Criminology Unit 3

• Age Crime Debate

“further, this distribution is characteristic of the age-crime relation regardless of sex, race, country, time or offense. Indeed, the persistence of this relation across time and culture is phenomenal. As long as records have been kept, in all societies in which such records are available, it appears that crime is an activity high concentrated among the young.”

• Androcentric bias

male centric bias

• Eurocentric bias

white bias

• Criminal profiling

attempt to construct typical characteristics of type of people who commit crimes, mainly used in the BSU unit of the FBI in their pursuit to track d

• Racial profiling

when people of a different race are perceived in a certain way that allows assumptions or stereotypes to be made about that person

• Deindustrialization

factory job losses, falling wages, and segregation created long term unemployment and reliance on alternatives like drug markets

• Institutions

relatively stable social patterns that serve a broad range of crucial functions in society; examples are the economy, family, church, state, and education

• Fallacy of autonomy

the belief that what goes on in the family is somehow separate from outside social forces that affect the family

• Catharsis hypothesis

exposure to media violence enables a vicarious letting off of steam and thus has a calming effect

• Precipitation hypothesis

assumes that exposure to media coverage of violence, fact or fiction, will produce greater propensities to aggression

• Copycat crimes

when an individual copies a crime pattern of another, usually a famous case

• Age Crime Debate

young people commit more crime than older/ Mostly property and violent crime/ Crime spikes in teen years and declines with age

• Gender

Men more than women universally—across countries, age, race, time/best predictor of criminality/gap is shrinking/culture and pathways matter

• Men and Crime

enter crime through aggression and status

• Women and Crime

enter crime through relationships and social ties.

• Class

not a real indictaor of crime/correlation between lower class and higher crime, but is it due to low class or a lack of power and more policing?/hidden rich crimes

• Rural vs. Urban Crime

Internationally, urban and suburban record crime rates are generally higher than rural crime rates/The bigger the place, the more crime that occurs