Undergraduate Assignment Feedback Sheet

Family name: Ilie

First name: Alexandru

Module code: SC104-4-FY-CO

Registration number: 1602791

Class tutor: Robin West

Date of Submission: 12.05.2016

Title of essay or assignment: Using examples, critically explore attempts to construct social order and deter crime in
urban environments.
I understand that my work may be submitted to a plagiarism detection service such as Turnitin, and that use of the
service complies with UK Data Protection Law. www.essex.ac.uk/records_management/policies/students.aspx

Please tick box on FAZER when uploading your Assignment

Excellent Good
Average Weak Poor
Argument and Structure
Does the essay answer the question? Does it need to be more focused? How well do the different
parts of the essay connect? Is the argument clear? Does it demonstrate a capacity for critical
argument?
Evidence
Does the essay engage with relevant academic literature and the content of the module?
How well researched is it? Is evidence used accurately?
Presentation and Style
Is the essay logically organised? Is it grammatical and fluent? Has it been proof-read?
Reference List and References
Are sources fully cited in the reference list and in-text references?
Knowledge and Understanding
Does the essay show depth of analysis, knowledge and understanding? Does it develop an
innovative analysis of the literature, sophistication in the theoretical analysis, or pursue novel
lines of argument?

Main Strengths
Main Weaknesses
You can improve your work in future by

1 | Page

Final mark

2 | Page

In our time, social order can be defined as a society in which individuals

mingle, interact and live together within unique and stable arrangements of
institutions. Usually social changes accompany social structure, providing
forces that alter a societys social structure and organization. In every society,
there are different groups like businesses, athletic groups, families, and
neighborhoods, each of which has its own unique structure. Some individuals
belong to a single group while others belong to more than one.
The social order is maintained by people with the greatest political, economic,
and social resources. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the
ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the
same time its ruling intellectual force. (Karl Marx:1867) Per the political
theorist Karl Marx, power is unevenly distributed in society, which means that
an elite controls social order at the cost of the majority. Social order can be
valuable when achieved through voluntary participation of the majority class. It
is unjust when administered through an authoritarian government.
This notion of the elite members of society maintain social order is called
theory, and according to this theory, social order emerges because of existent
conflicts between the society classes: working class, or proletariat, and the elite
class. The wealthy and powerful elite class is forcing social order on the
working class by controlling their access to resources and developing programs
that are only beneficial to their own interest as opposed to the interest of the
majority; The result in the end being the conflicts that arise between the two
classes, which eventually can lead to a social revolution and restructuring of
the social order.
Given the complexity of the human, society, and the wide range of values
expressed by each group, social order is subject to change at any given time.
Its the history that shows us how members of different racial, gender,
religious, political, and economic groups have redefined social order through
social revolution.

3 | Page

Moving on to crime deterrence, we need to understand that this is the use of

punishment as a threat to deter people from offending. Deterrence is often
contrasted with retributivism, which claims that a punishment is a necessary
consequence of a crime and should be calculated based on the gravity of the
wrong done. This concept of deterrence states two key assumptions: first is that
specific punishments imposed on offenders will manage to deter or prevent
them from committing further crimes; and the second is that the fear of
punishment will prevent others from committing similar crimes.
Deterrence can be divided into three separate categories: specific deterrence,
general or indirect deterrence, and marginal deterrence.
Specific deterrence focuses on the individual in question, aiming to discourage
the criminal from future criminal acts through punishments and by instilling an
understanding of consequences.
General or indirect deterrence focuses on the general prevention of crime
throughout specific examples of deviants to the public. The individua actor is
not the focus of the attempt at behavioral change, but rather gets punished in a
public view to deter other individuals from deviance in the future.
Incapacitation is considered to be a subset of specific deterrence. It aims to
prevent future crimes not through the rehabilitation of the individual but rather
by taking away the ability to commit such acts. Under this theory, criminals are
put in jail not so that they will learn the consequence of their actions but rather
so that while they are there, they will be unable to engage in crime. This is a
solution used today by the societies in hopes for deterring crime and helping
the growth of the social order.
Still, not all crime deterrence comes from a criminal justice system. In our
time, evidence suggests that private gun ownership and use significantly deter
crime, although some academics have concluded otherwise. In any case, gun
ownership is a way to deter crime and it is a practiced measure for example in
U.S.A. Going back to the development and growth of societies and social
4 | Page

order, its a very debatable fact that the ownership of a gun is a good way in
helping the evolution for society. Still many people today will say that owning
a gun is just another alternative that can lead to crime and in no way, is helping
the growth of social order but rather decimating it. We are encouraged to
appeal to the courts to look for justice nowadays rather than taking justice in
our own hands.
The last category of deterrence, marginal deterrence can be defined as a
principle in the theory of criminal justice which states that it would be a
cautious move to punish a more severe crime more severely than a lesser crime
and a series of crimes more severely than a single crime of the same kind.
Marginal deterrence is intending to deter criminals to limit their criminal acts
and without the marginal deterrence, a criminal could benefit from committing
other crimes and using illegal methods to suppress law enforcement, witnesses,
or evidence. An example would be if a robbery without force would be given
the same punishment as a robbery by murder, a robber could make a rational
choice to kill the victims to evade their testimonies. Therefore, marginal
deterrence is similar in conclusion yet different in justifying rationale from the
doctrine of proportionality often conjure in discussions of the retributive
justice.
Over the years crime prevention created a multi-disciplinary approach to deter
criminal behavior through environmental design, this also being called Crime
Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED). CPTED strategies rely
upon the ability to influence offender decisions that precede criminal acts. In a
general way of speaking, most implementation of CPTED occur solely within
the urbanized, build environment. Specifically modifying the physical design
of the societies and communities in which humans reside and congregate in
order to deter criminal activity is the main objective of CPTED. CPTED basic
principles of design affect the elements of the build environment ranging from
the small-scare like the strategic use of shrubbery and other vegetation to the

5 | Page

overarching, including building form of an entire urban neighborhood and the

amount of opportunity for eyes of the street.
The beginning of CPTED starts with Elizabeth Wood back in 1960. She
developed guidelines for addressing security issues while working in the
Chicago Housing Authority, placing emphasis on design that futured a natural
support for surveillability. Her ideas and guidelines never got to be
implemented but in the end, it stimulated some of the original thinking that led
to CPTED.
The phrase crime prevention through environmental design was first used by C.
Ray Jeffery, a criminologist from Florida State University. The phrase started to
get accepted after the publication of his 1971 book of the same name.
A contribution of Jeffery that gets often overlooked in his 1971 book is the
outlining of the four critical factors in crime prevention that have stood the test
of time. These are the degrees to which one can manipulate the opportunity for
a crime to occur, the motivation for the crime to occur, the risk to the offender
if the crime occurs, and the history of the offender who might consider
committing the crime. We see that the first three of these are within the control
of the potential victim while the last is not.
Still Jefferys work got ignored during the 1970s; He tried to find an
explanation and managed at the time to understand that the world wanted
prescriptive design solutions, his work presented a comprehensive theory and
used it to identify a wide range of crime prevention functions that should drive
design and management standards.
At the same time with Jefferys largely theoretical work was Oscar Newman
empirical study of the crime-environment connection conducted in the early
1970s. As established by Newman in his book Defensible Space Crime
Prevention through Urban Design (1972), the defensible space must contain
two major components. Firstly, that it should allow people to see and be seen
continuously. This diminishing the fear of the residents because they know that
6 | Page

a potential offender can easily be seen, identified, or apprehended. Secondly,

people must be willing to intervene or report a crime when it occurs. This
encourages people to take control of the areas and assume a role of ownership.
People would feel safer then and they are more likely to interact with one
another and intervene when crime occurs. This being at the time a very good
way to help developing social order and to deter crime in the urbanized
environments. Those components remaining as main implementations of
CPTED until 2004.
Moving to 1980s, the defensible space ideas of the 1970s were determined to
have mixed effectiveness. They did have a good impact in residential settings
yet the design tools were observed to be marginally effective in the commercial
and institutional settings. Thus, Newman and the others moved on improving
the defensible space, adding CPTED based features. Some of the new
contributions added to CPTED in 1980s includes:
The broken windows theory, brought to bear by James Q. Wilson and George
L. Kelling in 1982 which explored the impact on behavior caused by visible
deterioration and neglect in neighborhoods. Properly maintenance was added
as a CPTED strategy equal with surveillance, access control and territoriality.
Also, British criminologist Ronald Clark and Patricia Mayhew developed their
situational crime prevention approach: reducing opportunity to offend by
improving design and management of the environment.
In the 1990s, Jeffery released his final contribution toward CPTED,
Criminology: An Interdisciplinary Approach (1990). The CPTED model
evolved to the state of assuming that The environment never influences
behavior directly, but only through the brain. Any model of crime prevention
must include both the brain and the physical environment. (Robinson, 1996)
After 2004 elements and topics of CPTED approach gained a wide
international acceptance due to the law enforcement attempts to accept it.
Jeffreys intentions that CPTED also embraced the internal environment of the
7 | Page

offender managed to get lost in time, even those that promoted to expand the
CPTED and include the social ecology and psychology under the second
generation CPTED. Yet still, in 2012 Woodbridge introduced the concepts of
CPTED within a prison environment. Jeffreys understanding of the criminal
mind from his study in rehabilitative facilities over forty years ago, have
proven useful and wore now being used to reduce crime in those same types of
facilities.
To sum up the effectiveness of the CPTED, research proves that offenders
cannot be literally stopped or prevented from committing crimes by using
CPTED. Mainly CPTED relies upon the changes to the physical environment
that will cause an offender to have certain behavioral decisions. All those
changes wore designed more likely to encourage behavior, and thus deterring
rather than prevent behavior.
On the other side, the main argument against CPTED is that it does not
effectively reduce crime. It is unknown, for example, if someone intent on
criminal behavior, or person engaged in a crime of passion, would be deterred
by a higher probability of being observed. Meantime, all the close circuit
television monitoring does the same job in a city as the construction of
community spaces where individuals feel that they are under watch.
In the end, all the changes done by this day to help deter crime and to help on
with the development of the society and the social order did not reach a
culminant point, but still managed to offer a mix of both; looking up even
today for new ideas to implement, we still need to realize that everything
around us is evolving and there will never be a defined solution for deterring
crime but rather a temporary solution for slowing it down.

8 | Page

REFERENCE:
Charles, H. C. (1992). Human Nature and the Social Order. New-Jersey:
Transaction Publishers.
Jonathan, J. Methodology Institute and Mannheim Centre for Criminology,
LSE Ben Bradford, Methodology Institute, LSE.
Jeffery, C. Ray. (1971). Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage Publications.
Jeffery, C. Ray. (1977). Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage Publications.
Jeffery, C. Ray. (1990). Criminology: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.

Kleck, Gary (February 1988). "Crime control through the private use of armed
force". Social Problems.
Shaun, L. Gabbidon, Helen, T. G. (2013) Race, Crime, and Justice: A Reader.
Britain: Routledge.
Sherman, Lawrence J. (1993). "Defiance, Deterrence, and Irrelevance: A
Theory of the Criminal Sanction". Journal of Research in Crime and
Delinquency

9 | Page

10 | P a g e