Ch5: Criminological Theory

theory

• an explanation to make sense of our observations about the world

• should attempt to portray the world accurately and must “fit the facts”

• strives to make predictions

criminological theories

• focuses on explaining the causes of crime

• explains why some people commit a crime, identifies risk factors for committing a crime, and can focus on how and why certain laws are created and enforced

criminology

the scientific study of breaking the law, making the law, and society’s reation to thise who break the law

concepts

building blocks of any theory that need to be clearly defined (often with other concepts)

operationalization

the process of determining how we will measure concepts (aka variables)

spuriousness

when a 3rd variable is causing the other 2

macro-level vs micro-level explanations

• macro-level explanations - focuses on group rate differences; focuses on societal structures

• micro-level explanations - centers on differences among individuals; focuses on processual differences

What makes a good theory?

Akers & Sellers (2013) established a set of criteria to judge criminological theories…

• logical consistency - basic building block of any theory; a theories ability to “make sense”; is it logical? is it internally consistent?

• scope - a theory’s range(s) of explanations; better theories will have a wider scope/larger range of explanation

  • ex. does it explain crimes committed by males AND females? does it explain crime committed by ALL ages?

• parsimony/parsimonious theory - concise, simple, and elegant; doesn’t have too many constructs or hypotheses; a theory’s “simplicity”

• testable (and open to falsification)

• empirical validity - theories supported by evidence (after many tests and different approaches to research); most important principle to judge a theory

• usefulness - all theories will suggest how to control, prevent, or reduce crime through policy or program

pre-classical theory

used the supernatural and religion to explain crime

epistemology

• how humans obtain valid knowledge

• Comte (1851)

Comte (1851) claimed human being’s progression of knowledge went through 3 separate stages:

1. theological stage - used supernatural or otherworldly powers to explain behaviors; pre-classical theory

2. metaphysical stage - used rational and logical arguments

3. scientific stage - used positivism and scientific inquiry

In pre-classical theory, how was the supernatural used to explain crimes?

• during the middle ages, spiritual explanations assumed human beings broke laws or didn’t conform to conventional norms of society because they were possessed by demons or was a witch/warlock

• a person’s rank, status, and/or wealth determined their punishment, rather than the merits of the case at hand

classical school (key principles and figures)

• key principles: free will, pain-pleasure principle, deterrence, proportionality, and swiftness

• key figures: Hobbes, Cesare Beccaria, and Jeremy Bentham

Leviathon (1651) by Thomas Hobbes

• assumed humans were at conflict with one another, pursued their self-interests, and were rational

• believed people had natural rights like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

• one of the first social contract thinkers

social contract thinkers

• believed people would invest in laws of their society if (and only if) they know that the government protected them from those who break the law

• people will give up a little of their self-interests as long as everyone reciprocates

• humans were assumed to have free will

hedonism

assumption that people will seek maximum pleasure and avoid pain (punishment) - pain-pleasure principle

If we grant assumptions of classical theory, how does this impact punishment?

We can hold people 100% responsible for their actions because it was a choice (unlike under pre-classical theory) - the basis for the US criminal justice system since its inceptions

Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)

• Italian mathematician and economist

• shocked by unfair treatment of the accused

• wrote “An Essay on Crimes and Punishment” which attacked Europe’s use of harsh treatment

• wanted to change excessive and cruel punishment by applying rationalistic, social contract ideas

• influential during Enlightenment and served as a model for the creation of the US criminal justice system

• advocated punishments should fit the crime and be proportionate with the harm done, laws should only be determined by legislature, judges should only determine guilt, and every person should be treated equally

• claimed the sole purpose of the law was to deter people from committing the crime

  • deterrence can be accomplished if punishment is certain, swift, and severe

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

• English philosopher and regarded as a founder of utilitarianism

• believed a person’s expectations of the future was most predictive for deterrence

• punishment should be severe enough to deter people from crime

• helped popularize classical theory throughout Europe

utilitarianism

belief that decisions are considered right or wrong depending on their effect

neoclassical

• recognizes people experience punishments differently, and a person’s environment, psychology, and other conditions can contribute to crime too

• crime is a choice based on context

modern deterrence theory

• most dominant philosophy of the US criminal justice system

• tries to change a person’s behavior through laws and punishment

• 2 types of deterrence: general and specific

general vs specific deterrence

• general deterrence - uses punishment to deter crime among people in the general population; uses punishment as an example for those people not punished

• specific deterrence - uses punishment to reduce crime of particular persons; effect of punishment depends on the nature of punishment and who is punished

Rational Choice Theory

• proposed by Cornish & Clark (1986)

• claimed offenders rationally calculate costs and benefits before committing the crime and assumed people want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain (plain-pleasure principle)

• doesn’t explain motivation, but expects some people will always commit a crime when given the opportunity

• doesn’t assume offenders are entirely, but they have bounded rationality

bounded rationality

• constraint of both time and relevant information

• offenders must make the decision to commit a crime in a timely fashion with only the information at hand

• ex. a carjacker has limited time to steal a car, they don’t know when the owner is coming back

How is rational choice theory used to dissuade offenders?

• it emphasizes the significance of informal sanctions and moral costs

• advocates for a situational crime prevention approach by reducing opportunities

situational crime prevention

strategies to try to make crime a less attractive choice

Routine Activity Theory

• another neoclassical theory proposed by Cohen & Felson (1979)

• claimed changes in the modern world have provided more opportunities for offenders

• concentrates on the criminal event instead of the criminal offender

Cohen & Felson stated 3 things must converge for a crime to be committed…

• a motivated offender - there’s always going to be bad people

• a suitable target - can be anything; i.e. a vacant house, parked cars, a person, etc

• an absence of a capable guardian - lots of things can serve as a guardian; i.e. a barking dog, lots of lights, an alarm system, etc

positivism

• use of empirical evidence through scientific inquiry to improve society

• basic premises are measurement, objectivity, and causality

positivist criminology

• sought to identify other causes of criminal behavior beyond choice

• a school of thought that uses social, psychological, and biological factors to explain crime

• it assumes that criminal behavior is caused by external or internal influences, rather than free will

How did Charles Darwin contribute to the criminal justice field?

• it applied observations to humans in Descent of Man (1871)

• claimed that some people might be evolutionary reversions to early stage of man

• others borrowed his ideas and applied them to crime

trait theories

• assumes there are fundamental differences that differentiate criminals from non-criminals

• includes hard determinism

hard determinism

• implies people with certain traits will be criminals

• used in many early biological and psychological theories

Cesare Lambroso

• trained medical doctor in Italy

• claimed 1/3 of all born criminals were atavistic (evolutionary throwbacks)

• identified list of physical features he believed to deviate from the “normal” population - includes asymmetrical face, monkey-like ears, larges lips, etc

• his theory was widely rejected years later, but it served as an example of the first attempt to explain criminal behaviors scientifically

Charles Goring

• claimed there were statistical differences in physical attributes and mental defects

• focuses on mental qualities that led to a new kind of biological positivism - Intelligence Era

H.H. Goddard

• gave IQ tests to sort people and those who scored too low were institutionalized

• early advocate to to sterilize “morons”

How important is intelligence when predicting delinquency?

contemporary research reveals intelligence is at least as critical as race and social class for predicting delinquency

modern biological theorists

revealed that biology plays a role in our behavior, but we can’t say how much or how so

Is there a specific “crime gene”?

• There’s no “crime gene,” but there are some genetic variations that are correlated with anti-social behaviors - people aren’t necessarily criminal because of genetics

• may put the individual at risk for such behaviors, but a caring and supportive environment often mitigate the impact of genetic code

__ causes, such as __, have links to aggressive behavior

proximate; neurotransmitters, hormones, CNS, ANS, etc

What’s the correlation between personality and criminals?

• there is no real criminal personality, instead, there are some interrelated personality characteristics that were clustered together

• correlations between certain personality traits and criminal behavior: impulsivity, lack of self-control, inability to learn from punishment, and low empathy have all been linked to criminal behaviors

  • dangerous when a person has many of these personality characteristics

Capsi et al. (1994)

found that constraint and negative emotionality (2 super traits that contain a number of different characteristics) were “robust correlates of delinquency”

social environment interacts with our __ and __

biology; personality

What was Chicago School’s approach to crime?

tried to detect differences between kinds of places (not kinds of people)

University of Chicago

was the vanguard for human ecology (the study of relationship between humans and their environment)

concentric zone theory

• proposed by Burgess (1925)

• explains how cities grow, from central business district and outwards

• includes a zone of transition, zone of working homes, residential zone, and commuter zone

Shaw & McKay (1942) on the concentric zone theory

• began to plot addresses of juvenile court-referred male youths

• noticed many of the addresses were located in the zone in transition

• noticed 3 qualitative differences in transitional zone compared to other zones

  1. physical status includes invasion of industry and largest number of condemned buildings

  2. population compositions was also different - zone in transition had higher concentrations of foreign-born and African-American heads of families; also had transient population

  3. had socioeconomic differences with highest rates of welfare, lowest median rent, lowest percentage of family-owned houses; had the highest rates of infant deaths, tuberculosis, and mental illness

• believed zone in transition led to social disorganization

• two of the first theorists to put forth premise that community characteristics matter when discussing criminal behavior

social disorganization (what is it? what causes it?)

• inability of social institutions to control an individual behavior

• moving in/out at high rates, social institutions (i.e. family, school, religion, government, economics) and members no longer agree on essential norms and values

• speaking different languages and having different religious beliefs may have prevented neighbors from talking to one another and solidifying community bonds

strain theories

• assumes people will commit crime because of strain, stress, or pressure

• assumes that humans are naturally good

• bad things happen, which “push” people into criminal activity

• strain can come from a variety of origins

According to Emile Durkheim, what contributes to crime?

• when there’s a rapid social change (i.e. moving from agrarian to industrial society) social norms breakdown

• “anomie”/“normlessness” - decline of social norms; an inability of societies to control or regulate individual’s appetites

Merton (1938)

• thought many human appetites originated in the culture of US society rather than naturally

• his theory could explain any strain, he emphasized economic strains

What may cause a strain?

when there’s disjunction between goals of a society and appropriate means to achieve the goal, a person may feel pressure or strain

Merton claimed there were 5 personality adaptations between goals of a society and the means to achieve them?

• conformists - most common adaptation; accepts goals and legitimate means to achieve them

• innovators - accepts goal, but rejects the means or have their means blocked; innovates ways to meet society’s goal

• ritualists - conforms to predominate means of achieving wealth and success through hard work, but may be blocked from achieving success, or they drop the social goal

• retreatists - don’t share shared values of society, so they adjust by dropping out of conventional society; i.e. drug addicts, alcoholics, vagrants, etc

• rebels - rejects current goals and means of society, but they want to replace them with new goals and standards; seeks to establish a new social order

Cohen (1955)

• claimed stress could come from a lack of strains

• wanted to know why most juvenile crimes occur in groups

• explained many youths, especially those in lower class families, rejected education, and other middle-class values

• instead many teens seek status and self-worth as new value system

  • to achieve status, youths commit a crime to gain status among their peer group

  • criminal gangs provide youths illicit opportunities to gain money, conflict gangs permitted youths to vent their frustrations, and retreatist gangs were double failures (no legitimate or illegitimate means to increase income)

general strain theory

• proposed by R. Agnew

• claimed strains come from myriad sources

• Agnew defined strain as any event a person would rather avoid

• 3 strain types: failure to achieve a positively valued stimulus, removal of a positively valued stimulus, and confrontation of negative stimuli

What are characteristics of some strain that are more likely to lead to crime?

• when a person views a strain as high in magnitude and unjust, and pressure promotes criminal coping mechanism, people with minimum social control are more likely to commit a crime

• some people without prosocial coping mechanisms may commit a crime to vent, which can create social control issues, and facilitate social learning

criminal behavior serves a purpose…

to escape strain, stress, or pressure

learning theories

• compliment strain theories

• focuses on content and process of learning

Early philosophers, such as Aristotle, believed humans learn through ___

association - humans have a blank slate and our experiences build upon each other

classical conditioning

• proposed by BF Skinner

• active learning where organisms learn to behave based on reinforcements and punishments - a passive and straightforward learning approach

describe the difference between reinforcements and punishments in classical conditioning

• reinforcement - any event that strengthens/maximize a behavior; can be positive or negative

  • positive reinforcement - addition of something desirable; ex. a kid getting dessert for eating their dinner

  • negative reinforcement - removal of something unpleasant; ex. the car sound disappearing when you put your seat belt on

• punishment - used to stop/reduce a behavior; can be positive or negative

  • positive punishment - presentation of something unpleasant; ex. handing out jail time to an offender

  • negative punishment - removal of something pleasant; ex. taking away a kid’s phone

E. Sutherland (1947)

• first and created the most prominent statement of micro-level learning theory about criminal behavior

• proponent of differential association theory

• argued people give meaning to their situation

  • meaning-making determines if they would obey or break the law - explains how siblings grow up in the same environment, but may differ in their behavior

differential association theory

• tries to explain how age, sex, income, and social locations relate to the acquisition of criminal behaviors

• Sutherland presented the theory as 9 separate, but related propositions

  1. Criminal behavior is learned

  2. Criminal behavior is learned in interaction with other persons in a process of communication

  3. Principle part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups

  4. When criminal behavior is learned, learning includes: a) techniques of committing the crime, sometimes very complicated, sometimes very simple; b) specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes

  5. Specific directions of motives and drives are learned from definitions of legal codes as favorable or unfavorable. In some societies, an individual is surrounded by people who invariably define legal codes as rules to be observed, while in others he’s surrounded by a person whose definitions are favorable to violation of legal codes

  6. Principle of differential association - a person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law

  7. Differential associations may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity - means that associations with criminal behavior and also associations with anti-criminal behavior vary in those respects

  8. Process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns involves all of mechanisms that are involved in any other learning

  9. While criminal behavior is an expression of general needs and values, it’s not explained by those general needs and values, since non-criminal behavior is an expression of the same needs and values

“social learning”/“differential reinforcement” theory

• proposed by R. Akers

• process of how criminal behavior is acquired, maintained, and modified through reinforcement in social situations and non-social situations

• comprised of the 4 main concepts:

  • differential associations - refer to people one comes into with frequently; most important source of social learning

  • definitions - the meaning a person attaches to their behavior; can be general (i.e. religious, moral, or ethical beliefs that remain consistent) or specific (i.e. apply to specific behavior like smoking or theft)

  • differential reinforcements - refers to the balance between anticipated rewards or punishment and actual reward or punishment

  • imitation/modeling - humans can learn by observing how other people rewarded and punished; some people may imitate other’s behavior, especially if that behavior was rewarded or not punished

subcultural theories

• focuses on ideas of what is learned rather than social conditions that foster these ideas

• some groups may internalize values that are conducive to violence or justify criminal behavior

• where we grow up may influence what we learn about crime, police, government, religion, etc

control theories

• asks why more people don’t engage in illegal behavior, as opposed to assuming criminals have “something” or experiences “something” that drives their criminal behavior

• assumes people are naturally selfish, and if left to their own devices, will commit illegal and immoral acts

• tries to identify what types of “controls” a person may have that stops them from becoming “uncontrollable”

What are the types of controls on individuals?

• personal controls - are exercised through reflection and following pro-social normative behavior

• social controls - originates in social institutions like family, school, and religious conventions

“stakes in conformity”

• how much a person has to lose if they engage in criminal activity

• more stakes in conformity a person has, less likely they would be willing to commit a crime

Travis Hirshi

• most associated with control theories

• argued all humans have the propensity to commit a crime, but those who have strong bonds and attachment to social groups like family and school are less likely to commit a crime

• social bond (social control) theory

social bond (social control) theory

• Hirshi presented 4 elements of a social bond

  • attachment - affection we have towards others; involves an emotional connectedness to others, especially parents, who provide indirect control; essential element of bond

  • commitment - rational component of social bonds; if we’re committed to conformity, our actions and decisions will mirror our commitment; if people commit a crime, they would risk losing these investments; involvement and commitment are related

  • involvement - people who are involved in socially accepted activities would have little time to commit a crime

  • belief - the final social bond component; people vary in their beliefs about rules of society

Gottfredson & Hirshi (1990)

• claimed their theory could explain all crime by all people

• argued lack of self-control was the primary cause of criminal behavior, if true, low self-control was established before the person started committing crimes and will continue to manifest throughout the person’s life

• root cause of low self-control is ineffective parenting

• lack of self-control is established by 8 years old

informal controls

socialization and effective child-rearing can establish direct, indirect, personal, and social controls on people

social reaction theories

• concentrates on people or institutions who label offenders, react to offenders, and want to control offenders (instead of focusing on the offender)

• grounded in symbolic interaction and emphasizes how meanings are constructed

• meanings can be culturally created through interactions with peers

labeling theories

• sought to explain the phenomenon that not everyone who commits a crime is caught and not all those who are caught are labeled as a criminal

• points to social construction of crime, which varies over time and place

• emphasizes process of being labeled and treated as criminal - can have deleterious effects

reintegrative vs stigmatizing shaming

• reintregrative shaming - centers on forgiveness, love, and respect; reintegrates a person back into the community by removing the label; proposed by Braithwaite (1989)

• stigmatizing shaming - uses formal punishment, degrades a person’s bond to their community; reigns supreme; counter-productive and tends to shun the offender

• stigmatizing shaming propels people to crime, reintegrative shaming seeks to correct behavior through respect and empathy

critical theories

• shares 5 central themes

  1. to understand crime, one must appreciate fusion between power and inequalities; people with power, political and economic, have an enormous advantage in society

  2. crime is a political concept; not all who commit a crime are caught, nor are those who are caught punished; the poor are injured the most by enforcement of laws, while the affluent are treated leniently

  3. criminal justice system and its agents serve the ruling class - the capitalists

  4. the root cause of crime is capitalism because it ignores the poor and their atrocious living conditions; capitalism demands profits and growth over values and ethical considerations

  5. believes the solution to crime is a more equitable society, both politically and economically