Crime and Society
Crime and society examines the relationship between criminal behavior and the broader social environment. It encompasses the study of crime rates, causes of criminal behavior, and the impact of crime on communities. This field also explores the role of social institutions, such as the legal system and law enforcement, in shaping and responding to criminal activities.
8 Key excerpts on "Crime and Society"
eBook - ePub- Donna Youngs, Donna Youngs(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...They include contributions from many different social science disciplines, which complement each other building a holistic picture to illustrate: • The crucial social and social psychological aspects of crime, which include personal attitudes as well as the broader societal context. • The investigation and management of crime. This increasingly includes careful consideration of the forms that crime is taking in contemporary society. • The aftermath of crime, both for those who are convicted as well as those who have to deal directly with the consequences, is an important but too rarely examined area. • Approaches to tackling all of these issues can be informed by social science perspectives that complement the often limited approaches of law enforcement. Crime as a reflection of society At the heart of criminal activity is an individual carrying out illegal activity. Understanding the processes that move and shape that activity are therefore crucial to any consideration of Crime and Society. When the crimes considered are of the most heinous kind, such as the mass shootings examined by Myketiak (2016), then it is tempting to assume that there are unique individual aspects of the culprit that are the cause. Yet as Myketiak demonstrates, the views of the perpetrator she studied are deeply embedded in his reactions to social and societal processes. His extremely low self-esteem is related to the multiple social inequalities he believes he has experienced. A recent issue of Contemporary Social Science is devoted to the many different inequalities that abound and their wide-ranging consequences. But Myketiak’s in-depth study of a mass shooter demonstrates how these inequalities are internalised by an individual to influence his feelings of low-self worth...
eBook - ePub- Eileen Leonard(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 The Social Construction of Crime DOI: 10.4324/9781315743790-1 We have noted the emphasis placed on street crime and the value of a comparative perspective in demonstrating the stereotypical ways we view crime and criminals. Our purpose, however, is not only to challenge “common sense” understandings of crime but also to examine how these understandings are related to entrenched patterns of inequality in American society. In light of this, it may be useful to briefly review how sociologists think about crime and social categories such as class, race, and gender. It is not my purpose to provide a detailed discussion of the many concepts and theoretical perspectives that have been used to analyze crime, but instead to point to a few that have informed this text, raising central questions and providing frameworks that should be of use to any student of crime. A Sociological Perspective One of the basic principles of sociology is that we are profoundly affected not just by our immediate personal situation but also by the larger social system. It follows that to make sense of our lives, and our society, we need to understand this larger social context and the influence it exerts on us, including how wealth and power are distributed, as well as the force of our cultural beliefs and practices. This provides a fuller understanding of the social world and enables us to be more knowing participants in it. Sociology is not only an intellectual discipline. Understanding larger social issues, where they come from, and how they relate to us offers the possibility of being part of the solution to these issues as well (Johnson, 2008 : 152). One of the impediments to this type of analysis lies in the U.S. emphasis on individualism. Americans are steeped in a way of thinking that encourages us to explain the world in terms of what goes on inside individuals and nothing else...
eBook - ePubCriminology in Brief
Understanding Crime and Criminal Justice
- Robert Heiner(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 3 Sociological theories of crime Sociological thinking about crime Biologists and psychologists typically think about crime on an individual level, asking how is the criminal different from the non-criminal? Sociologists, on the other hand, focus less on the individual and more on the environment, asking, how does the environment influence people’s behavior? In an over-simplification, it is often said that sociologists study groups. This is because the groups to which we belong determine the environments to which we are exposed. Here, the word “group” often refers to the demographic group to which we belong, for examples, our social class, race, age, gender, religion, and the neighborhood or region in which we live. With its focus on the group, sociologists are better able to explain aggregates, trends, and crime rates than are biologists and psychologists. For example, in the 1980s, it was estimated that there were 35 serial killers on the loose at any given time. 1 Thirty-five is a very small number relative to a population of more than 300 million; and one might better turn to the psychologist rather than a sociologist for an explanation of why does someone become a serial murderer. On the other hand, there were over 16,000 homicides in the United States in 2018; and the sociologist is better equipped to handle such questions as why are murder rates so much higher in Chicago than in Seattle, or why are murder rates so much lower today than they were in 1990, or which demographic groups are more likely to commit murder and why. Sociologists are also concerned with societal reactions to crime. Criminal justice policies represent a set of societal reactions, as do the labeling of criminals, and public fears about crime...
- Michael Phillipson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...4 Crime in particular social structures The discussion in this and the remaining chapters focuses on crime in contemporary industrial societies; the distinctive patterns of crime and societal reactions to them which characterize industrial societies can be understood only by relating them to the surrounding structures of social meaning and social processes. Such structures and processes are very different in character from those which are found in what have traditionally been called simple societies. It is in industrial societies also that particular patterns of criminal behaviour have been publicly defined as ‘serious social problems’ requiring certain sorts of public action to reduce the problem; we have already noted that this public definition of certain forms of crime and delinquency as important social problems was one of the main reasons why so much time and energy has been directed towards their study by criminologists and sociologists. The ostensibly ‘objective’ scholars were very much caught up in the value problems of industrial societies. Public definitions of crime as a social problem led to political pressures on such scholars to provide the answers to the ‘why’ questions about crime and to explicitly or implicitly suggest what might be done about the problem. Thus, overt political interest in crime and delinquency created the conditions in which many scholars chose to undertake research to try and provide answers to the questions of public concern; the amount of time, energy and money spent on the investigation of criminal deviance in a society seems to depend on the quality and scale of crime, the reciprocal strength of public concern with the problem and the amount of money available, as well as the interest and natural curiosity of certain kinds of sociologists. The confluence of these influences has resulted in an enormous quantity of sociological writing and research on the subject in the United States and comparatively little elsewhere...
eBook - ePub- Travis C. Pratt, Jacinta M. Gau, Travis W. Franklin(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...To be sure, his message is rooted and reflected in the work of social scientists that came along a half-century before him. In particular, these sentiments reflect the work of early 20th-century criminologists like Robert Merton, Clifford Shaw, and Henry McKay. Together, the works of these theorists demonstrate how individuals’ behavior is shaped by their surroundings in general, and how social conditions influence criminal behavior in particular. While Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization theory and Merton’s anomie/strain theory posit different—and at times, seemingly contradictory—propositions concerning what causes crime, they are wedded to the common notion that criminal behavior cannot be understood as merely an individual phenomenon. Put differently, understanding crime requires an understanding of society. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY Early perspectives on criminological theory and research were guided by the assumption that the explanation for crime can be found within the individual. These theories differed, however, in terms of their propositions regarding what it is about individuals that should cause crime. For example, some criminological theorists maintained that crime could be a function of biological determinism (Dugdale, 1877), of substandard intelligence or “feeble-mindedness” (Goddard, 1914), or of dissocial manifestations of psychic forces (Aichorn, 1925/1979). Others were even so bold as to assert that individuals’ criminal propensity can be indicated by the existence of “criminal bumps” on their heads (Lombroso-Ferrero, 1911; see also Gould, 1996)...
eBook - ePub- Ian Marsh, Ian Marsh(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Although routine activity theory is an attractive and robust explanation of how crime can occur, it is less proficient at clarifying why. SOCIAL FACTORS AS AN EXPLANATION OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOUR Despite all of the above research, which has focused very much on individual thinking patterns, some psychologists remain committed to the idea that causes of crime are more relational. Many have chosen to look at the social factors in individuals’ lives to try to explain why certain individuals become criminals. For example, do people who commit crime come from similar communities? Do they share common occurrences in how they have been raised by their parents? Are they more likely to be found attending certain types of school? The results of the research in this area show that indeed some social factors are commonly seen in the lives of those who go on to commit crimes. However, the research in this area is also surrounded by many ‘myths’. For example, we often hear it said that people who have been brought up in violent homes are likely to become violent adults themselves. However, often the research into the social factors which vary with criminality shows that the facts are not so straightforward, a point we will turn to later on in this chapter. Firstly, in order to get a feel for how the research in this area has been conducted we shall consider how researchers design studies which enable them to find out which social factors are common in the backgrounds of criminals. Researching the social factors of crime Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies are two examples of research methodologies which can be used to research the social factors of crime. Cross-sectional designs In a cross-sectional design the researcher takes what is effectively a ‘snapshot picture’ of groups of individuals, at a particular point in time. This account is simply a measure of people at that one stage in their life...
eBook - ePub- Mary McIntosh, Paul Rock(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...W. G. Carson The sociology of crime and the emergence of criminal laws A review of some excursions into the sociology of law The sociology of law and the sociology of crime In his introduction to the translation of Law in Economy and Society, Max Rheinstein (1967) takes considerable pains to absolve Weber from the charge of failing to achieve what he did not set out to do, namely write a comprehensive and systematic sociology of law. According to Rheinstein, such an undertaking would include but would not be co-terminous with Weber’s interest; it would ‘have to comprise an investigation into the relationship between all legal and all other social phenomena’ (1967: xxxix). Dauntingly broad as this specification of a comprehensive sociology of law may be, it does something less than justice to the claims that the law and its institutions can legitimately make upon the attention of sociologists. For law is not merely something that by dint of its relationship with other social phenomena may justifiably be subjected to sociological analysis, it also converges at many points with central sociological concerns. One need only examine Durkheim’s use of law to distinguish types of social solidarity or indeed, Weber’s discussion of the emergence of formal rationality in law, to see that questions relating to legal organization, development, and thought hold more than passing relevance for the sociologist. Schwartz and Skolnick have summarized the close connexion in a neat set of juxtaposed statements: ‘Sociology is committed to the understanding of social order; law provides the framework of formal norms within which complex societies function. Sociology concerns itself with the processes of social control and social change; legal institutions comprise a major agency through which society seeks authoritatively to exercise its control function and to limit or direct social change...
eBook - ePubDrugs and Crime
Theories and Practices
- Richard Hammersley(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...In smaller communities conflict over resource and status issues could be resolved personally and often peacefully because everyone knew everyone else. Laws impose abstract norms on people instead: it is wrong not only to hit your mother, but to hit anyone. Civilized as society has become, not everyone agrees. The basic motives of acquiring resources and gaining social status are still with us. Indeed they are encouraged in open societies, as long as citizens do not break the law and as long as they aspire to the right sorts of resources and the right kind of social status. The lawmakers do not think highly of drugs, flash cars and ‘bling’: better fine wines, a mortgage and a business suit. ‘Crime’ is not an absolute thing, but relative to who is doing what and to whom, and who is observing and defining the actions. The police can offend in part because they are often able to ensure that the offence is undetected. It is also of importance that much crime as experienced then reported by victims in crime surveys was never reported to the police to become part of the official statistics – the ‘dark figure’ (MacDonald, 2001). Additionally, how you ask the questions in crime surveys affects how respondents answer (Farrall et al., 1997). Furthermore, ‘everyday’ crime, such as running red lights and failing to report taxable income, is probably committed on a larger scale than the kinds of crime linked to drugs (Karstedt and Farrall, 2006). One example of major cultural variation in crime is that some Native American cultures traditionally lack the sort of concept of personal property that allows the crime of ‘theft’. In these cultures, basically objects do not belong to people forever independently of need, and it is acceptable to take things that others are clearly not going to be using for the time that you need them...
