Chapter 3: The Nature and Causes of Crime



Chapter 3: The Nature and Causes of Crime

Objectives

1. Know the strengths and weaknesses of the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and understand the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

2. Understand how self-report studies add to our knowledge of criminality.

3. Be familiar with the “dark figures of crime” and know how they affect crime statistics.

4. Know the age, gender, race, and ethnicity of the most likely persons to be criminal offenders or victims of crime.

5. Distinguish between choice, trait, and sociological theories.

6. Explain the social policy applications of the theories.

Introduction

1. Historically, crime has been difficult to measure

2. Public information about crime is not very accurate

3. Two principal measures

a. Official crime statistics (UCR)

b. Unofficial crime statistics (NCVS)

4. Around the globe

a. Chewing gum crime

5. Uniform Crime Reports

a. One of the earliest measures of crime

i. Crime Index offenses

ii. Part II offenses

b. See Table 3–1 UCR Serious Criminal Offenses

c. Problems with the UCR data

i. Reports only crimes known to the police

ii. Does not collect all relevant data

iii. Tells us more about police behavior than it does about criminality

iv. Still the most widely used data source

d. Reforming the UCR

i. National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)

1. Crime incident

2. Victim

3. Nature of the property

4. Characteristics of the arrested suspect

ii. Approximately 36 percent of law enforcement agencies contribute data

iii. In 2004, FBI discontinued using the Crime Index

6. National Crime Victimization Survey

a. Table 3–2 Differences Between UCR and NIBRS Data

b. NCVS was launched in 1972

i. Seven crimes of interest

ii. Provides a better estimate of the dark figures of crime

iii. Helps criminologists understand why some victims do not report crimes

iv. Demonstrates variations in crime reporting

v. Allows criminologists to test theories about how crime results from interactions between victim and offender

c. Problems with NCVS Data

i. Limited in scope

ii. Interview data may be unreliable

1. Memory errors

2. Telescoping

3. Errors of deception

4. Sampling error

d. Acclaim for the NCVS

i. Trends reported in both sets of data are similar

ii. Data from both instruments generally reach the same conclusion

7. Self-report surveys

a. Purpose—identify your own criminality

b. National Youth Survey—most comprehensive self-report instrument

c. Study has followed the same individuals over time

i. Original cohort 11 to 17 years old

ii. Now 43 to 49 years old

d. Problems with self-report surveys

i. Data are not always reliable

ii. Studies often exclude chronic offenders

iii. Studies typically discover trivial events

e. Acclaim for self-report studies

i. Quantity of information is substantial

ii. Real extent of the dark figures of crime being 4 to 10 times greater

8. Crime statistics for the United States

a. No perfect measure

b. Best single source is the UCR

c. Violent crime is committed every 22 seconds

d. Property crime is committed every 3 seconds

e. NCVS reported 14 million property crimes and 3.3 million violent crimes

f. Dramatic decrease in crime in recent decades explained by

i. The economy

ii. Prisons

iii. Policing

iv. Age

g. Figure 3–1 U.S. Crime Clock

h. Figure 3–2 U.S. Crime Rate Index, 1991–2007

9. Criminal offenders

a. 60 percent of persons arrested are between 19 and 39

b. African Americans account for 37 percent of arrests for serious violent crime

c. Men are arrested for 82 percent of serious violent crime

10. Offenders by age

a. Figure 3–3 Age Crime Curve

b. Crime rates increase during preadolescence

c. Peak in adolescence

d. Decline steadily thereafter

e. Serious violent crime arrests peak at age 18

f. Property crime arrests peak at age 16

g. Juveniles account for 16 percent of serious violent crimes and 26 percent of serious property crimes

h. Arrests in both categories have dropped for the period 1997 to 2006

i. Age-crime curve shows older people commit fewer crimes

j. Focus on criminal justice

i. The criminal unborn

11. Offenders by socioeconomic status

a. UCR and NCVS stress street crimes

b. Actual monetary costs of white-collar crime are unknown

c. White-collar crime may be undiscovered, unprosecuted, and/or unpunished

12. Crime victims

a. There are no victimless crimes

b. Criminal behavior always has consequences

c. Children

i. Vulnerable to crime

ii. Childhood victimization linked to problems later in life

1. Teen pregnancy

2. Alcohol and drug abuse

3. Criminality

iii. Roughly 1 million children are victims of maltreatment each year

d. Figure 3–4 Victimology Timeline

e. Senior citizens

i. Are 12 percent of the population

ii. Seniors experience nonfatal violent crime at a rate of 5 percent of that of young persons

iii. Seniors experience property crimes at a rate of 25 percent of that of younger persons

f. Victims of intimate-partner violence (IPV)

g. IPV involves murder, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated and simple assault

h. Women are five times more likely than men to be victims of IPV

i. Demographics of women most likely to be victims of domestic violence

i. African American

ii. Young

iii. Divorced or separated

iv. Low-income, living in rental housing in urban areas

j. Hate crime victims

i. Legislation passed in the 1980s

ii. Southern Poverty Law Center has estimated that 888 hate groups were operating in the United States in 2007—up 5 percent from 2006

1. Ku Klux Klan, White Nationalists, Neo-Confederates, Black Separatists, and Racist Skinheads

k. Headline crime: The beating of Billy Ray Johnson

13. Causes of crime

a. Three types of crime theories

i. Choice theories

ii. Trait theories

iii. Sociological theories

b. Choice theories

i. Derived from classical and neoclassical schools of criminology

c. Classical school

i. Cesare Beccaria

1. Developed ideas about crime and punishment

2. Classical school ultimately failed to explain why people committed crime

3. Classical school focused on the criminal act, not the actor

d. Neoclassical school

i. Focus on the role of the criminal justice system in preventing crime

ii. Recognized crime may be influenced by factors beyond the control of the offender

iii. Mitigating circumstances

1. Age or mental disease

2. Mitigating circumstances became recognized as individual justice

3. Individual justice led to the development of the insanity defense

e. Rational choice theory

i. Explores the reasoning process of criminals and suggests offenders are rational people

ii. Offenders collect and process information before committing a criminal offense

f. Routine activities theory

i. Motivated offenders, suitable targets, absence of capable guardians

ii. Does not identify what motivates an offender

iii. Overlooks factors that may cause crime

g. Lifestyle theory

i. Closely related to routine activities theory

ii. People become victims because of the situations they put themselves in

1. The more time spent away from home, the greater the risk

h. Social policy implications of choice theories

i. Crime control legislation based on classical and neoclassical theories recommends

1. Implementing cell-phone tracking surveillance

2. Establishing three-strikes law

3. Hiring more police

4. Making it physically difficult to commit crimes

5. Increasing risk of crime

6. Reducing rewards of crime

i. Trait theories

i. Theories rooted in biology and psychology

j. Biological theories

i. Called scientific determinism

ii. The positive school of criminology

1. Auguste Comte

a. Scholars adopting this philosophy are called positivists

iii. Genetic factors

1. Criminality may be partially inherited

a. Twins study

b. Concordance—the similarity between behaviors of twin siblings

c. Discordance—the lack of similarity between behaviors of twin siblings

d. Adoptee studies

i. Criminality of the adopted child strongly related to the criminality of the biological parent

iv. Neurological factors

1. One of the most consistently documented biological correlates of crime is an underaroused system marked by low resting heart rate

2. Growing body of literature confirms that criminality is tied to differences in brain structure

v. Environmental factors

1. Behavior is under the control of the brain

2. Activities shape how the brain processes information

3. Environment contributes to both the brain’s content and its wiring

a. Mothers who smoke while pregnant

b. Parents who smoke around their children

c. Evidence suggests that mothers who smoked during pregnancy were much more likely to have children who participated in criminal behavior into adulthood

4. Environmental toxins

a. Interfere with the ability of the brain to perceive and react to the environment

i. Lead

ii. Damages internal organs

k. Psychological theories

i. Three popular theories

1. Psychoanalytic theory

2. Behavioral theory

3. Social learning theory

ii. Freudian psychoanalytic theory

1. Id—present at birth and consists of blind, unreasoning instinctual desires

a. If you want something, take it!

2. Ego—grows from the id and represents problem-solving dimension of the personality

a. To minimize guilt, the ego will leave clues at the crime scene

3. Superego—emerges from the ego and represents the moral code, norms, and values

iii. Behavioral Theory

1. B. F. Skinner

2. Environment shapes the behavior of people

3. Behavior is either pleasant or painful

4. Behavior is shaped by its consequences

iv. Social learning theory

1. Albert Bandura

2. People learn by modeling and imitation

a. People may learn to be aggressive

b. People may learn aggressive behavior from what they see in the media

3. Some disagree

a. Cheryl Olson argues video games are a social toy for boys who use them to interact and build friendships

v. Social policy implications of biological and psychological theories

1. Invest more money in prenatal and postnatal care for women

2. Monitor children more closely during crucial developmental years

3. Offer paid maternity leave

4. Make nutritional programs available for pregnant women, newborns, and young children

5. Provide counseling

6. Teach people different ways to respond to their environment

a. For example, aversion therapy

l. Headline crime: should video games be censored?

m. Sociological theories

i. Causes of crime are outside the offender

ii. Social factors cause crime

iii. Cultural deviance theory

1. Criminality is blamed on social and economic factors found in the neighborhood

2. Neighborhoods provide consistent values and norms

3. Low-income neighborhoods are characterized by social disorganization

4. Transmission of values begins early in life

iv. Differential association theory

1. Aims to explain both individual and group criminality

2. Criminal behavior is learned through social interaction with friends and family

v. Strain theory

1. Faults American society for teaching everyone to strive for certain goals

2. Blames crime on a lack of integration between goals and means

3. Crime is a normal response to a social condition that limits opportunities

4. Modes of adaptation include

a. Conformity

b. Innovation

c. Ritualism

d. Retreatism

e. Rebellion

5. Table 3–3 Merton’s Modes of Adaptation

vi. Social control theory

1. Argues people are by nature amoral

2. Controls are attitudes implanted effectively in most people

a. Attachment

b. Belief

c. Commitment

d. Involvement

3. People with weak social bonds commit crime

4. Best predictor of criminality is the child’s attachment to parents, schools, and peers

5. Each component of the bond forms it own continuum; when merged, they provide a gauge of how strongly someone is tied to society

vii. Self-control theory

1. Argues people are self-gratifying and pleasure-seeking

2. Some people are impulsive, insensitive, and short-sighted

3. Self-control is attributed to early childhood rearing

4. Post childhood experiences have little effect on self-control

viii. Labeling theory

1. Deviants and non-deviants are more similar than they are different

2. Whether people are labeled deviant depends on how others react to their behavior rather than on the behavior itself

3. Behavior is neither moral or immoral; it becomes one or the other depending on people’s reaction to it

4. Process

a. Commit the deviant act

b. Caught and given a label

c. Negative label is generalized to the whole person

d. Label becomes the person’s master status

ix. Conflict theory

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

2. Views society in terms of inequities in power and influence

3. Crime is the product of an oppressed and exploited working class

x. Developmental theories

1. Career criminals

2. Theorists look at what was going on in the lives of criminals before they began their criminal careers

xi. Social policy implications of sociological theories

1. Find a way to alter the landscape

2. Mobilize residents

3. Large-scale community projects such as the Chicago Area Project (CAP) started in 1931

4. Create new opportunities for disadvantaged people

5. Opportunities for offenders to “go straight”

6. Social policies should focus on strengthening bonds between children and their parents

a. Head Start

7. Childhood intervention projects that assist single parents

a. Parent training curriculum

8. Ignore minor violations

9. Examine the consequences of structural inequalities

10. Programs to strengthen family bonds and effective communication

11. Programs designed to address drug use by high school students

12. Programs that will assist with an effective transition to the job market and avoiding dysfunctional personal relationships

xii. Headline crime: PETA activists protest Kentucky Fried Chicken

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