SOC313 - March 20, 2012 - Risk
- risk touches on a lot of themes weve talked about already:
- surveillance
- bureaucratization
- crime management - in the CJS there is a shift happening - governments
and agencies are starting to move away from a more traditional model of
punishment either retributive or rehabilitative - not focused on making
people better or punishing, it is focused on managing - managing the
realities/implications of a certain population - this isn't a radical departure -
it gets another logic, another way of thinking about control that is starting
to get some momentum
- Feely and Simon - characterized this shift as the "new penology" - new
what that punishment is being managed with an eye to risk -- actuarial
justice
- what is an actuary --> actuaries are often hired by insurance companies
- complex statistical model that if you have these certain risk factors, what
is going to happen to you - with regards to justice, it is about predicting
risk - i.e. TCLR psychopathy test - the whole story is that a guy is in prison
because he did poorly on this test
- see how this ties into surveillance - you need surveillance to get the data
and then you need the bureaucracy to implement this data (i.e. hand out
surveys, etc)
3 different approaches to risk
1. Social theories of Risk
- about large scale social change
- we are living in a different kind of society now
- i.e. Ulrich Beck - 'risk society' --> argues that in late modernity, this time
period is becoming its own theme - what this means is that right now we
are dealing less with advancing new technology or creating new insight it
is about creating those insight in the context of managing existing problem
- what we do now is spend a lot of time thinking about advanced
modernity and the problems of advanced modernity - i.e. global warming
= all this new technology we created, it is now about managing those
risks
2. Cultural theories of risk
- social constructionist theme
- Howard Becker and labeling theory - same kind of way of thinking -