Freedom and Social Control                                                                    

Austin — Spring 2008

FINAL EXAM

TENTATIVE REVIEW

 

50-point exam

Likely format:

·         Multiple choice, true-false, and matching sections

·         No essays

 

1.      On the abstract question of freedom be prepared to answer questions concerning the competing visions of freedom—negative and positive.  How are liberalism and conservatism in all their different forms different from socialism?  What is Hayek’s position on equality and the role of the state in securing it in The Constitution of Liberty?  What are sources of inequality from his point of view?  What do Marx and Engels argue in the Communist Manifesto about inequality, freedom, and democracy?

2.      What is the basic of thrust of Mark Colvin's book, Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs?  How are changes in punishment in the twentieth century connected to changes in the nineteenth century?  In other words, why is history important?  According to Colvin, does crime explain punishment?  If not, what does?

3.      What did I say in class about the relationship between crime and punishment?  What are the competing theories of crime?  How do these theories reflect political ideology?  What are reasons for doubting the relationship between crime and punishment, as it has been traditionally understood?  What is the difference between the UCR and the NCVS?  Why is this difference significant.

4.      Which are the outstanding features of prison trends in the United States over the past 30 years?  According to text and lecture, are there class and racial-ethnic disparities in the way the state punishes in the United States?  If so, what racial group shoulders most disproportionately the burden of mass incarceration in the United States?  What do we mean when we say that the state has a class and race character?  How are the changes in punishment related to the long waves of capitalist development?

5.      In the book, Discipline and Punish, what does Michel Foucault claim changed between the executions of would-be regicides Damiens and Fieschi?  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?

6.      What is Richard Quinney’s social reality of crime thesis?  What are the propositions?  Under what conditions are criminal definitions more likely to be applied?  According to Quinney, what community and organizational factors increase the probability that criminal definitions will be applied?

7.      According to Colvin, what are the characteristics of early colonial America?  How does this square with what I have argued?  What were some of the changes in the character of crime in the eighteenth century?  Colvin suggests that Protestant religion changed to fit with the new economic order.  Which religious belief represented the new Calvinist theology justifying capitalism?

8.      According Rusche and Kirchheimer, why was state punishment was not very great in the early Middle Ages in Europe?  According to Rusche and Kirchheimer, several forces undermined the private character of the law during the fourteenth century in Europe.  What were these?

9.      How do conceptions of crime and punishment change with the rise of capitalism?  Who are Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush and what did they argue?  Bentham proposed that criminal justice should be primarily concerned with what?  How did conceptions of criminal behavior change with the emergence of industrialism in the West?

 

10.  In class, I explained the development of the penitentiary in the nineteenth century by linking changes in punishment to economic cycles.  Why does Colvin criticize this procedure?  According to Colvin, to fully understand the cycles of reform and stagnation in the development of the penitentiary one needs to do what?

11.  What does Randall Kennedy mean by his concept of “racially selective underprotection”?  What is the logic of racially-based sexual controls in the United States? What was the character of chattel slavery in the United States?  What different about the United States and the United Kingdom that promoted the use of slavery in the former.

12.  According to Colvin, which of the following factors shaped the convict leasing system in the US South?  According to Colvin, what does the case of southern punishment cause us to question?  What role did white fear of black crime play during the emergence of the new south?  Which of the four major theorists covered in Colvin’s text fail to adequately explain punishment in the US South according to the author?

13.  How would the four main theorists Colvin covers in his text explain the development of "true womanhood"?  What was/were the reason(s) for the expansion of women's prison reform in the mid-late 19th century?  What did Zebulon Brockway propose in the mid-1800s to minimize crime?  According to Colvin, did the emergence of the ideology of “True Womanhood” change the way people thought about the inherent natures of men and women?  What was the purpose of “scientific charity”?

14.  What do Ehrenreich and English argue in the article, “The Sexual Politics of Sickness?” What is the “cult of invalidism”?  Were there social class differences in how the cult of invalidism affected women?  What was the theory many doctors were claiming explained mental illness in women in the late nineteenth century?  What do Ehrenreich and English identify as the principle causes of the cult and its effects?  Are there parallels between the way women are treated today and they way they were treated in one hundred years ago?

15.  What are the main points in our critique of the mass media system?  Who owns the major media?  What is the structure and function of the major media?  What are the filters discussed by Chomsky.  According to Parenti, does the media have a liberal or conservative bias?  Or does it have a bias?  What do the studies presented in the lecture show?  Is the media becoming more open or more of a monopoly?

16.  According to Weber's rationalization thesis, what is distinctive to Western society and increasingly dominating the world?  What is the name Weber gives to his claim that people in Western societies have become imprisoned by rational systems of their own creation?  What did Weber mean when he describe modern bureaucratic society as an “iron cage”?  How is disenchantment related to rationalization?  What role does the Protestant ethic play in this?

17.  Know the four principles of rationalization.  Ritzer acknowledges that efficiency may increase convenience for customers.  What are some of the other consequences?  What are the basic characteristics of the Holocaust according to Ritzer?  What is the phrase Weber and Ritzer use to argue that with rationalization there is a tendency for rational systems to behave unreasonably?  What does Ritzer’s mean by “birth as pathology”?  What is the irrationality of rationality?  What is its connection to fascism?

18.  Be prepared to connect Weber and Ritzer’s arguments to Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon?  How would you explain the Panopticon using Ritzer’s McDonaldization principles?