Cullen, F. Criminological theory: Past to present. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, M. Religion in criminal justice. Miller, H. Restorative justice: From theory to practice.
Criminology and religion: The shape of an authentic dialogue. Book review. Criminology is the integrated, multidisciplinary study of the causes, predictions, and control of crime and other harmful behaviour constituting a breach of societal norms at a local, national, or international level. Criminology is guided by a commitment to human rights, democracy and equality.
Distinguishing criteria between petty and high-ranking corruption: Preliminary results. For example, the question is not whether nature or nurture causes crime but rather how they interact to account for individual variations in criminal behavior.
It is not a question of why does poverty seem to be associated with higher crime rates but rather how do individual development and poverty interact to explain why some people are delinquent and others are not. Each dimension of explanation is to a degree irreducible, and each is related to and influences the other. One of the most influential theories in criminology today is developmental or life course theories.
If disciplines by definition have their own distinct identities with welldefined boundaries, vocabularies, assumptions, values, theories, methods, and so on, will problems of communicating across disciplines discourage interdisciplinary efforts? Do certain subject areas compel the use of interdisciplinary approaches despite the inherent difficulties? In the natural sciences, revolutions in thinking take place by reconstituting our ideas about the natural world.
Biochemists studying human cells—who previously joined the disciplines of biology and chemistry—now work with physicists and engineers in addition to chemists and biologists. Scientists are now combining their understanding of their subject matter in ways that simply did not exist in the last century. Why Take a Multidisciplinary or Interdisciplinary Approach? Blending disciplines to create new area studies is a growing trend in colleges and universities. For example, at Truman State University in Missouri, sociology professor Michael Seipel instructs his students that rural America is best understood by combining and building on the disciplines of geography, sociology, economics, and political science.
Or consider Brazilian studies, which is a relatively new interdiscipline. The nation of Brazil lends itself to interdisciplinary studies in large part due to its history of military dictatorship, its rich cultural diversity, and wide extremes between the wealthy and poor.
Recent academic concerns with the problem of terrorism have already stimulated interdisciplinary endeavors. In general, the most important rationale for interdisciplinary education is that students need to be prepared to face a world in which boundaries of all sorts—cultural, economic, knowledge—increasingly overlap. They need to be versatile and to learn skills of processing information that will help them to understand and evaluate new developments from fields outside of their own.
Contrary to popular belief, most scientific disciplines do not make measured advances in knowledge over time, but instead are characterized by slow progress based on increasingly outdated assumptions.
Not surprisingly, this state of affairs eventually leads to an intellectual crisis within the discipline, perhaps because scholars cannot ignore discrepancies between theory and fact, or because changes occur in their area of study that the discipline cannot explain e. Recently, Cambridge University astrophysicist Stephen Hawkins retracted his once-leading theory of black holes because it does not fit into the more widely accepted string theory in physics.
In some cases the key scholars within the discipline become convinced that a new set of assumptions should replace the old ones. What can we say about the discipline of criminology, which not only failed to predict the substantial decline in crime during the s, but made headlines predicting the opposite of what really happened: a sharp increase in the crime rate for the same time period?
The inaccurate predictions were based on a simplistic assumption made by criminologists: that crime rates are directly related to demographics, particularly the number of adolescents and young adults.
Although the number of predicted young people was correct, the surrounding context changed dramatically. However, despite rising numbers of young people, the drug-related street violence declined steeply during the s and largely disappeared by the end of the decade as demand for crack-cocaine dissipated. After the dramatic downturn in crime occurred, many tried to explain why criminologists had been so wrong in their predictions about the crime rate.
Why did crime, notably street violence by juveniles and young adults, decrease during the s? Was the downturn in youth crime courtrelated—a result of early intervention with first-time offenders, increased incarceration rates, or use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act the RICO law by federal prosecutors against drug gangs?
Did it have to do with the increased use of personal electronic protection devices such as home security systems? Was it due to the fact that, while the numbers of young people increased, the number of older adults also increased, thus contributing to more stable neighborhoods? Was it because of a robust economy and growth in jobs?
Was it the result of efforts to support youths and families through domestic violence services and afterschool programs? How might a true cross-section of academic disciplines explain the recent and unexpected decline in violent youth crime? How would other disciplines build on existing knowledge to help prevent crime increases such as the one that occurred in the s?
This has led some to advocate for scholarship that is unrestricted by disciplinary criteria—essentially having to worry about no restrictions on disciplinary thinking. A recent news item about advances in genetic engineering confirms that there may be wisdom to this approach.
Then, interdisciplinary projects were given a tremendous boost by the Human Genome Project, which mapped the genetic properties of the human body and provided a foundation for new assumptions about chemical and physical properties of cells. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches enable students to understand perspectives that might not appeal to them initially.
For example, psychologist David Keirsey has identified four such styles, which can be assessed by testing students with a written exam. Some students are drawn to people, others to abstract ideas, some to step-by-step solutions, and others to learning by experience.
Professionals who work with criminals or victims have not necessarily studied any of the disciplines to be discussed in this book.
Although many criminal justice professionals probably have specialized in sociology or psychology, most of them have not ventured deeply into economics, biology, religious studies, or philosophy.
What are the advantages of delving into these disciplines? Are students prepared for the opposing viewpoints of crime that they must eventually encounter? Nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky offers a view of the complexity of crime that suggests that while courtroom adjudications may resolve cases legally, they nevertheless leave open compelling questions about the human condition. What punishment should have been imposed on homemaking guru Martha Stewart for lying to federal investigators?
Or on a juvenile who kills his abuser? Are criminals calculating opportunists, or poor and culturally disadvantaged people who end up behind bars because they perceive few options? The evidence at the crime scene was muddled, and there was no proof against Raskolnikov other than his confession.
He did not permit his attorney to argue that he was temporarily insane, although such a case could have been made. His character, prior to the killings, offered much to be admired. He had also rescued two little children from a house on fire and suffered burns in doing so. At the trial for the murders, he did not try to defend himself. When asked about his motive, he cited his poverty and helplessness, and his hope to redirect his life with the stolen money.
He noted his shallow and cowardly nature, which was pushed to the limit by deprivation and failure. When asked what led him to confess, Raskolnikov answered that it was his heartfelt repentance. Legally, his case was resolved with a shortened sentence of eight years in prison. Crime is as intricate a phenomenon as the array of human motivations for crime.
Moreover, the subject of crime includes considering the punishment response, so crime is further complicated by matters involving authority, organizations, and cultures.
Consider what we might call the oversimplified view of crime, the one you might overhear in a bar. Two patrons are arguing furiously. If you unpack these assumptions, you may learn that the first person has armed robbers in mind, while the other is talking about juvenile joyriders.
But even now the arguments break down. Perhaps he is desperate—hungry, drug-addicted, socially or psychologically troubled. And the joyrider, although young and impressionable, nevertheless was not physically forced to take the car. Even though Lt. William Calley gave the order and was prosecuted for his offense, many argued that he was made a scapegoat by the army.
His Captain, Ernest Medina, who was not convicted of any crime, was also viewed with sympathy by citizens back home. Rather than blame the individuals who ordered and carried out the killings, many people preferred to blame the war itself, the U.
How institutionally widespread was the practice? Were soldiers too untrained for such assignments? Or did those individuals simply choose to behave sadistically because they were in a position to do so? Criminologists as professionals have been studying crime for more than a century.
However, not every scholar who studies crime or takes an interest in crime is a criminologist. Scholarly disciplines give us a way of examining many parts of the human story by training our minds to be versatile as well as disciplined. Each discipline offers a systematic way of seeing the world, its human inhabitants, and imagining its future.
Each discipline has its own history, assumptions, methodologies, and criteria for verifying assertions about the subjects that are studied. Moreover, every discipline creates a particular reality and emphasizes particular values. How does each discipline contribute to our understanding of the criminal and of the society that punishes the criminal? How are crimes influenced by genetics, personality, socialization, government and laws, religious beliefs, morality, and rational choice?
The primary objective is to examine six disciplines—sociology, economics, psychology, biology, philosophy, and religious studies—and how they deal with the topic of understanding crime.
This multidisciplinary point of view is not the standard one used in most criminology texts, which present the assumptions, theories, and research of, say, sociology, psychology, and biology as criminologists have come to know them and use them.
Rather, this book consists of a series of original chapters, written by experts within each discipline, who describe the current thinking within the discipline as it relates to crime. The disciplinary areas were chosen based on their frequency in the primary literature that criminologists read, as defined by the number of entries found in Criminal Justice Abstracts, a quarterly journal summarizing all such literature.
This book offers a secondary purpose as well, which is to develop an awareness of important strengths and limitations of academic disciplines. The cross-section of disciplines offers an opportunity to examine such fundamental matters collectively as disciplinary assumptions, theories, and methods that hold true regardless of the subject matter.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this multidisciplinary approach. As a result, criminologists have become accustomed to reading what other criminologists say about economics, for example, rather than what modern-day economists themselves have to say about crime. Many of the most important discoveries of the future will come from those wise enough to explore the unknown territories between different disciplines. Professor Harold A. The disadvantage of this approach is that each disciplinary chapter is written by one scholar from their field.
Had we asked six other experts to write the chapters, they may indeed have come out quite differently whereas if we asked six criminologists to write those chapters, they would have come out looking unremarkably similar.
Each discipline is complex and sheds light on a slightly different angle of crime. In the next chapter, on sociological perspectives, readers will come to understand how and why crime and incarceration are patterned by social demographics and other societal factors. In Chapter Three, on economics and crime, readers will learn how economists develop understandings and responses to crime when they assume that crime is the result of a rational thought process.
The commentaries offer the reader further insight into how criminologists might understand crime through the perspective of each discipline.
In much the same way as other criminologists have stood at the edge of each discipline, these criminologists will discuss the assets that the disciplines have offered, and continue to offer, to the field of criminology, as well as the limitations of each discipline for understanding crime. At the conclusion of this volume, Chapter Eight has been prepared by a criminologist, Bruce A.
Arrigo, who takes a critical and interdisciplinary perspective on the study of crime that draws on the six chapters before it. As they make progress through the book, astute readers may begin to discern the gaps between disciplines as areas where future discovery is most likely. Even though the chapters do not necessarily discuss how the disciplines do or could interact with one another, the parallel presentations can be examined for potential areas of intersection among two or more disciplines, areas that can support interdisciplinary study.
This type of creative knowledge-building might appeal to certain readers in particular. As we consider the relatively young history of the academic discipline of criminology, perhaps the future direction for understanding crime will call for breadth of knowledge as well as depth, intellectual versatility, and responsiveness to new ideas.
References Allen, S. Cohen, S. Against Criminology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Faiola, A. Feyerabend, P. Against Method. New York: Verso. Foakes, R. Shakespeare and Violence. Foucault, Michel Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Girard, R. Williams The Girard Reader. New York: Crossroad. Keirsey, D. Kuhn, T. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lesser, W. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Morris, A. Osofsky, J. Children in a Violent Society. New York: Guilford. Quinney, R. Pepinsky and R. Quinney eds. Rosenfeld, S. Schwendinger, H. Schwendinger n. Young, J. Fitzgerald, G. McLennan, and J. Pawson eds. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. I then ask my students in what field they believe most American criminologists have received their training. I tell them that I have first-hand experience of this, having taught criminology to people in various branches of law enforcement.
I then ask the students to think about the criminology course they are currently taking. Why is it offered in the Sociology Department, and taught by me, a sociologist? The fact of the matter is that while some American criminologists are trained in biology, psychology, psychiatry, economics, political science, or criminal justice—and indeed, a few may even be lawyers and police officers— a disproportionate number of them have degrees in sociology.
There are two reasons for having this short discussion with my criminology students early in the course. First, it is to get them to realize that if they want to understand criminal behavior, it is a good idea to also study social behavior; that if they want to explain the crime problem, they had better know something about social problems.
Given that the study of social behavior and social problems has historically been the purview of sociology, it seems only logical that the behavior of criminals and the problem of crime should also be the concern of sociology. For most of its hundred-year existence, theoretical criminology has followed in the footsteps of sociological criminology. The Emergence of Sociological Criminology For all intents and purposes we can say that sociological criminology began with the renowned French sociologist, Emile Durkheim Durkheim believed that sociology—the scientific study of human society and social behavior—could explain much of the phenomenon of crime.
Durkheim began his sociological analysis of crime from two premises. To take a contemporary example, in high-crime urban neighborhoods, residents may believe that they are potential victims of robbery thinking , experience a sense of vulnerability to their surroundings feelings , and, as a consequence, may purchase a handgun and spend much of their time indoors behavior.
Although the academic discipline of sociology did not yet exist, Durkheim insisted that social facts should be systematically analyzed because they explain variation in behavior across segments of society and over time. Durkheim, whose nineteenthcentury work was later translated into English during the twentieth century , conducted an extensive study of suicide, an act normally believed to result from a private and personal decision, in part to refute the assumption that behavior was motivated only by individual psychology.
In the case of suicide, he found that social factors including religious affiliation, societal politics, and characteristics of occupational groups could predict the frequency of individuals taking their own lives in a given society.
A society without crime is impossible. He infers from an absence of crime that such a society would have to impose very harsh measures to keep its citizens from breaking the laws. For example, while there are no societies without crime, there have existed, and currently do exist, societies with very low rates of such crimes as prostitution, murder, robbery, gang delinquency, and so on. The former Nazi Germany was such a society. Durkheim believed that the price to be paid for very low crime rates is twofold: 1 the citizens of these totalitarian or authoritarian regimes have very little freedom in expressing individual originality, through their words or actions, and, as such, 2 the possibility for progressive social change in these societies is minimal.
Moreover, because progressive social change is desirable, both crime and the criminal are necessary; that is to say, they provide a useful role in this progression. Durkheim gives as an example of the social-change utility of crime the case of Socrates, the noted Greek philosopher. According to ancient Athenian culture, Socrates was considered a criminal for simply espousing his philosophical beliefs.
In B. Socrates was subsequently executed by means of a poisoned cup of hemlock, but, according to Durkheim, his death was not in vain. The case of Socrates—of the criminal as agent of progressive social change—is not unique. Periodically, throughout history, there have been criminals who have, through their crimes, brought about social reforms.
Consider, for example, that in , Martin Luther King Jr. These two cases, that of Socrates and King, illustrate that there are some laws that need to be broken if society is to progress.
It is to a general discussion of sociological theories of crime that we now turn. If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out.
If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law.
Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. Sociological Theories of Crime In their attempts at understanding crime, sociologists have generally asked, and tried to answer, two basic questions.
The first one is: Why do individuals commit crime? And the second, related question is: Why do some communities and certain populations have higher rates of crime than others? Simply put, the broader question is: What are those social factors that cause crime? In order to explain the causes of crime, sociologists have developed theories that examine the factors that produce criminal behavior and high crime rates. A theory is a scientific explanation for a causal relationship between two or more measurable phenomena a change in X causes a change in Y.
For example, an increase in poverty leads to an increase in crime. Theorists might first observe an increase in the poverty rate that is followed by an increase in the crime rate. Then the theorist would develop an explanation demonstrating the sociological connections between poverty and crime to rule out the possibility that the poverty-crime correlation is merely a coincidence.
Any phenomenon that can be measured is called a variable. A variable, then, is a phenomenon that can be measured either mathematically e. Sociological theories of crime look at variables that have to do with social structure, social process, or social conflict. As such, social structure gives order and stability to society. For example, even before you walk into your criminology class for the first time, you already have a good sense as to what type of behavior you can expect from the other students e.
Social structural explanations of juvenile crime might include neighborhood resources, teenage unemployment rates, and number of parents per household. Social process refers to the dynamic aspect of social interactions through which individuals define their everyday reality. People understand their social lives through ongoing communication with others. Sociologists who examine social process, therefore, pay special attention to how people give meaning to the behavior of others as well as to various social situations.
For example, students and professors abide by the norms and roles of the classroom—that is, they generally behave as they are expected to behave—because they define that situation as a classroom, and not as a party or a funeral. Social process variables measure precursors to crime, such as associations with criminal offenders and weak attachments to family members that contribute to the socialization of the offender.
Social conflict refers to the notion that social life is rife with all sorts of disagreements, frictions, and antagonisms, either between individuals or between social units e. The issue of power—the ability to get others to do what you want them to do, even if it is against their will—is at the heart of most social conflicts. Because individuals or groups do not all have the same amount of power authority, influence, clout , they usually compete against each other for it.
In a diverse society such as the United States there are many individuals and groups with different and competing interests who will want to have as much power as possible in order to maintain or advance those interests. Consider, for example, how legislation is influenced by such powerful political interest groups involved on opposite sides of the issue of gun control—those groups, like the National Rifle Association, that oppose a legislative ban on handguns, and those groups, like Handgun Control, Inc.
In general, then, there are three main sociological perspectives, or points of view, from which sociologists have developed theories to explain the causes of crime: 1 the social structure perspective, 2 the social process perspective, and 3 the social conflict perspective. In the sections that follow I briefly describe each of the three perspectives, provide a sketch of the main types of theories that are informed by these perspectives, and give a few select examples of specific theoretical statements on crime belonging to these theories.
There are generally three categories of theories that consider social structural factors and their disturbance: 1 social disorganization theories, 2 anomie theories, and 3 subculture theories. As a consequence, individual behavior is not as strictly regulated, and the outcome may be high rates of crime in that community. The Chicago School sociologists pointed to several factors, including rapid shift in populations, high unemployment, deteriorated housing, low income levels, and large numbers of single-parent households.
Thus, social disorganization theory links high crime rates to neighborhood structure. In their effort to study various social problems, the Chicago School sociologists developed a model of analysis in which they mapped out the city of Chicago into a ring of five concentric circles, or zones. Each zone possessed within it a unique community of people with a unique social structure, in regard to norms, values, culture, and so on.
The social disorganization theory of crime was popularized by the work of two Chicago sociologists, Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay , who saw a connection between life in transitional slum areas in the city, such as Zone II, and high rates of juvenile delinquency. In mapping delinquency rates throughout various zones of the city, Shaw and McKay observed that the areas of heaviest concentration of delinquency appeared to be in the transitional inner-city communities of Zones I the central city and II the immigrant slum communities.
Shaw and McKay stated that, in the transitional immigrant neighborhoods of the inner city, many diverse cultures and values competed and conflicted with each other, thus making it hard for people to know which ones to follow. What is more, these communities, even when their ethnic composition changed, were the most susceptible to the forces of rapid social change and persistent poverty.
These inner-city neighborhoods had all the earmarks of social disorganization.
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