Criminology Midterm

  1. Crime
  2. an act that violates the criminal law and is punishable by the state.
  3. deviance
    Violation of norms occurs when people break the rules.
  4. What defines crime?
    the societal reaction
  5. common reasons popularly claimed by society to explain criminal activities:
    • Poor parenting,
    • low moral standards,
    • poverty
  6. important roles in increasing fear of crime:
    • politicians
    • media
  7. Best’s theory
    media reports only extra-ordinary crime.
  8. Glassner’s theory
    pseudodanger plays an important role in society because it takes away the attention of people from bigger issues to smaller crimes.
  9. classical school
    humans have free will and their behavior is guided by pain-and-pleasure theory. Classical theorists also claimed that criminals can calculate the risks and rewards in any action; therefore, punishment should be suited to the offence, not to the characteristics of a criminal.
  10. positivists
    the choice to commit crimes is made by an individual whose personality, character, and violent tendencies had been formed through many negative interactions with the environment, although they may be predisposed to crime by their biology. Therefore, providing a positive environment to criminals can help them in reformation.
  11. Shaw and McKay
    juvenile delinquency could be understood only by considering the social context in which youths lived.
  12. Criminal behavior is learned
    in interaction with other persons in a process of communication. The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups.
  13. Urban ecological variables such as neighborhood and structural density influence crime by...
    their impact on formal and informal processes of social control.
  14. In 1925, Burgess presented a descriptive model...
    which divided cities in a set of six concentric zones. According to this model, neighborhood organization is instrumental in preventing or permitting delinquent careers.
  15. In 1893, Emile Durkheim
    introduced the concept of anomie to describe an emerging state of social deregulation, which explained how the moral values of people could erode, to they no longer knew what to expect from each other.
  16. Merton's strain theory
    • societal factors such as unemployment, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, etc. cause strain and lead to crime. According to this theory, crime can only be explained by examining the structure of society, not the nature of the individual.
    • mostly concerned with the difficulties people have in gaining money
  17. extensions of Merton's strain and deviance approach
    Albert Cohen, Richard Cloward, and Lloyd Ohlin
  18. Cohen explained that delinquency is...
    a product of conflict between working and lower-class culture and middle-class values and expectations.
Author
Anonymous
ID
26786
Card Set
Criminology Midterm
Description
Criminology Theory - Ch 1 to 4 and 7
Updated