The General Theory of Crime - Essay Example

The General Theory of Crime In terms of crime's general theory of action, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) argue that all crimes occur because they are chosen. They say that there is significant variation in the extent to which people choose to act offensively or recklessly based on their underlying "criminality". This criminality or impulsiveness is an individual property characterized by several things: the need for immediate gratification of desires, the utilization of simple means ("money without work, sex without courtship, revenge without court delays"), preferences for exciting, thrilling, or risky activities, little interest in long term interpersonal or economic investments, little interest in skilful or sophisticated criminal planning, and insensitivity to the pain or discomfort of others. This global outlook will also extend to the non-criminal acts of low self-control individuals: "they will tend to smoke, drink, use drugs, gamble, have children out of wedlock, and engage in illicit sex... people who lack self-control will tend to be impulsive, insensitive, physical (as opposed to mental), risk-taking, short-sighted, and nonverbal, and they will tend therefore to engage in criminal and analogous acts". Such traits appear where parental supervision has been lacking, and/or where discipline has been harsh and inconsistent, where the children are stigmatized and rejected, as opposed to shamed and reintegrated (Braithwaite 1989). The traits are evident to teachers as early as the first grades and they tend to persist throughout the life cycle. This is the stability theorem, and it has considerable relevance in penology since it makes later life rehabilitation unrealistic. Major implications A General Theory is important because it is quite clear about the probable relevance of a number of other key life experiences to delinquency and misconduct - the school, delinquent friends, drugs, and criminal justice interventions. Contrary to suggestions of school critics, the school is not a primary source of experience which fosters criminal careers. The school makes demands of control, discipline, and accountability which are difficult for the low self-control student to meet, and, for this reason, early school leaving is a result of low self control, not a cause of it, and hence not a cause of delinquency (McLaughlin et. al., 2003). Children from fractious families may be at greater risk of early leaving because their families have ill-equipped them to behave appropriately or have already lost any control they themselves have over the children. Delinquent peers were traditionally thought of as the crucible of criminal careers, especially in the context of the contemporary images of the power of gangs over ghetto adolescents. Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) also argue that the drift of adolescents towards gangs follows a loss of parental controls. Adolescents seek out people like themselves who are thrill seekers, renegades, and who reject conformity. Unlike Sutherland's differential association theory which suggested that gangs were a sort of counter cultural fraternity where the positive labelling of crime outweighed the negative, and where the gang became a repository for the acquisition of specialized knowledge, contacts, and attitudes, A General Theory argues otherwise. Crime is its own reward, but gangs are only attractive to people who are already impulsive and hedonistic, and lack normal restraints. In fact, the relationships within gangs are notoriously fractious and unstable because gang members have common selfish, impulsive, and insensitive traits (McLaughlin et. al., 2003). This conclusion is important since it advises that the impact of criminal peers is not a primary source of criminality. Changes in individual training can be expected to influence the subject without second-guessing how the peer group dictates the individual's life course trajectory. Many commentators argue that the causes of crime like robbery or breaking and entry are narcotics, solvents and/or alcohol abuse. If the low self-control theorem is valid, there is no need to make such an inference across two expressions of deviancy since they are both manifestations of the same underlying thing, and all are consistent with the non-specialized nature of delinquency. Finally, the recurrent frustration with adolescents in trouble with the law and, specifically, with the high levels of recidivism experienced among a subpopulation of serious habitual offenders' is poorly understood in the absence of the theory. The liberal optimism regarding the prospects for rehabilitation in the '60's and '70's was replaced by econometric models of deterrence in the '80's, and calls for selective incapacitation in the late '80's and the '90's. Rehabilitation declined in consideration because programs failed to show strong, positive results, because, even where such changes occurred, they were typically covariant with other factors (age, maturity, intelligence, desire for self-reform, etc.). In addition, it was not clear whether offenders ever took rehabilitation seriously. Since crime is its own reward, learning theories suggest that to make the criminal opportunity unattractive, authorities have to punish the choice to make it aversive or painful to the actor. While it is open to debate whether our laws are even consistent with the types of aversion which are presupposed by the econometric models, the fact is that the econometric model is based on the idea of a rational actor whose ventures into the marketplace are governed by the changing costs of opportunities. The low self-control actors are oblivious to such costs' because the long term consequences are remote from the contexts which give immediate satisfaction to criminal behaviour. Desroches (1995) reports that robbers typically do not plan their heists before the day they commit them, take little precautions to evade identification even on premises known to be open to camera surveillance, and do not believe they will be caught in spite of choosing the same targets repeatedly. What this suggests is that legal intervention comes at a point in the life cycle where those whose misconduct has become problematic are impervious to rational checks on their behaviours provided by the state. "Because low self control arises in the absence of the powerful inhibiting forces of early childhood, it is highly resistant to the less powerful inhibiting forces of later life, especially the relatively weak forces of the criminal justice system". Two further interrelated points are raised in the theory in the context of criminal justice intervention. The first has to do with work schemes and/or training initiatives designed to prevent crime among those already prone to it. The second has to do with evaluating the results of such programs. Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) stressed that the motives for engaging in crime are the immediate proceeds or rewards of crime. The idea that people steal bread because they are starving may make good theatre but it does not reflect the mundane crime picture. "Therefore, policies that seek to redress crime by the satisfaction of theoretically derived wants (e.g., equality, adequate housing, good jobs, self-esteem) are likely to be unsuccessful". They argue further that possession of a job is not incompatible with commission of crimes in Hirschi's earlier work (1969) and that, even where employment opportunities exist equally for delinquents and non-delinquents, the former continue to offend. In other words, this individual based theory would predict that unemployment and welfare dependency go hand in hand with crime, not because poverty causes crime, but because the same low self control and high impulsiveness which makes crime attractive simultaneously makes work stressful. Attempts to substitute work for crime, from the perspective of this theory, misunderstand the relationship. This is critical in the context of correctional initiatives since the latter appear to presuppose that recidivism will decline as work replaces crime. The theory advises to the contrary. There is also a second more methodological point to consider. The patterns of offending over the life cycle commonly follow an age curve - a peak in the levels of offences which rises throughout the late adolescence and which declines into early adulthood. This has been reported consistently for over a century and holds true in cross-cultural perspective. Although the magnitude of the peak varies by race and gender, as well as for high frequency versus low frequency offenders, it is an invariant effect, and, as Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) have gone some length to demonstrate, it is not spurious with other conditions. It is simply "the inexorable aging of the organism". This does not deny the existence of variations in individual tendencies toward self control according to which some offenders will start earlier, desist later and achieve higher peaks than their contemporaries. However, "policies which do not attend to this highly predictable circumstance are likely to mistake natural change for program effectiveness or to waste considerable resources treating or incapacitating people without benefit to them or to society". Likewise, policies which promote work subsidies, employment preparation and the like will produce effects that must be measured independently of the age curve effect. In short, no matter how such policies work, the age-crime curve will predict a tendency towards desistance based on maturation alone. Social Class Social class is a variable with considerable predictive power in sociology and other social sciences. A social class system is the ranking of people within a culture. Social classes are based on income, occupation, education, and type of dwelling. Social class systems separate society into divisions, grouping people with similar values and life-styles (Croall, 1998). Meanwhile, the term social stratification refers to groups (or strata) of people who are arranged in some sort of ranked order. People who are ranked within the same stratum or level will tend to view each other as social equals. They will tend to feel comfortable with each other, spend work and leisure time together, and share interests and activities. Clearly, a definition of social class includes the notion of groupings of people who are aware both of their own group identification and that of others "above" and "below" them. Other members of one's social class will be the persons with whom one spends most time on and off the job (Croall, 1998). Social class has been demonstrated to help predict individual behaviour in many realms of human existence, including but not limited to the following: products and services purchased, recreational preferences, religious affiliation, geographical mobility, friendship patterns, and social and political behaviour (Croall, 1998). In addition, social class is influenced by employment status. Thus, it is reasonable to believe that social class will interact with employee behaviour in a variety of areas. In studies of people motivation, social class would be expected to be positively related to the focus and strength of the so-called growth need. If the focus stems from expectancy theory, social class may also be found to be positively related to the valence for intrinsic rewards and to perceptions of expectancy and instrumentality. Social class may well influence learned attitudes toward risk and reward, and thus decision making. Social class congruence, the degree to which the person's class background fits the job requirements, may be a key ingredient in the person's ability to accurately perceive and perform job-role requirements (Croall, 1998). Social Class and Crime Social scientists continue to debate whether the social control of crime is influenced by extralegal factors. Much of this scholarship focuses on the importance of race and social class as determinants of treatment by various social control agents. The major theoretical impetus for these inquiries is the conflict perspective and its emphasis on how dominant groups use state apparatuses including the criminal law to control subordinate groups who threaten their interests (Jewkes Letherby, 2002). This "racial threat" thesis has spawned a overabundance of studies that investigate whether the relative size of the population is predictive of various aspects of social control, including police use of deadly force, police force size, arrest rates incarceration rates and executions. Others have used the racial threat thesis to explain informal mechanisms of social control such as lynching, hate crimes, interracial killings, and welfare and other state-based social control efforts not involving the criminal justice system (Jewkes Letherby, 2002). On data collection in relation to class and crime Latent class analysis, a technique widely used in the social sciences, is based on the theory that individuals differ in their behaviours due to some unobservable latent trait. Social scientists often are interested in relating latent traits to some other variables, with the ultimate purpose of understanding what defines or perhaps causes the latent trait. If the latent traits could be observed, then it would be a simple matter to analyze the data using techniques such as contingency table analysis. Class analysis is also often use in collecting official data related to class and offending. (Jewkes Letherby, 2002). Meanwhile, researchers have also been, for a long time, observing a strong relation between neighbourhood crime rates and structural characteristics such as the level of poverty, ethnic composition and the rate of residential turnover. A central tenet of social disorganization theorists is that the effect of these exogenous structural factors on criminal victimization is mediated by the organizational characteristics of the neighbourhoods as a whole. Precisely what are the relevant organizational characteristics and which are the most important exogenous factors has been a source of some debate. Social disorganization theorists since the 1980s have argued that the effects of neighbourhood structural characteristics are specifically mediated by the prevalence of informal ties, such as friendship and kinship relations, as well as formal ties generated by participation in neighbourhood organizations. According to this view, neighbourhoods characterized by dense social networks will experience greater trust among residents and cooperation in the enforcement of social norms against crime and delinquency (Jewkes Letherby, 2002). Thus, analysis of crime and justice had to take account of social collectivities. Common to the times, the "social class" had a tightly integrated, double character. On the one side was a collective civility, a responsibility to all others that bear as members of an organic whole that is "society." It was a sense of the "social class" that informed socialism and underlay the discourses of the social democratic welfare state. On the other side was the definition of the "social class" as a site of formation. Society, its "forces" and influences, shaped and generated crime, justice, and injustice. In the context of Social Class and Justice the two sides were connected through an anti-determinist politics: the sense that whatever determinative role "society" had, it was open to intervention and change (Jewkes Letherby, 2002). On Class Exclusion In the British government's own statements concerning "social exclusion" there is an emphasis on citizenship, which is understood to carry with it duties and moral obligations, as well as rights. Studies in the U.K. have distinguished four dimensions of social exclusion, which include: (1) exclusion from adequate income or resources; (2) labour-market exclusion; (3) service exclusion; and (4) exclusion from social relations. On all these dimensions ethnic minorities are more severely disadvantaged. One survey, carried out by a team of researchers in Birmingham, compared four groups: whites born in the U.K., compared with those of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, or Afro-Caribbean origin or parentage. The study showed that the ethnic minority groups were all over-represented in the low-income population. Nationally, households with Pakistani or Bangladeshi heads were also more likely to have no member in the workforce, high rates of unemployment, and the lowest household incomes. Other research in Britain has drawn attention to the widespread incidence of racism and Islamophobia. Institutionalized racism is evident in the police and prison services. There is discrimination in the housing and job markets. Since 11 September, Islamic communities have been rendered even more vulnerable (Croall, 1998). On Death of the Class/Social In the field of crime and criminal justice, connections between crime and social class have been dissolved: either evaporated by the focus on the individual and volitional, or morally ruptured through imageries of risk and dangerousness. Of course, this is in some ways an overdrawn account, but the pattern is robust. Thus, while in the U.S. the social was never as well developed as in the rest of the Anglophone world, the anti-social developments have been more virulent and the tendencies more extreme. On the other hand, in countries such as Australia, where a well-developed welfare state has not entirely been dismantled, a similar distance and direction has been travelled, albeit to a more tempered position at present. Although punishment and retribution long ago displaced reform agendas in Australian corrections (Croall, 1998), in the emerging criminology and policies centred upon crime prevention, "social class" factors may still appear, albeit far less than was once the case. Yet a subtle change has entered into their nature. Increasingly, social class conditions and considerations have been reconstituted as "risk factors," so that socioeconomic background now appears simply as something that creates risks: it is not in itself a "problem" to be organized or rectified in its own right as a "social problem." To underscore this point, risk factors appear just as correlations, and it is not clear- nor is it necessary to know - how they achieve their effects, even in the case of "poverty and economic stress" (Croall, 1998). Rumours of the death of working class consciousness in Britain have been greatly exaggerated. The level and ferocity of industrial unrest in the country during the late 1960s and early 1970s hardly suggests its mortality. Secondly, as James Cronin has argued, the emphasis placed on the death of class may have been and may continue to be an indication of the Left's failure to articulate adequately "the compatibility of dramatic material improvement and persistent class identity," rather than a convincing account of a real absence. These are crucial qualifications, but they should discipline rather than displace an examination of the discourse of working class transformation in the fifties. Though it clearly animated and has continued to animate discussions of class structure and political strategy from the 1950s to the 1980s, the historical context of working class structure, outlook and identity in Britain during the 1950s remains under-examined (Croall, 1998). References: Baudrillard, Jean 1983. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or "The Death of the Social." New York: Semiotext(e). Beck, Ulrich 1992 Risk Society. New York: Sage. Braithwaite, John 1989 Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croall, H. 1998. Crime and Society in Britain: An Introduction. Longman Desroches, Frederick 1995 Force and Fear: Robbery in Canada. Toronto: Nelson. Gottfredson, Michael and Travis Hirschi 1990 A General Theory of Crime. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hirsch, Travis 1969 Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jewkes, Y and Letherby G. 2002. Criminology: A Reader. SAGE Publications Ltd. McLaughlin, E. Muncie, J. and Hughes, G. 2003. Criminological Perspectives: Essential Readings (Open University). Sage Publications Ltd; 2nd edition. Rose, Nikolas 1996 "The Death of the 'Social' Refiguring the Territory of Government." Economy and Society 26,4: 327-346. Read More