Theories are used as explanations of an experiment or study. A theory can be tested and then is used a predictor of something. People in criminal justice use criminological theories to explain why individuals commit crimes and based off of these theories, they can also see try to predict whether people will commit crimes and based off this try to prevent individuals from offending. In the criminal justice work field another set of theories are used called Management Theories. Similar to criminological theories, management theories can also help predict and explain people’s behavior. Management theories help explain behavior in the workplace. They are executed to aid in the expansion of employee output.
This paper will analyze one criminological
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The theory directly links the type community with the crime rates it has. Social Disorganization Theory was developed by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay in the Chicago School in 1942. They discovered that crime rates were not even across all communities. Despite changes in population Shaw and Mckay noticed that the crime was concentrated and stable among certain areas. Communities who were economically deprived, had high crime rates and increased population turnover were the cities that they considered to be socially disorganized. According to Regoeczi and Jarvis (2013), Extensions and revisions of this theory have included more explicit discussions of the intervening processes between such structural factors as economic deprivation and residential instability and crime rates. A persons physical and social environments are partly responsible for the decisions that they make. Shaw and Mckay did not directly correlate low income neighborhoods with crime, bust instead low income neighborhoods had higher turnover rates and the people who would move into the neighborhood were usually immigrants which then resulted in racial heterogeneity. Aspects of a person’s neighborhood can be looked at and used to predict whether there will be higher crime rates in the neighborhood. This theory is used to help law enforcement predict where the higher crime will be and therefore allow them to prevent …show more content…
When the riots from the Michael Brown and Freddie Gray surfaced, police officers and law enforcement all had to adjust to the changes in their towns. People took off of work and school to protest about the killing of unarmed black men. They protested at the courts and in front of police stations. Normally during the middle of the day people would be at work but instead they were posted in front of government buildings letting the world know about their problem. Police officers schedules also changed when this happened. Instead of the officers usual deployment that may have consisted of patrolling or office work, many of the officers were standing outside and creating a barrier between the buildings and the protestors. In Baltimore, people broke into stores, set buildings on fine and destroyed a lot of property to get their point across to the Baltimore Police Department. Chaos theory states that things are constantly changing and that some of the things that happen and some things can be controlled while others can’t. The Baltimore Police Department had to change their structure to maintain the stability to the department during the
...g, Critical, Peacemaking, Life Course and Strain theories could also be used to explain crime in these neighborhoods. According to Emile Durkheim, mores are different depending on the type of community. On a spectrum, from organic or the lower socio-economic neighborhood to mechanical or the well-structured community in this case Chestnut Hill. In a mechanical society, there is greater cohesion, sharing common values or goals. As could be expected, crime is predicted to be higher in more organic the community is.
There are many definitions to theory. According to Akers (2009) “theories are tentative answers to the commonly asked questions about events and behavior” (Akers, (2009, p. 1). Theory is a set of interconnect statements that explain how two or more things are related in two casual fashions, based upon a confirmed hypotheses and established multiple times by disconnected groups of researchers.
According to Cullen and Agnew (2011) the Social Disorganization theory was developed in the mid 1940’s by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay while they were researchers studying at the Institute for Social Research in Chicago. Shaw and McKay (1942) based their research of the study of crime in Chicago off of the work that Ernest Burgess theorized in how urban areas grow through a process of continual expansion from their inner core toward outlying areas. According to Cullen and Agnew (20011) one of the primary arguments in the social disorganization theory is the idea that there are settlement patterns in the development of cities, and how these patterns impact neighborhood characteristics and corresponding crime levels. Shaw and McKay developed a theory based off the settlement pattern research that Ernest Burgess conducted. According to Cullen and Agnew (2011) Ernest Burgess stated ...
Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization theory had a profound impact on the study of the effects of urbanization, industrialization and immigration in Chicago neighborhood on crime and delinquency rates. However, Shaw and McKay faced much criticism when they first released their findings. One criticism of the social disorganization theory had to do with researcher’s ability to accurately test the social disorganization theory. Although Shaw and McKay collected data on characteristics of areas and delinquency rates for Chicago communities and were able to visually demonstrate a relationship between by using maps and other visuals, their research did not have an actually test that went along with it (Kurbin, 2010). Kurbin (2010) states that “the
Many of the traditional criminological theories focused more on biological, psychological and sociological explanations of crime rather than on the cost and benefits of crime. More conservative approaches, including routine actives, lifestyle exposure and opportunity theories have clearly incorporated crime rate patterns as a fundamental part of analyzing the economics of crime. Crime statistics are important for the simple reason that they help put theories into a logical perspective. For example, a prospective home owner may want to look at crime rates in areas of potential occupancy. On a more complex level, it helps law enforcement and legislators create effective crime reduction programs. Furthermore, it also helps these agencies determine if crime prevention programs, that have been in effect, have been successful. There are many factors that influence the rates of crime including socio economic status, geographical location, culture and other lifestyle factors. More specifically, Messner and Blau (1987) used routine activities theory to test the relationship between the indicators of leisure activities and the rate of serious crimes. They discussed two types of leisure actives, the first being a household pastime, which primarily focused on television watching. The second type was a non-household leisure event which was consisted of attendance to sporting events, cinemas, and entertainment districts. The focus of this paper will be to study the effects that substantial amounts of leisure activities have on the offender and the victim. Leisure activities not only make a crime more opportunistic for offenders, it may also provide offenders with motivation to engage in criminal activity. On the other hand, it may also be argue...
While the study of criminal justice and the formation of criminal justice theories are largely molded by several other disciplines such as psychology and sociology (Wellford, 2007), the study of criminal justice has grown and it is time for it to stand alone as its own scientific discipline. Crime theories are developed through studying individuals and assessing as well as their environment and other social aspects. These theories are then used to help form policies in order to deter the individual or group from committing further crimes. Criminal justice theories are not only used for crime but there are also theories which aid criminal justice personnel in the application of the practices that they use. The criminal justice policies are implemented
When social disorganization manifests, communities deteriorate, and residents become frightened to leave their homes in fear of potential victimization (2014).
Two major sociological theories explain youth crime at the macro level. The first is Social Disorganization theory, created in 1969 by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay. The theory resulted from a study of juvenile delinquency in Chicago using information from 1900 to 1940, which attempts to answer the question of how aspects of the structure of a community contribute to social control. The study found that a community that is unable to achieve common values has a high rate of delinquency. Shaw and McKay looked at the physical appearance of the neighborhoods, the average income of the population, the ethnicity of the neighborhood, the percent of renters versus owners, and how fast the population of the area changed. These factors all contribute to neighborhood delinquency.
This theory however as some have argued has emerged from social disorganisation theory, which sees the causes of crime as a matter of macro level disadvantage. Macro level disadvantage are the following: low socioeconomic status, ethnic or racial heterogeneity, these things they believe are the reasons for crime due to the knock on effect these factors have on the community network and schools. Consequently, if th...
In the criminal justice system, different theories are looked at to see why criminal acts are committed and what mindset must a person have to commit these acts. Two theories that come up are that of the social structure theory and the social process and social development theory which can both be argued as to why criminal behaviors exist in society today. This paper will take a look at the Tent City, Arizona video and how it supports the social structure theory. This paper will discuss how the tent city video supports the social structure theory in addition to the primary subject or content of the video. It will also discuss social issues raised in the video and major principles of sociological theory addressed in the video. To conclude,
Why are some neighborhoods more prone to experience violent episodes than others? What is the extent and in what sociologically measurable ways do communities contribute to the causation and prevention of crime in their neighborhoods? Are neighborhood-level predictors adequate to explain differences in violent crime rates in the respective communities? These are some of the questions addressed by this statistically intense paper published in Science 1997, by Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls.
There are many different crimes that people commit and many reasons for why those people commit those said crimes. Criminology is the study of crime and people that do that for a living are called criminologist. A long time ago, some criminologist came up with some theories on the reasons why and how people commit crimes. There are a group of theories under the social learning theories; one of these theories is the differential association theory. This theory states that people learn to be criminals and the criminal behavior associated with crime.
Therefore, the community has informal social control, or the connection between social organization and crime. Some of the helpful factors to a community can be informal surveillance, movement-governing rules, and direct intervention. They also contain unity, structure, and integration. All of these qualities are proven to improve crime rate. Socially disorganized communities lack those qualities. According to our lecture, “characteristics such as poverty, residential mobility, and racial/ethnic heterogeneity contribute to social disorganization.” A major example would be when a community has weak social ties. This can be caused from a lack of resources needed to help others, such as single-parent families or poor families. These weak social ties cause social disorganization, which then leads higher levels of crime. According to Seigel, Social disorganization theory concentrates on the circumstances in the inner city that affect crimes. These circumstances include the deterioration of the neighborhoods, the lack of social control, gangs and other groups who violate the law, and the opposing social values within these neighborhoods (Siegel,
In order to understand criminal behavior and the justice field, one must use sociological criminology. According to Barkan (2015), it is the intension of sociological criminology to expose and prove wrong incorrect claims about how effective and efficient one crime-control intervention is to others. In addition, sociological criminology should also be able to point out any injustices of criminal labels that were/are applied. We must start though by looking at the sociological perspective, which points out that people are shaped by how society shapes things like their behavior, attitudes, or even the chances in their life. Now this has sociologists looking at the social structure people come from in terms of their social aspects of life (relationships
Criminology is the scientific study of why people commit crime and why they act the way they do. The origins of criminology are usually placed in the eighteenth to the mid- nineteenth century. This was also a point of scientific discoveries and the creation of the new scholarly field of studies. One of these was criminology. Criminology was an act against the wild system of law, punishment, and justice that existed before the French revolution. (Adler, Mueller, Laufer & Grekul, 2012). There are many criminology theories that explain why an individual commit a crime. Anomie/stain theory and labelling theory are two important theories in criminology. There are two different kinds of theories, psychological theories and biological theories. Both of those theories share the assumption that such behaviour is caused by some underlying physical or mental condition that separates the criminal from the non-criminal. They seek to identify the kind of person who becomes a criminal and to find the factors that caused the person to engage in criminal behavior. (Adler et al.,).