Crime

CRIME AND CRIMINALITY

SOCIETAL OR MACROLEVEL FACTORS

They include such things as:

• the relative distribution of the population among groups and the flows of information
• resources
• people between groups

• Societal factors encompass the variety and heterogeneity of racial/ethnic/cultural/productive groups, their behaviors and beliefs, and economic

relations.

Societal or Macrolevel factors

these deal with systematic interactions between social groups in other words it describes the ways society is structured

ECOLOGICAL FACTORS

INDIVIDUAL OR MICROLEVEL FACTORS

This category includes things associated with the physical environment

such as :

• geography and topography
• crowding, pollution,
• recreational opportunities.

• These ecological factors can affect how people develop physically and emotionally over their lives as well as the level of hostility, fear, or well-being they feel from moment to moment as they experience, for example, a crowded subway, dark lonely parking lot, or serene park
• Ecological factors also determine what opportunities for crime exist because they include interactions between people and the ways physical environments channel those interactions
• The routine activities of people in a physical setting can have important effects on when and where opportunities for crime occur. A crime is not possible unless a motivated and able offender converges with a victim, property, or illicit substance or behavior in the absence of capable guardianship (people or physical barriers to prevent the crime)

Individual or Microlevel factors

these describe how a person becomes motivated to commit

a crime

Ecological factors

involve interactions between people and their activities in a physical environment

INDIVIDUALS

ACTUALLY

COMMIT

THE

CRIMES!!!

• Although ecological and societal factors must be included in any full explanation of crime, individual factors always intervene between them and a criminal act.
• For this reason individual factors need to be the center of any description of the causes of crime.

Disadvantage

may motivate people to commit crimes,

but

so can

Advantage

• Lay people call this “temptation” and probably would consider any discussion of motivation that excluded temptation silly
• Thus a person’s propensity to commit a criminal act at a particular point in time is a function of both motivation and opportunity
• Some may be motivated to seek out and exploit criminal opportunities that offer extremely small rewards; others will commit crimes only when presented with relatively enormous opportunities; and a very few will not commit crimes regardless of rewards

MOTIVATION

• As the past decade’s string of various issues and controversies have presented, the elevated skills and status that provide access to lucrative criminal opportunities with little risk of being caught and punished also can motivate people to commit crimes
• In politics and business, the opportunities are enormously tempting. Their is very high motivation to commit crimes for most politicians and business people since the benefits of covering up seemingly simple things can be quite blinding and opportunities have tendencies to present themselves regularly

In this discussion, motivation is more than the “I want.” portion of the equation. It includes:

• “I could.”
• “What will it cost me compared to what I think I’ll get?”
• “Is this right and proper?”

• Child development—the source of many core personality traits—is particularly vulnerable to poor family management practices arising from such things as poverty, lack of education, or living in a high crime neighborhood. Family stressors such as unemployment, marital conflict, and divorce also can disrupt family life. According to Patterson and his colleagues at the Oregon Social Learning Center, growing up in a disrupted family is strongly associated with child antisocial behavior—of which crime is one type

OPPORTUNITY

• Contrariwise, scientific scandals are relatively rare. However, it is not likely motivation but opportunity that is lacking.
• The main reward in science is prestige, and it is gained by publishing papers. Plagarism and data faking occur, but if the idea is an important one, the victim of plagarism will complain, and other will attempt to replicate the faked experiment.
• The criminal act of publishing a faked paper is highly public; your name is attatched and the chances of getting caught are high

Motivation

this is the outcome of a process in which a goal is formulated, costs and benefits are assessed, and internal constraints on behavior are applied

• Criminologists hypothesize that a number of individual factors determine a person’s motivation to commit an act
• Motivation at a particular point in time is the result of interactions over a person’s life course between biological, socio-cultural, and developmental factors as well as contemporaneous opportunity

Biological Factors

Development

This is the process of physical, intellectual, and emotional growth that begins with conception and ends with death. Development can be adversely influenced by such factors as environmental pollutants, disease, physical injury and lack of nurturing. Interactions throughout the life course between biological,

sociocultural, and developmental factors determine who we are and how we respond to opportunities at any point in time.

Motivation alone cannot cause a crime to occur

Another thing is also required

• The relative importance of the components of this process may vary from individual to individual, time to time, and situation to situation
• In other words, sometimes a person’s motivation is influenced more by rational decision-making, other times by emotions such as anger, greed, or lust
• Similarly, some people tend to be more motivated by cost/benefit calculations more of the time than others
• Moreover, the value people place on different objects or activities can vary as can their ability to resist temptation

Biological Factors

These include such things as physical size, strength, or swiftness,

and the excitability/reactivity of nervous and organ systems in the body

Note: Although these factors set the physical boundaries of our behavior and influence our affective state, they do not determine which of the myriad possible behaviors we perform.

Socio-Cultural Factors

These influence the strategies of behavior and personal beliefs,

values, needs, and desires a person acquires over his or her life

Socio-cultural factors influence the strength of self-control that

helps us resist temptation. They also can produce “strain” that magnifies temptation when there are disjunctions between what we have learned to desire and the opportunities we perceive.

Socio-Cultural Factors

Development

• Murder, robbery, burglary, rape, drunken driving, child neglect, and failure to pay your taxes all are common examples of crimes
• The behavioral definition of crime focuses on, criminality, a certain personality profile that causes the most alarming sorts of crimes
• . As Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) noted, criminality is a style of strategic behavior characterized by self-centeredness, indifference to the suffering and needs of others, and low self-control

Webster’s defines them as such:

Crime

an action or omission that constitutes an offense that may be prosecuted by the state and is punishable by law.

Criminality

behavior that is contrary to or forbidden by criminal law.

What is crime?

What is criminality?

How Bad is the Problem of Crime?

Why do people commit crimes?