Sociology And Criminal Behavior

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Sociology and criminal behavior

 Introduction 

Before investigating the world of criminal sociology, it is worth mentioning how sociology arose. Sociology was established as an academic discipline thanks to the sociologist Émile Durkheim. In addition, it is considered that this science was created by sociologists such as Karl Marx and Marx Weber accompanied by Durkheim. One of the main objects of this science is to analyze the society in which humans live and develop, with their different behaviors and actions.

Criminal sociology could be defined as the science that studies criminal behavior from a sociological point of view, that is, analyzing society as such, including, of course, sociological factors involved in the realization of these illicit acts of which we will talk aboutlater. We could say that this branch was created by the sociologist Enrico Ferri, in addition to being a very important sociologist was one of the most important authors of the so -called positivist school.

However, we cannot only mention Enrico Ferri as a criminal sociologist, since there are thousands of theories about this branch of sociology. How can we really know what makes a person become a criminal? Is it due to your family context? Or maybe to the area where they live? Well, first, we will mention the Chicago school.

Developing

This school was the first where the phenomenon of crime is considered a social phenomenon. Previously it was explained by the physiological characterization of individuals, such as Lombroso theories who claimed that people who performed criminal behaviors had a biological predisposition to be carried out. His method was based on that of natural sciences, that is, following empirical knowledge, through statistics and observation, criminal behavior could be identified.

The ecological approach to the criminal phenomenon means studying any phenomenon from the influence of human aggregation forms in which the different groups are distributed in space, in the case of crime, how the area where people live inCriminality rates. The first factor that we must develop is that developed by Park, who says that we are facing a parallel between the increase in crime and the increase in the city’s population, the passage from rural life to another urban, calling this movement industrialization.

He affirms that while in small communities there is an important personal control of the community about the individual, in urban communities people develop their activity outside the scrutiny of people who exercise control. The thesis of the Chicago school focused on verifying that the disorganized areas of the city are areas where higher crime rates are produced. Its research object was to determine the Chicago areas that have different youth crime rates. Once this rate is delimited by zones, the authors would study the physical and social characteristics of criminal areas. The results were the following:

  1. There is a big difference in crime phenomena between the city’s areas.
  2. There is a great concentration of crime in the central areas of the city
  3. There are no significant variations in these data between different periods studied.

With all this a characterization of criminal areas is obtained:

  • They are central areas of the city, in the so -called transition zone
  • The population born outside, with a high percentage of recently arrivals predominates.
  • It has a decreasing population.
  • In it there is the lowest income of the city.
  • The residents of these areas suffer to more social problems: school absenteeism, infant mortality, adult crime, etc. In conclusion, what the Chicago school raises is that what the crime explains is not the origin of the population, but its living conditions in certain areas of the city.

Theory of social disorganization 

If the areas with the greatest crime coincide with those that have the greatest poverty and have quite low living conditions, high immigration rate, etc. The next question is, why do these areas have such high rates of crime? This theory was developed by Henry McKay and Clifford Shaw. The result of his investigations was that the social context in which the individual grows is the main reason why the offender makes illegal behaviors.

Anomia theory 

Robert Merton was the one who, for the first time, reflected the hypothesis of the absence of the norm and tension that the social state generates in individuals. So much Durkheim, who was the one who introduced the concept of anomia in his work the Suicidiocomo Merton, the anomia arises from the discrepancy that exists between the needs of man and the media offered a society to satisfy them.

Its objective is to explain the crime from certain characteristics of society that promote its existence. Study the circumstances that weaken the effectiveness of norms as a guide for individual action. In addition, it does not focus on a society which is formed by people who perform illegal actions, but intends to explain and respond to the pressures that people receive in anomic societies, thus explaining the reason for the high criminal behaviors as we can observeIn the proposed text to comment.

One of the clearest examples to explain Robert Merton is American society, defined as an anomic society as a consequence of economic success which disadvantages or weakens respect for legitimacy to get to get said triumph. To define an anomic society we must observe and analyze in the first place its inequality in access to opportunities. 

The cultural structure of a society can define both the legitimate objectives that people must follow in their life and the legitimate instruments to achieve them. It was elaborated by North American Sutherland. His approach tries to refute that the crime is not due to the physical constitution;In the same way, poverty could be said "poverty does not cause crime alone, since sometimes it is present without the crime and sometimes crime occurs without poverty".

conclusion

He affirms that acquiring aggressive, criminal behavior can be given by different factors such as the techniques of commission of crime, motivation, justification and attitude rationalization. Motivation can have, so to speak, two ways. On the one hand, a person who is surrounded by legal persons, who do not violate the norms, has a positive motivation so he will not perform criminal and/or aggressive behaviors. 

However, if we change the environment in which the person is, surrounding themselves with people who show aggressive behaviors, this will tend to do the same thus obtaining a negative motivation. This results in the statement that, according to Sutherland, the offender is created due to the favorable causes he has in his environment to violate the rules. Differential associations can be variable duration, frequency, intensity and priority among people, so these associations, generally do not have the same intensity of influence.

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