CCJ4614: Criminal and Delinquent Behavior - Exam 2 Study Guide

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering key definitions, theories, and institutional concepts across homicide, suicide, domestic violence, and mental illness for CCJ4614 Exam 2.

Criminal Homicide

The intentional killing of another person without legal justification or excuse.

Justifiable Homicide

An intentional killing recognized by law as justified, such as necessary self-defense against a reasonable threat of death or serious bodily harm.

Excusable Homicide

An accidental death rather than an intentional killing.

Premeditation

Deliberating or planning before acting.

Malice Aforethought

An unjustifiable state of mind showing intent to kill, intent to cause serious harm, or extreme disregard for life.

Serious Provocation

Circumstances suggesting the offender acted in a sudden heat of passion during active involvement in a lethal encounter, which legally reduces murder to voluntary manslaughter.

First-Degree Manslaughter

An intentional fatal act committed during a heated encounter involving substantial provocation.

Second-Degree Manslaughter

A death caused by negligent conduct without an intent to kill or seriously harm.

Assault

Attempting to cause bodily injury or placing someone in fear of imminent injury.

Battery

Actual unwanted or offensive physical contact.

Aggravated Assault

An unlawful attack involving a weapon, an intent to commit another crime, or circumstances that create a heightened risk of serious harm.

Frustration-Aggression

A perspective focusing on blocked goals or unmet expectations that increase the likelihood of aggression.

Unreciprocity

A perceived failure to receive expected respect, affection, support, loyalty, or role obligations from someone in a complementary social role, potentially producing frustration and aggression.

Routine Activities Theory

A theoretical perspective emphasizing the spatial and temporal convergence of a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian.

Low Self-Control

An individual trait characterized by impulsivity, risk taking, short-sightedness, preference for physical responses, and prioritizing immediate gratification over delayed consequences.

Subculture of Violence

Wolfgang and Ferracuti's perspective proposing that certain social settings grant normative approval to violence as a way to gain status or respond to instability, threats, disrespect, or conflict.

Illegitimate Opportunities

Cloward and Ohlin's concept stating that communities differ in the availability of non-conventional or illegal pathways to status and resources.

Suicide

Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with an intention to die.

Psychological Pain

Suffering experienced as unbearable that contributes to the suicide process.

Hopelessness

The cognitive belief that one's negative situation will not improve.

Helplessness

The belief that an individual lacks the personal capability to change or improve their situation.

Rationalization Process (Suicide)

The process by which an individual gradually overcomes social and moral prohibitions against suicide and redefines it as an acceptable or necessary solution.

Suicide Contagion

An increase in suicidal behavior following direct or media-facilitated exposure to suicide or suicidal behavior.

Mass Cluster

A suicide cluster following widespread media exposure that manifests across a broad, geographically dispersed population.

Point Cluster

An unusually high number of suicides occurring within a smaller geographic area, institution, or connected group during a limited timeframe.

Homicide-Suicide

An event occurring when a person kills someone else and then dies by suicide, often precipitated by intimate-partner conflict, separation, rage, or access to weapons.

Suicide by Cop

An encounter in which an individual appears to deliberately provoke police officers into using lethal force against them.

Instrumental Goals (Suicide by Cop)

Motivations that use confrontation with law enforcement to achieve a tangible outcome, such as avoiding consequences or forcing a lethal response.

Expressive Goals (Suicide by Cop)

Motivations in a police encounter that communicate internal emotional states such as desperation, rage, revenge, hopelessness, power, or a desire to save face.

Social Integration (Durkheim)

The strength of a person's attachments and ties to social groups and shared values.

Social Regulation (Durkheim)

The degree to which societal norms, rules, and expectations guide or constrain individual behavior.

Status Integration

A sociological measure reflecting how commonly a specific combination of social statuses occurs and how clearly defined the associated role expectations are.

Domestic Violence

A broad category including patterns of abusive behavior within intimate, family, or household relationships.

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

A specific form of domestic violence involving physical violence, sexual violence, stalking, or psychological aggression by a current or former spouse, dating partner, or other intimate partner.

CDC's Four Forms of IPV

Physical violence, sexual violence, stalking, and psychological aggression.

Learned Helplessness

A survival response to repeated and unpredictable abuse where a person comes to believe their actions cannot reliably stop or alter the situation, narrowing their perceived safe options.

Child Maltreatment

Abusive acts against a minor including physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional maltreatment, neglect, or combinations of these experiences.

Elder Abuse

Abuse directed at an older adult that may involve physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological abuse, neglect, abandonment, or financial exploitation.

Walker's Cycle of Violence

A three-phase conceptual model describing the recurring pattern in abusive relationships: tension building, an acute violent incident, and reconciliation (honeymoon phase).

Reconciliation Phase

The 'honeymoon' phase in Walker's cycle of violence where the abusive party may apologize, promise change, demonstrate affection, or minimize their abusive actions.

Exchange and Social Control Model (DV)

A theory arguing domestic violence occurs when the perpetrator believes it will produce a reward (such as compliance or control) while expecting few meaningful social, legal, or interpersonal costs.

Balance of Power Explanation (Straus)

A framework stating that in asymmetrical relationships where one partner's preferences dominate, violence is often utilized to preserve control or reassert challenged authority.

Feminist Theories of Domestic Violence

Theoretical perspectives emphasizing patriarchy, gender inequality, male dominance, and social norms supporting men's authority as drivers of coercive control.

Any Mental Illness (AMI)

A broad clinical category encompassing any mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder with functional impairment ranging from mild to severe.

Serious Mental Illness (SMI)

A specific psychiatric designation involving serious functional impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.

Medical Lens

An analytic framework focusing on symptoms, psychiatric diagnosis, individual impairment, and clinical treatment.

Social Lens

An analytic framework examining how context, stigma, power dynamics, social inequality, and institutional decisions govern the interpretation of and response to behavioral symptoms.

Social Causation

The proposition that disadvantaged structural conditions (e.g., poverty, trauma, discrimination, unsafe housing, chronic stress) create or exacerbate psychological distress.

Social Selection (Drift)

The proposition that mental illness symptoms or impairments disrupt education, employment, income, and housing, driving downward social or economic mobility.

Deinstitutionalization

The policy shift involving closing or downsizing large state psychiatric hospitals with the goal of providing mental healthcare within the community.

Transinstitutionalization

The historical process following deinstitutionalization whereby individuals with unmet mental health needs were increasingly absorbed into jails, prisons, and shelters.

Reentry Cliff

The abrupt loss of structured clinical support upon release from a correctional facility before community-based healthcare, medication, insurance, and housing are established.

Residual Deviance

Thomas Scheff's term for nonconforming behavior that remains difficult to explain using conventional cultural or explicit legal categories, often resulting in the application of the mentally ill label.

Culture Conflict

Differences in norms, values, communication styles, and cultural interpretations that influence whether a specific behavior is perceived as normal, deviant, or symptomatic.

Power Conflict

Differential authority held by various actors to define a situation, impose or contest a deviant label, and access alternatives to criminalization or institutional control.

Structural Inequality

Systemic disparities that expose marginalized groups to heightened trauma, surveillance, and crisis contact while restricting access to quality treatment, housing, and social support.