Analyzing Crime Theories and Rehabilitation Practices

Section 1: The Rational Actor Model

Question 1

Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham formulated felicific calculus. The function of the felicific calculus was to provide the calculation of the degree or the level of pleasure that given action can cause. According to his research, Bentham believed that the moral wrongness or rightness of an action to be the reason behind the amount of pain or pleasure that is produced (Mitchell & Eli, 2017). The felicity calculus could be used to determine the moral status of any considered act.

Question 2

Cornish and Clarke proposed the deterrence theory; they also came up with the rational choice theory. According to deterrence theory, a human being will consider the consequences of punishment prior to acting. Even before they act, he or she would not commit the act when there is no effective punishment. This is evident that all offenders have a free will because; if the rational calculation the pain derived from punishment is greater than what motivates the crime, then humans are less likely to commit the crime. This motivation is constant across the offenders, all of them, but not across offences. According to this theory, before an individual commits any crime, he or she would have first thought about its repercussions and made up their minds on whether to go on with the crime or not (Morgan, 2017).

Question 3

There is numerous research on deterrence effects. However, these effects vary according to a number of factors. To begin with, is the nature of crime, and notably, deterrent effects can be categorized as crime-specific. According to one study, for instance, it was discovered that burglary rate was lowered due to increased certainty of arrest, while police did not affect the larceny rate. Certainty of punishment is another reason why crime rate has declined. According to research, the increase in probability of arrest has led to decline in crime rates. Deterrence has been found difficult in explaining prevention of crime, this is because preventing crime through punishment, and law is its main purpose even if it fails to reduce crime completely (Boterill, 2017). This would make it appear as if deterrence is less effective when it comes to explaining crime. That when punishment is served, actors will offend less is the only explanation it can give.

Section 2: The Pre-destined Actor Model

Question 1

Cesare Lombroso was an Italian criminologist; he came up with the biological theory of positivism. He studied the mind, body, as well as the habits of “born” criminals. The physical differences that he measured among soldiers, including the aggressive soldiers or those who displayed criminal behaviors and the disciplined ones are what helped him come up with his findings. He found the relation between physical abnormalities and individual features, against their propensity towards committing crime (Hagan, 2008). He came up with four types of criminals which includes; the born criminals, insane criminals, criminals of passion and occasional criminals.

Question 2

According to Bandura, violence is a learnt behavior and if children are exposed to violent images in the media, they might learn that such behaviors are normal and acceptable in real life. There exist incidents where kids commit violent crimes after watching very violent media. Media violence also leads to desensitization where people become less shocked by violence and are more likely to employ it themselves (McShane, 2013).

Question 3

Rehabilitation is an offending arena, which contains some components that meet the criteria for punishment. When rehabilitation is integrated into the society, a person who has been convicted will be subjected to modern penal policy whose main objective is to counter habituate them hence it can be considered as a form of punishment (Di Lorenzo, 2011). When criminals are placed in unhealthy-threatening bad conditions and are denied access to medical care then rehabilitation is viewed more as a rigid punishment rather than its transformation objectivity. When they are denied ties to the outside world then rehabilitation does not serve its purpose. Continue your journey with our comprehensive guide to The Impact of gruesome evidence on juror decision making.

Section 3: The Victimised Actor Model

Question 1

According to the available statistic, the amount and of and type of offending is correlated to class background. According to Marxism, the high rate of working class crimes are of social construction, owing to the fact that it emphasizes on the role of crimogenic capitalism in general (Weis, 2017).

Question 2

A social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in politics and leadership, control over property, social privilege and moral authority is known as patriarchy. This is associated with a set of ideas, for instance the patriarchal ideology that tries to explain and justify this type of dominance and relates it to the differences between men and women. Sociologists view patriarchy as social product and not as a result of the differences between men and women (Witz, 2013).

Question 3

1. Primary deviance are episodes of deviant behaviors that are participated in by majority of people while secondary deviance is when something is made out of the deviance behavior by an individual and it creates a negative social label which ends up changing a person’s self-concept and social identity (Matsueda, 2017).
2. Master status refers to when an individual deviant identity overrules all other identities. This can happen when the individual is portrayed as a deviant in public. This may result to rejection from other numerous groups (Enriquez, 2017).
3. An exaggerated outburst, which arises as a public concern over the morality or behavior of a group in the society is known as a moral panic. The focus of moral panic has always been on Deviant subcultures (Rohloff & Wright, 2010). Mass media has a crucial role to play when it comes to moral panic.
4. Folk devil is a term used to describe those people who are threatening to public order. These are people portrayed by the media deviant, and also regarded as outsiders. They are usually blamed for crimes or even other forms of social problems in the society (Poynting & Morgan, 2016).

References

• Botterill, L. C. (2017). Evidence-Based Policy. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.
• Di Lorenzo, C. E. (2011). Pilates: what is it? Should it be used in rehabilitation?. Sports health, 3(4), 352-361.
• Enriquez, L. E. (2017). A ‘master status’ or the ‘final straw’? Assessing the role of immigration status in Latino undocumented youths’ pathways out of school. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(9), 1526-1543.
• Hagan, F. E. (2008). Introduction to Criminology: Theories, Methods, and Criminal Behavior. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
• Matsueda, R. L. (2017). The Natural History of Labeling Theory. Labeling Theory, 13-44.
• McShane, M. (2013). An Introduction to Criminological Theory. Routledge
• Morgan, P. M. (2017). The Concept of Deterrence and Deterrence Theory. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.
• Mitchell, W. C., & Eli, G. (2017). Bentham’s Felicific Calculus 1. The Backward Art of Spending Money, 177-202.
• Poynting, S., & Morgan, G. (2016). Introduction: The transnational folk devil. In Global Islamophobia (pp. 15-28). Routledge.
• Rohloff, A., & Wright, S. (2010). Moral panic and social theory: Beyond the heuristic. Current Sociology, 58(3), 403-419.
• Weis, V. V. (2017). Marxism and Criminology: A History of Criminal Selectivity. Leiden, Netherlands: BRILL.
• Witz, A. (2013). Professions and patriarchy. Routledge.