| Introduction to Walker Chapters 1-4 Chapter 1 Walker begins with one of the basic realities of America's crime and drug problems - both problems are related to the economy and to the millions of people "left behind" as our economy has developed. Increasingly, technology and globalization have led to the creation of fewer livable wage jobs in the bottom half of our class structure. In the absence of a functioning economy with decent jobs in poor areas, illegitimate economies grow up and prosper - the drug economies and petty crime economies centering around theft (mostly involving young poor males), and the sex and porn industries (mostly employing young poor females). Confused by a lack of understanding of poverty and by media stereotypes of street crime (and the confusion is also promoted by politicians looking for votes), the public forms sets of erroneous beliefs about crime and drugs and about how we should respond to crime and drugs. These sets of beliefs are what Walker calls "theologies" - ideas that are irrational, unworkable, and based on lack of any factual knowledge of crime and drugs. Chapter 2 Here Walker introduces the "wedding cake model" of crime (study this closely!). Here Walker points out that the technicalities of law become virtually irrelevant as the workers in the courts try to deal with the huge mass of poor people flowing into the system daily. Hidden within the huge numbers of petty (less serious) offenders are a relative handful of serious "criminals" (chronic or violent, etc.). Using the plea bargaining process, workers in the system try to figure out who the serious offenders are and send them to jail/prison while treating petty offenders more leniently (probation, etc.). Note: since the system already incarcerates the serious offenders, when politicians "get tough on crime" they force the system to "dip into the third layer" (deeper and deeper) and send more and more petty offenders to prison, thus creating the imprisonment binge and the set of disastrous problems that come with it. Chapter 3 Walker introduces the concept of "the going rate" (similar to the concept of "normal crimes" in the court outline). The courthouse culture, in the course of its day to day operations, generates standard ways of dealing with similar offenses and offenders. The going rate is based on considerations of both "justice" and practicality. Chapter 4 Walker discusses one of the most interesting, influential, and confusing ideas to emerge in criminology - the "high rate offender." Marvin Wolfgang's claim that about 6% of offenders commit more than half of all crimes set off a search for ways to identify these high rate offenders and get them off the streets. After several years of research, criminologists arrived at the conclusion that we have no way to identify who the high rate offenders are, and certainly not early enough to make much difference in crime rates. Meanwhile, though, this idea helped to generate the imprisonment binge by encouraging the belief (theology) that incarcerating more and more people would lead to lower crime rates. In this chapter, watch out for the confusion over arrest rates (what Wolfgang actually studied) and rates of committing crime (which nobody knows). What Wolfgang found was that a small group accounted for many arrests - we don't know much about how many crimes they committed because of the low clearance rates! This becomes so confusing that even Walker gets tangled up in this chapter! |