25-point
exam
1.
What are the key assumptions in the negative (liberal) and positive
(social democratic) conceptions of freedom?
What does it mean to
label these perspectives "negative" and "positive"? What is the dominant
2.
Marx and Engels take up several arguments made by
their opponents in the Communist Manifesto. One is the claim that doing away with private
property will cause all work to cease and society to be overtaken with
universal laziness. What is their
response to this claim? Among other
things, Marx and Engels advocate what measures to begin the journey to
communism? What is alienation? What is the source of alienation in
capitalist society? Marx and Engels
argue that communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products
of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the
labor of others by means of such appropriation. What do they mean by this?
3.
What is the basic argument of Colvin's book, Penitentiaries,
Reformatories, and Chain Gangs? What
do the theorists in his book for the most part argue about the relationship
between the level of crime and the type and amount of punishment?
4.
What are the main arguments of the several theorists covered over the
first third of the course? Be familiar
with the ideas of Durkheim, Marx, Foucault, Elias, etc. For example, who links variation in the scope
and intensity of punishment to changes in the material base of society, such as
the size of the excess work force? Who
links variation in the scope and intensity of punishment to changes in the
division of labor and crises of collective moral sentiments? What do Rusche and Kirchheimer argue? Be
prepared to match theorists with interpretations of changes in punishment in
the 19th century (see Colvin).
5.
Durkheim theorizes that changes in punishment reflect changes in the
relationship of the moral order and moral sentiments to the social totality and
the division of labor. What were the
main points of his argument? What is the
difference between mechanical and organic solidarity? What is the difference between mala in se and
mala prohibita? What is
retribution? What is restitution? Why does Durkheim believe that crime is a
normal feature of healthy societies?
What is the problem with Durkheim’s grand theory? What’s useful in his theory?
6.
Know terms from Marx. What is
surplus value? What is
exploitation? How does Marx link
variation in the scope and intensity of punishment to changes in the material
base of society? What are the basic
features of the capitalist mode of production?
What are the consequences of accumulation? What is the difference between absolute and
relative surplus value?
7.
What does Michel Foucault claim changed between the executions of
regicides Damiens and Fieschi? What was
the symbol of power during the First Penal Age?
During the First Penal Age, torture had two purposes/functions. What were these? What is the character of the new moral
technologies of the Second Penal Age?
Between the First Penal Age and the Second Penal Age, the central power
figure shifted from what to what? How
would Michael Foucault explain changes in punishment in the nineteenth
century? What are some problems with
this explanation? According to Michel
Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, eighteenth century prison reformer
Jeremy Bentham proposed that criminal justice should be primarily concerned
with what rehabilitation (or reforming the moral character of offenders). Who proposed a circular prison where
prisoners would be watched without seeing the watcher, and believed that this
arrangement would morally reform the offender by strengthening their
conscience? Who was Cesare
Beccaria? What did the eighteenth
century prison reformer Jeremy Bentham argue?
What is the “Panopticon”? What
does it look like? What is its function? What is “panopticism”?
8.
How would Norbert Elias explain changes in punishment in the nineteenth
century? Why does he contend that
growing humanitarianism, part of the civilizing process, led to a reduction in
the severity of punishment? What are some
problems with this explanation?
9.
What
does Quinney mean by the "social reality of crime"? What community
and organizational factors make application of criminal labels more likely? Be
able to list the five propositions of Quinney’s social reality of crime thesis.
Do not answer these simply with "application of criminal definition"
and so forth. Know the propositions.
10.
According to your reading
and my summary of Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer’s study of social control
in
11.
According to Colvin, what
were the characteristics of early colonial
12.
What false assumption do
most theories make when explaining rates of incarceration? What do the FBI
statistics say about the rate of crime over the past 40 years? What are some
criticisms of the FBI statistics? What is the NCVS? Why is it superior to FBI’s
UCR? What are some of the other problems with standard theories explaining
patterns of imprisonment over the second half of the twentieth century? We covered
five types of explanations for crime and or punishment during this unit with
respect to explaining the rise of prison populations over the past forty years.
What are they? What are their main elements? What are problems with each
approach?
13.
In class, I explained the
development of the penitentiary in the nineteenth century by linking changes in
punishment to economic cycles. First, be able to explain the theory of the
economic cycle of rehabilitation and repression. Be prepared to use historical
examples to illustrate the theory. Second, why does Colvin criticizes this
procedure? According to Colvin, to fully understand reform and stagnation in
the development of the penitentiary, what does one need to do? According to
lecture, in what ways was prison labor economically beneficial for the emerging
industrial capitalist class in the nineteenth century? What use of prison labor
was economically beneficial for the emerging industrial capitalist class in the
nineteenth century.