Week 2- Theories of crime Flashcards
WHY IS A THEORY IMPORTANT?
The theoretical approaches to which we subscribe will play an important role in determining the approaches we adopt to manage and rehabilitate offenders during their sentence and subsequent supervision.
To ensure consistent and fair decisions, it is important that the management of an offender’s sentence reflect theories of why individuals engage in criminal behaviour.
It is also important to recognise the way in which we deal with offenders will follow directly from our ideas or theories about why people engage in crime.
A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF CRIME
Theory + explanatory factor -> Behaviour + Explanatory factor -> Intervention = Reduced incidence of behaviour
SOCIETAL OR MACRO LEVEL THEORIES
Broadest level of analysis – suggests crime is a consequence of social structure rather than other factors, such as genetic or psychiatric problems
Marxist conflict theory regards criminal justice system as means by which the dominant or privileged classes retain dominance
Linked to psychology:
-> Feminist analysis fundamentally assumes power is gendered in society and male power reflected in laws that disadvantage women
Hate crimes linked to economic conditions and unemployment
COMMUNITY OR LOCALITY THEORIES
Crime is not randomly distributed geographically, and neither is criminality. Some parts of cities suffer more crime than others – geographically organised. Why?
Theories suggest there is either something different about these areas, or that they provide different opportunities for criminality
Idea of “twilight” areas - people moving in, people moving out very low, living standards, and very usually high level of poor people.
Social Disorganisation Theory - this social disorganization theory speaks to the fact that norms or values or what’s considered good or bad behavior, those kind of values and beliefs kind of breakdown within those areas.
GROUP OR SOCIALISATION INFLUENCE THEORIES
Influence of the group (inc family) on criminality
Includes:
Sub-cultural delinquency theories (association with gangs, groupings where the young person achieves some status)
Differential association theory (Sutherland) – criminal behaviour is learned
Lifestyle and routine activities – most crime is trivial and impulsive with an element of opportunism,
some of the community level theories link closely and overlap with group or social socialization based theories.
They include direct social influences, and group and peer influences. For instance. So you have subcultural delinquency theory. Where status is something that needs to be achieved by teenagers, and they achieve that through group membership. Usually those use the disenfranchised in some way is differential association theory, where you adopt the values, beliefs, and behaviors of a valued group
and that can include exposure to crime. And they and values and belief systems and attitudes towards crime and towards law enforcement.
INDIVIDUAL APPROACHES
Psychology believes criminality cannot be divorced from social and societal context, but importance of biological and psychological differences as root cause of criminality stressed
Difficult to determine personality types – with exception of psychopathy
-> through twin studies that you know, 2 people can be subject to the same life stresses and they will react and behave differently. We also know that, you know, twins brought up in the same household, one might go on to offending, and one might not. Twins separated and brought up in different households. Those factors might also influence whether they end up offending or not.
it’s really difficult to separate the individual away from the societal, because there’s a lot of kind of overlapping influences there. But some of these serious attempted to do that.
So obviously, there’s different situational and society influences at play.so the individual influences can’t kind of explain the behavior by itself. So goes back to this looking at simple theories in order to explain behavior.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OFFENDING
Group and individual level focus
Views offending as a type of behaviour
Our knowledge of antisocial behaviour can thus inform the study of crime
Interaction between individual (with a degree of criminal / antisocial tendencies) and environment (providing the opportunity)
“Given the same environment, some people will be more likely to commit offences than others, and conversely the same person will be more likely to commit offences in some environments than others” (Farrington, 1992, pg. 7)
THEORIES OF CRIME
Biological theories – stress genetic influences, neuropsychological abnormalities, biochemical irregularities. Based on idea that criminals are physiologically different to noncriminals – inferiority.
Psychological theories – crime results from personality attributes; patterns of thinking; recognised risk factors (pro-criminal attitudes, personality disorders).
Sociological theories – crime results from social or cultural forces that are external to any specific individual; exist prior to any criminal act; emerge from social class, political, ecological, or physical structures affecting large groups of people.
Social-psychological theories – bridge gap between environmentalism of sociology and individualism of psychological or biological. Crime is learned, but differ about what is learned and how it is learned.
EARLY THEORIES OF CRIME
Classical theorists Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) believed lawbreaking occurred when people freely chose to act wrongly, when faced with a choice between right and wrong.
Modern theories of crime developed from positivist school of criminology – emphasis on factors that determine criminal behaviour.
Understand through scientific method and analysis of criminal data.
Early series of crime hook into the idea that the individual is a rational person, one that will weigh the consequences of their actions in a cost, benefit analysis.
laws and strategies were designed to combat crime based on this idea of rationality and free will.
BIOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS
Biological theories focus on aspects of the physical body, such as inherited genes, evolutionary factors, brain structures, or the role of hormones in influencing behaviour.
Growing understanding of these mechanisms suggests that certain biological factors may affect person’s biological propensity for criminal and/or antisocial behaviour.
These may include: Genes, Neurological deficits, Low serotonin activity, malnutrition
LOMBROSO (1835-1909)
Lombroso developed the theory about “born criminal”. (atavistic) In 3000 anthropometric measurements he found some biological traits of criminals.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL BIOLOGICAL THEORY
believed he found a difference in their deformity of their brain. In the back region of the skull known as the optical Corsic.
according to lombrosso who had 5 or more biological traits, are born criminals like a twist nose, excessive cheekbones, long arms, excessive wrinkles on the skin. Large chin, ect
‘Early Criminological Theory’
Influenced by social Darwinism – “Origin of the Species”
Criminals were “born” not “made” (atavism)
Identified several common physical characteristics from subsequent cases
Concept of biological determinism and atavistic stigmata
The “born criminal” descends from a degenerate family with frequent cases of insanity, deafness, syphilis, epilepsy and alcoholism among its members
