations offender equally

Homicide suicides involving intimate partners

- men who are considering suicide may kill their wives and children due to feelings of ownership and control, believing his family cannot survive without him - unplanned suicide out of remorse appears to be an extremely rare act - Global index on homicide 2013 indicates that the majority of spousal homicide situations were committed mostly by men who were married to their spouse

Top two risk factors

1. History of Domestic Violence: any actual, attempted, or threatened abuse/maltreatment toward a person who has been in, or is in, an intimate relationship with the perpetrator 2. Actual or Pending Separation: the partner wanted to end the relationship or the perpetrator was separated from the victim but wanted to renew the relationship or the victim had contacted a lawyer and was seeking a separation and/or divorce

Motivation to kill

1. Revenge 2. Power 3. Loyalty 4. Profit 5. Terror

Homicide intervention

1. Surveillance - identify a problem 2. Discover risk factors - identify causes 3. Develop/test interventions - what works? 4. Implementation and evaluation - what works where and how?

Youth homicide method of death

1/5 use no weapon, most frequent method was a knife closely followed by bat or dumbbells, then firearms

Spree

2+ victims, 1 event, 2+ locations, no cooling off period. Launches swatch of destruction, usually over a period of several days, wherein most of activity surrounds planning or executing crimes and evading police. More motivated by sadistic fantasies, revenge

Serial

3+ victims, 3+ events, 3+ locations, with a cool off period. May continue to kill over period of months or years, often have long time lapses between homicides, during in which he maintains a more or less ordinary life

Canada conviction rates

Canada has experienced a declining homicide clearance rate over the past several decades

Ford "Pinto" automobile

Car fired after rear end collisions, first time that a major American corporation would go to trial for murder

Pseudo Commandos

Carefully planned in specific locations to make a statement

Thalidomide

Caused some 8000 babies in nearly 50 countries to be born severely deformed

Paternal

Child killed by father

Maternal

Child killed by mother

Exxon Valez oil-spill in Alaska

Considerable harm to animal and plant life

Routine Activities Theory

Crime is more likely to occur when there is a motivated offender, suitable target, and lack of capable guardians

Expressive

Fail to include rationality of cost/benefit considerations and are impulsive character decisions for desire to retaliate or redeem esteem or express rage e.g. killing of a spouse

Recidivism for lifers

In US homicide is less than earlier because they are better prepared for release, parole is more carefully scrutinized, and parolees with convictions for violent offences are more closely supervised

Homicide demographics

Individual homicide events may seem random, but when examined more closely homicide rates exhibit demographic, temporal, and spatial patterns and are conditioned not only by individual but also community, situational, and social structural characteristics

Mass

Kills at least four people, happens in a single incident in one location with no cooling off period. Easier to apprehend, and by the time it makes it to the media the offenders are caught

Family annihilator

Kills entire family

Disgruntled employee

Lashing out at workplace

Theory of law

Law in unevenly distributed in society, in criminal law an arrest is more "law" than no arrest, a charge is more "law" than no charge etc. o Use of law demonstrates which victims lives are valued, argued that police prioritize homicide cases where the victim enjoys higher social status

Homo economicus

Managerial mind is programmed to focus on maximizing profits, investments, reducing costs, etc. and turn to deviant solutions

Depersonalization

Managers feel far removed from the consequences of their decisions, and from relations with colleagues

Normalization of violence

May contribute to the increased rate of stranger-as-victim homicides - Disadvantaged youth who are exposed to high levels of violence develop cognitions normalizing violence and increase risk - Might have fewer reservations around offending against unknown victims - Prevalence of the hostile attribution violence in impoverished neighbourhoods (positive beliefs about the use of aggression, negative emotional reactions, aggressive scripts)

Instrumental

Offenders seek to improve their position through some rational calculation such as minimizing risk, increasing gain or bot (typically stranger homicides) E.g. robbery

Cognitive dissonance

Psychological mechanism disconfirming evidence of a strongly held belief and making it stronger

Company as a total institution

Take on structural characteristics and impact of "total institutions" such as long hours, out of work socializing, provision for family, etc. pervades your entire life and may be difficult to resist deviant activities

Filicide

The killing of a child by their parent (very rare in Canada)

Intoxication

The system has mixed reactions related to the presence of alcohol and drugs. It is difficult to determine the degree of intoxication needed to preclude one's ability to form intent

In reach workers

Utilizes Lifers who have lived crime-free in the community for at least five years and who have proven to be positive role models to provide assistance and support for prisoners and their families