Crim Midterm
What is self-control?
The capability to abandon short-term pleasures that potentially result in long-term, negative consequences.
How does self-control develop?
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.
What is needed for crime to occur?
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.
What behavior does self-control explain?
A lack of foresight or consideration of delayed consequences
Stability of self-control:
Self-control develops early in childhood and remains relatively stable over time
Hirschi's Social Bonds and what they mean
Attachment (to parents,peers, and school), commitment (to education), involvement (in academics), and belief (in social rules and convention)(4)
Criminal propensity is universal:
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:
control theories assume that crime does not need a special explanation and look at why people do not commit crime.
Extension of: Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory
Who you associate with is how these definitions (definition favorable to violation of law/Definitions unfavorable to violation of law) develop
Enhancement over Differential Association: addition of several components
Adds elements of operant conditioning to DAT and clarifies measures and processes that lead to crime
Differential association
Process to differential definitions of illegal or law-abiding behavior
Behavioral: direct and indirect association and interactions
Normative: norms and values imparted
Mimicry/modeling
Behaviors to observe and imitate
Definitions
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
Differential reinforcement
Rewards(reinforcement) and punishments
LOOK AT TABLE IN GOOGLE DOC
Differential Association Theory
- Crime can be learned by anyone
- How social class, broken homes, age, race, urban or rural location, and mental disorder are associated with crime.
How is crime learned?
Through interpersonal communication and social interaction in small, intimate groups. (individuals learn to become criminals by associating with criminals and non-criminals)
Significant role in learning criminal behavior: balance of definitions favorable to crime
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)
Focal variables in the theory (association and their impact depend on the following criteria)
Priority, frequency, duration, and intensity
Social environment and criminal behavior:
Your social environment matters, difference in group or peer association explains differences in criminal behavior
Social Disorganization Theory: environment and neighborhood impact on crime
The neighborhood conditions are responsible for crime, not the residents.
Stability of crime rate in neighborhoods: place-based theory
Crime rate remained stable, no matter which ethnic group occupied certain neighborhoods.
What factors cause to social disorganization (Causal factors that lead to crime)
Heterogeneity, poverty, and transiency
Potential policy implications
Race matters, race/ethnic differences in crime due to differences in community context, reducing crime required changing neighborhoods, reorganizing communities.
Burgess’s Concentric Zone Model
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)
Sampson and Groves article on collective efficacy and how it was measured (Sampson et al)
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.
Well-organized communities have:
1)local friendship and network. 2)community organization and participation. 3)supervised teen groups
What is informal social control and how is it measured?
- 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 and General Strain Theory: the American Dream
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 between goals/aspiration & means to success (do we value winning or playing by the rules)
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
Forms of adaptation to strain
Conformity, Ritualism, Innovation, Retreatism, and Rebellion
General Strain Theory (Agnew) added components
The removal of a positive stimuli and the confrontation of a negative stimuli
General Strain Theory (Agnew) clarified measures:
Objective and Subjective Strain, they’re no event based and they’re perception & feelings.
General Strain Theory (Agnew) categories of strain:
1)failure to achieve positively valued goals 2)removal of positively valued stimuli/impulses 3)confrontation with harmful/negative/noxious impulses
General Strain Theory & broadened strain
“Relationships in which others present the individual with noxious or negative stimuli”
The attributes about individuals/human nature offered by Classical School of Crim(Cesare Beccaria)
- 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
Classical School of criminology:
emphasizes the ideas that people make choices to commit crime and that punishment should be about preventing future crimes from being committed.
Routine Activity Theory:
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.
Longitudinal studies can contribute to understanding causality:
he three criterias:
temporal orderder, non spuriousness, and association
Difference in measurement for arrest vs. self-report
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.
What are candidate gene studies, empirical support/opposition?
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
What is a meta-analysis?
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.
What was the primary contribution of Lombroso to criminology?
A criminal mind was inherited and could be identified by physical features and defects.
Lombroso idea
People are born criminals
Atavistic characteristics:
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.
Typologies of the criminal Man
Born Criminals, Insane Criminals, Occasional Criminals or Criminaloids, Passion Criminals.
Hard determinism
humans actions are controlled/ impelled by forces beyond decision-making (biological, psychological, and sociological)
Free will
humans are rational and have the ability to control their decisions to their own will and purposes.
Soft determinism
humans control much of their behavior , limited in choices they can make by lack of knowledge. (no one can predict or control human behavior)
What is behavioral genetics?
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)
What was the critique of twin methodology?
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.
Martinson Report
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)
What did the Martinson Report say about rehabilitation?
“Nothing works”