The capability to abandon short-term pleasures that potentially result in long-term, negative consequences.
It’s inculcated by parents through their care about the child. 1. Be present and monitor. 2. Recognize deviance or antisocial behavior. 3. Appropriately punish deviant behavior. AND by the age of 8 it’s stable.
Desire, a Target, and the Opportunity
People with low self-control are more prone to commit crimes, since they are less capable of restraining themselves from impulses and immediate gratifications.
A lack of foresight or consideration of delayed consequences
Self-control develops early in childhood and remains relatively stable over time
Attachment (to parents,peers, and school), commitment (to education), involvement (in academics), and belief (in social rules and convention)(4)
Hirschi; all humans have the propensity to commit crime, but those who have strong bonds and attachments to social groups like family and school are less likely to commit crime.
control theories assume that crime does not need a special explanation and look at why people do not commit crime.
Who you associate with is how these definitions (definition favorable to violation of law/Definitions unfavorable to violation of law) develop
Adds elements of operant conditioning to DAT and clarifies measures and processes that lead to crime
Process to differential definitions of illegal or law-abiding behavior
Behavioral: direct and indirect association and interactions
Normative: norms and values imparted
Behaviors to observe and imitate
Attitudes and meaning ascribed broadly and specifically to particular acts/behavior
General definition: Broad attitudes about behavior
Specific definition: Attitudes specific to particulars acts
→negative, positive, neutralizing
Rewards(reinforcement) and punishments
LOOK AT TABLE IN GOOGLE DOC
- Crime can be learned by anyone
- How social class, broken homes, age, race, urban or rural location, and mental disorder are associated with crime.
Through interpersonal communication and social interaction in small, intimate groups. (individuals learn to become criminals by associating with criminals and non-criminals)
The excess of definitions favorable to deviance over definitions favorable to violation of law makes a person become a deviant while associating with other persons. (criminal behavior is learnable and learned in interaction with other deviant persons)
Priority, frequency, duration, and intensity
Your social environment matters, difference in group or peer association explains differences in criminal behavior
The neighborhood conditions are responsible for crime, not the residents.
Crime rate remained stable, no matter which ethnic group occupied certain neighborhoods.
Heterogeneity, poverty, and transiency
Race matters, race/ethnic differences in crime due to differences in community context, reducing crime required changing neighborhoods, reorganizing communities.
zone 1 Central Business District "loop"
zone 2 zone in transition (ZIT)
zone 3 working class zone
zone 4 residential zone
zone 5 commuter zone
(zone 2 is the worst zone in terms of crime and poverty)
Collective efficacy: the catalytic effect of group responses to neighborhood problems.
Measured: Sampson et al, scales for social cohesion and trust and informal social control.
1)local friendship and network. 2)community organization and participation. 3)supervised teen groups
- Informal social control (DOES NOT =) best friends with everyone
- Informal social control (DOES =) capacity to intervene
- Informal social control is the pressures from unofficial authorities (society, community, family) to act or behave in particular ways
- Measured: Peer and community pressure, bystander intervention in a crime, and collective responses such as citizen patrol groups
--"how likely is it that your neighbors would intervene if they saw a group of youths spray-painting graffiti on a local building?"
Classical Strain Theory (by Merton) states that society puts pressure on individuals to achieve socially accepted goals. (such as the American Dream)
-->Merton & his American Dream: his personal journey reflects his theory 1)accepted the cultural message to pursue the American Dream and 2)accepted the legitimate means to achieve the goal
Disjuncture leads to adaptation
When faced with goals but limited means; we adapt.
Merton: School/work, “bootstraps”, honesty, hard work
Merton: strain to achieve, strain causes adaptations
Conformity, Ritualism, Innovation, Retreatism, and Rebellion
The removal of a positive stimuli and the confrontation of a negative stimuli
Objective and Subjective Strain, they’re no event based and they’re perception & feelings.
1)failure to achieve positively valued goals 2)removal of positively valued stimuli/impulses 3)confrontation with harmful/negative/noxious impulses
“Relationships in which others present the individual with noxious or negative stimuli”
- Rationality: people have free will and they choose to commit crime
- Pleasure and Pain (or rewards and punishment)
- Deterrence is the best justification for punishment
- Human rights
- Due process principles
emphasizes the ideas that people make choices to commit crime and that punishment should be about preventing future crimes from being committed.
ooking at crime from an offender’s point of view, Theory suggests that for crime to be committed, three elements must be present: an available target, a motivated offender, and a lack of guardians.
he three criterias:
temporal orderder, non spuriousness, and association
Measures of arrests have a lot of errors that add noise to the measure, level of measurement for arrest are official reports from the police, surveys of victims, and self-reports from offenders.
Self-report is more reliable, and it’s based on participants' perceived experience of emotions, rather than behavioral or physiological emotional information.
Candidate gene studies: researchers look at whether a specific gene may be linked to certain traits. Some focused on a hypothesized link between violent behavior and a gene called MAOA.
Opposition: only a very limited number of variants have been assessed across a gene of interest
Meta-analysis was designed to synthesize empirical re- lationships across studies, such as the effects of a specific crime pre- vention intervention on criminal offending behavior. Meta-analysis. focuses on the size and direction of effects across studies, examining.
A criminal mind was inherited and could be identified by physical features and defects.
People are born criminals
Features of the thief: expressive face, manual dexterity, and small, wandering eyes. Features of the murderer: cold, glassy stare, bloodshot eyes, and big hawk-like nose. Features of sex offenders: thick lips and protruding ears. Features of women offenders: shorter and more wrinkled, darker hair and smaller skulls than ‘normal’ women.
Born Criminals, Insane Criminals, Occasional Criminals or Criminaloids, Passion Criminals.
humans actions are controlled/ impelled by forces beyond decision-making (biological, psychological, and sociological)
humans are rational and have the ability to control their decisions to their own will and purposes.
humans control much of their behavior , limited in choices they can make by lack of knowledge. (no one can predict or control human behavior)
a form of conditioning, where behavior is learned and reinforced by rewards or punishment. (if around those who condone and reward criminal behavior–especially authority figure–they will continue to engage in that behavior)
Similarity in environmental experiences, not genetic similarity is the more important contributor to the similarity seen in twins.
AND
They are based on false or questionable assumptions; monozygotic twins share 100% of their genes and the equal environment assumption.
A massive study undertaken to determine the most effective means of rehabilitating prisoners but came to the conclusion that there was no appreciable effect on recidivism. (recidivism: relapse into criminal behavior; where you return back into the criminal system)
“Nothing works”