Explaining Crime

2. Explaining Crime
• Classical-Neoclassical
– General Deterrence
– Rational Choice
– Routine Activity
• Positivist
– Social Disorganization
– Social Learning
– Neutralization
– Strain
– Control
• Other/Real World Application

3. Classical-Neoclassical

4. General Deterrence

5. General Deterrence
• Severity
– Exceed the amount of damage done to
society
• Celerity
– Swiftness-promptness of punishment after
crime
• Certainty
– Commonsense? The more likely
punishment is the more fearful the offender
of being caught

6. Rational Choice
• Builds on deterrence, started neoclassical school
• Assumes
– Every crime has a purpose
– Criminals choose to commit crime based on limited ability
to weigh benefits and risks
• Three parts
– Initiation (leads up to first offense)
– Habituation (continued offending)
– Desistence (becomes noncriminal or changes crime)

7. Routine Activity
• Focus on why crimes occur at
specific places and times
• Posits that crime is the function
of the space-time convergence of
a motivated offender, suitable
target, and lack of capable
guardianship.

8. Routine Activity
Property
Criminal
Not Guarded

9. Positivist

11. Social Disorganization
• Rapid changes in an areas
characteristics allows crime to occur.
• People in areas of residential
mobility lack a mutual trust with
neighbors.
• Higher crime occurs when neighbors
don’t know each other well.

13. Social Learning
• Criminal behavior is learned
• Delinquency occurs when more conditions are
favorable to breaking the law than
unfavorable
• A person becomes a criminal when more of
their friends are criminals or support them
• Criminals learn
– Motive
– Attitude
– Technique

15. Neutralization
• People believe crime is wrong,
commit it anyway, and still believe
crime is wrong
• Offenders rationalize actions,
creating exceptions for their actions

17. Strain 1 (Merton)
• Americans want the dream and work ethic
• Strain is the disjunction between goals and
means, and provokes response
– Innovate by rejecting tradition (steal, etc.)
– Turn to ritualism (keep working with limited
results)
– Retreat and turn to drugs
– Rebel – create new goals and means (sometimes
forming new community)

19. Strain 2 (Cohen)
• Also known as status frustration
• Goals based on status, not
finances
• Middle class is the standard
• Lower classes humiliated, seek
status elsewhere

21. Strain 3 (Cloward-Ohlin)
• Youth look for alternative goals
• If illegitimate alternative supports
skills, may join criminal group (gang).
• If illegitimate alternative does not support
skills, may join a conflict group (gang).
• If neither criminal nor conflict associations
work, may resort to retreating (drugs).

23. Strain 4 (Agnew)
• Strain is caused by
–Removal of positive valued stimuli
–Presentation of negative stimuli
–People commit crimes when they
lose something they like or
someone does something they
don’t like

25. Control 1 (Hirschi)
• Focus on why people aren’t criminal
• Four social factors affect delinquency
– Attachment (affection for parents/school)
– Commitment (investment in criminal
activity)
– Involvement (if no free time, no
opportunity)
– Belief (belief/consensus that a thing is
wrong prevents us from doing it

27. Control 2 (Gottfredson-Hirschi)
• Poor child-rearing is the
root cause of all crime as it
results in low self-control

29. Other
• Critical theory – crime is a normal
function of certain groups
• Marxist theory – conflict exists between
upper-lower classes
• Feminist theories – females less likely to
commit crimes
• Life course theories – teenage youth
account for most crime

31. Real World Application

32. Review
• Scientific v. non-scientific theory
• Assumptions made in neoclassical school
• Which theory focuses on why people
don’t become criminals
• What part of Strain theory describes
crime for money?

33. That’s all . . .