Criminology and Hurricane Katrina
May 27, 2025
The prison industrial complex
May 27, 2025
Introducing ‘crime’ and ‘harm’
The concepts of ‘crime’ and ‘harm’ at first sight appear to be rather similar. Both refer to issues or events that could be seen as damaging. After all, why would something be defined as criminal if it did not do any harm? However, as you will see both concepts are complex and before they can be studied, they have to be analysed.
Power and inequality in the study of social harm
In the last activity you considered critically the idea that ‘crime’ becomes taken for granted. This may, in turn, may mean that people cooperate in accepting what is and is not defined as a crime, conforming to particular norms and in the process reinforcing expectations about how we can and should behave.
For critical criminologists, the focus is often less on measuring crime and its causes, and more on how occurrences and activities acquire the status of ‘crime’. By implication this means that the reasons that some activities or events are not classed as crime are also the focus of attention of some criminologists. Related to this are questions about who and what become the focus of criminal investigation and activity, and what people and which do not.
These issues are also important in social harm approaches. However, they move beyond criminology in arguing that social harm itself should be the focus of attention rather than simply asking why some activities and events are classified as crimes and others are not. Zemiology raises wider questions beyond the definition of criminality, such as how harm can be measured, why some harmful actions may be seen positively and how a focus on social harm can be used to promote social justice.
This in turn raises questions about who may be seen as responsible for causing harm, and also about situations where there may not appear to be obvious ‘perpetrators’ but the way in which social life is organised still results in social harm. These issues also raise questions about power and about the role of states and other institutions, including local, national and global corporations, in producing and responding to harms.
For zemiologists, one area of investigation is the power of certain actors to influence how harm is regarded and what responses are taken. Inequalities of power can prevent the recognition of what is harmful, or can restrict attempts to mitigate or tackle the harm caused. This can cause other inequalities, for example by restricting the life chances of people who have been harmed by the operation of the criminal justice system itself.
Central to the social harm approach, then, is the idea that to focus on ‘crime’ is problematic, and potentially misguided. Instead, it is argued that focusing on ‘harm’ would allow us to better understand and respond social problems, and potentially to prevent harms from occurring.
As you continue with this course you will be learning about zemiology, the social harm approach, through two particular lenses:
- the role of ‘the global’ in locally occurring harms, including consideration of the role of corporations and states (often referred to as ‘crimes of the powerful’)
- the role of inequalities and power.
- To do this you will look at examples occurring in different places and considered global in nature. Some of the examples will concern harms impacting across borders, while other kinds of harms may be seen as producing gains for some parts of society, particularly in states or regions of the world less likely to be impacted by those harms
You’ll begin with Hurricane Katrina and use a social harm approach as a way of seeing how we might understand and respond to social problems triggered by ‘natural’ phenomena such as impacts from meteorological and seismic events.
Natural disasters’ and social harm
In this section you have seen how the zemiological (or social harm) approach can throw light on the harms that can result from the actions (or inactions) of powerful actors in the context of a structurally unequal society. While Hurricane Katrina was a destructive natural event, some social groups were shielded from its effects much more than others by virtue of their advantaged position in structures of inequality and because the most powerful actor responding to the hurricane the state, acted in ways which compounded the problems faced by less powerful groups. The significance of such harms was also highlighted through the concept of structural violence. The example suggests that legalistic approaches to crime (and harm) risk neglecting or ignoring the ways in which social harms are shaped by power and inequality rather than simply by law breaking and the operation of the criminal justice system which are the central focus of more traditional criminology.
Corporations, prisons and global perspectives on crime and harm
So far in this course, you have been exploring some of the debates about crime and harm, and, in particular, critically considering how certain harms in society may be criminalised and others not. In the last section, you were introduced to the suggestion that, in particular, harms that come about in contexts of structural inequality can tell us something about the role of power in causing, being subjected to, and avoiding harm. It thus introduced arguments about the role of powerful individuals and particularly groups, notably states. In this section the role of the state remains significant, but we will consider other powerful actors as well, particularly multinational corporations. In the following case study, you will be introduced to issues focused around important contemporary debates about prisons. You will also further consider inequality, power, harms, and the global nature of what might appear to be local issues.
