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Consideration was give to the offender’s
- •Age
- •Mental condition
- •Extenuating circumstances
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Positivistic Criminology
Behavior is seen as largely a result of biological/psychological and social/cultural influences beyond an individual’s control
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Individual Determinism
humans influenced most by biological or psychological factors.
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Social/Cultural Determinism
humans influenced most by social or cultural factors.
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•Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)
- –Father of Criminology
- –Studied military criminals versus non-criminals and thought:
- •he detected physical differences
- •These differences were symptoms of underlying lesser evolutionary status (atavism).
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Schools of Individual deterministic theories:
- –Physical Type Theories
- –Hereditary Theories
- –Defectiveness Theories
- –Mental Deficiency Theories
- –Mental Illness Theories
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Humans influenced most by social or cultural factors
- –Social Structure Theories
- –Social Process Theories
- –Symbolic Interactionism
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Neighborhoods changed populations over time, but delinquency patterns remained very stable.
- –Thus, the kids were learning crime from the older kids in delinquent areas.
- –The cultural transmission of delinquency – delinquent beliefs and acts spread from one delinquent to another in neighborhoods, despite differences in race and ethnicity.
- –Thus, crime could NOT be biological in origin … it had to be learned!
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Emile Durkheim (1858-1917).
- –Viewed the changes in modern society as causing a disjunction between the old norms people had learned and the new social conditions in which they now lived.
- –The disjunction caused “anomie”
- •Anomie = a state of “normlessness” occurring when norms do not fit the situation people are in now.
- –Saw deviant behavior (such as crime, and even suicide) as resulting from social conditions … NOT from individual abnormalities.
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Goals-means gap:
- Adaptation Goal Means
- 1. Conformity + +
- 2. Innovation + -
- 3. Ritualist - +
- 4. Retreatist - -
- 5. Rebel +- +-
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Social Process Theories
Major influence on any individual is not society in general but the interactions that dominate everyday life.
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Differential Association Theory
- –Identified by Edwin Sutherland – one of the most influential sociologists in the 20th century.
- –People learn from other people in the most important of their membership groups – or from the most important of their personal relationships
- –People learn content and skills as well as motivations to behavior, whether legal or illegal.
- –“A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law.”
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•Control Theory:
–Argued that people would commit crimes naturally if they were not constrained in some way by conventional society.
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