Two Treatments for the Criminal Mind - Social Approach and Situational Approaches - Literature review Example

Now days it becomes more and more important to prevent crimes. The external social environment is becoming more and more criminal/. That’s why it’s considerably necessary to analyze the reasons for committing crimes. There are two major approaches for criminal mind/ They are social approach and situational one. Usually crime science involves analyzing the way that different factors influence Crime science1 is the study of crime in order to find ways to prevent, detect and solve crimes ethically and with regard to the broader social implications of interventions. Three features distinguish crime science from criminology: it embraces the physical, computer and engineering sciences as well as the social; it focuses on crime rather than criminals, and it is single-minded about cutting crime, rather than studying it for its own sake. Crime science was conceived by the British broadcaster Nick Ross in the late 1990s in order to recruit scientific methods to crime prevention, with encouragement from the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens and Professor Ken Pease. There are as many reasons to commit crimes as there are people on this planet. Below are some general motives that cover a wide variety of crimes.2 People stand in the way of the criminal achieving a particular goal. The criminal figures the end result is worth the risk and the damage. The criminal wants revenge for a real or imagined offense. A good end justifies evil deeds. The crime doesnt seem as wrong to the criminal as it does to the victim. Outside influences put pressure on the criminal so that he feels as if something made him do it. The criminal lacks a sense of responsibility. (Such crimes are often blamed on temporary insanity.) The criminal has no desire to remember because the past is irrelevant. The crime is committed as a form of self-defense -- often in an emotional sense. For example, a criminal might kill loved ones to prevent them from leaving. The criminal has a different memory of events than her victims have, either because of a genuine personality disorder or because perceptions vary from one individual to another There are two major approaches to the criminal mind. I’d like to start with situational one. Situational approach is the analyses of different situations that can make people commit crime. Situations have not been entirely ignored in criminology. Birkbeck3 and LaFree (1993) and Sampson and Lauritsen (1994) have reviewed various situational approaches to crime, deviance, and violence, including the work of symbolic integrationists, opportunity and routine activity theorists, and those who advocate the study of criminal events. Most empirical research on situations, however, has involved the event as the unit of analysis, with no link to individual histories or individual patterns of behavior. To study the behavior situation relations advocated by Mischel and Shoda (1995)4, we would need to study the same individuals across multiple situations or contexts. To proceed with such an approach, we must define situations. From the various situational perspectives on crime there has not as yet emerged a consensus as to how situations should be conceptualized. Let us turn back to the summer camp study (Shoda et al., 1994) for a possible model. In that study the researchers observed behavior occurring within different levels, which they referred to as ecological settings, nominal situations, and interpersonal situations. Table 1 provides examples of these different levels. The ecological settings represented are camp, school, and home. Within each ecological setting are nominal situations, which they describe as “dictated by the structure of the particular ecology (the setting)” (Shoda et al., 1994: 675). Thus, at camp, two nominal situations are woodworking and cabin meetings. Similarly, playground and classroom are two nominal school situations, and mealtime and watching television are two home situations. Noting the difficulty in generalizing from nominal situations, these researchers stressed the importance of defining situations in terms of psychological features that may occur across many nominal situations and settings. In the summer camp study they constructed interpersonal situations that could be characterized by two dimensions they believed to be psychologically salient for the children: whether an interaction was with an adult versus a peer and whether it was a positive or negative interaction. Thus they looked for interpersonal situations in which peers either initiated positive contacts or teased, provoked or threatened, and situations in which adults praised, warned, or punished the child. Using this same conceptual scheme, we might construct a similar matrix for studying situation-behavior relations related to adult offending. If we wanted to study physical aggression, for example, relevant ecological settings to study might include home, school, work, bars, and the street. Nominal situations for home and school might be the same as those suggested by Shoda et al. (1994)—mealtime and watching television, and playground and classroom—and for bars might include talking with others, drinking alone, and engaging in other activities (for example, dancing, playing darts, playing computer games). Table 1. Examples of Ecological Settings, Nominal Situations, Interpersonal Situations, and Psychological Features Setting Nominal Situations Interpersonal Situations Psychological Features Camp Woodworking When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive When peer teased, provoked, or threatened peer, negative When praised by an adult adult, positive When warned by an adult adult, negative When punished by an adult adult, negative Cabin meeting When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive When peer teased, provoked, or threatened peer, negative When praised by an adult adult, positive When warned by an adult adult, negative When punished by an adult adult, negative School Playground When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive When peer teased, provoked, or threatened peer, negative When praised by an adult adult, positive When warned by an adult adult, negative When punished by an adult adult, negative Classroom When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive When peer teased, provoked, or threatened peer, negative When praised by an adult adult, positive When warned by an adult adult, negative When punished by an adult adult, negative Home Mealtime When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive When peer teased, provoked, or threatened peer, negative When praised by an adult adult, positive When warned by an adult adult, negative When punished by an adult adult, negative Watching TV When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive When peer teased, provoked, or threatened peer, negative When praised by an adult adult, positive When warned by an adult adult, negative When punished by an adult adult, negative As Shoda and colleages did (1994), we would likely consider the other person in an interaction as a psychologically salient dimension, and we would probably classify the other as stranger, acquaintance, or intimate partner. We might further distinguish that other person according to sex. Positive and negative interactions might be represented by someone initiating positive contact, insulting or threatening, or making demands. Table 2 shows an abbreviated version of such a scheme.5 Whereas conducting observational studies like the children’s camp study, which would enable us to measure the conditional probability of various target behaviors, may be feasible only infrequently, another more descriptive approach could be useful. In their 1991 article “The Neglected Situation,” LaFree and Birkbeck introduced the concept of particular crime types being situationally clustered, that is, more likely to occur in some situations than in others. In their study, based on victimization data in the United States and Venezuela, situational clustering was measured for different crime types by considering the deviation from an even distribution for a set of situational characteristics that included victim sex, age and number, victim-offender relationship, location, presence of others, and illumination (day versus night). For example, in the United States, with regard to location (outside versus inside), pick-pocketing was found to be much more situationally clustered (27 percent outside) than assault (55 percent outside). Table 2. A Possible Situational Framework for Studying Aggression Setting Nominal Interpersonal Bars Talking Stranger makes positive contact Stranger insults, threatens, makes demands Stranger bumps or jostles Acquaintance makes positive contact Acquaintance insults, threatens, makes demands Acquaintance bumps or jostles Partner makes positive contact Partner insults, threatens, makes demands Partner bumps or jostles Drinking Alone Stranger makes positive contact Stranger insults, threatens, makes demands Stranger bumps or jostles Acquaintance makes positive contact Acquaintance insults, threatens, makes demands Acquaintance bumps or jostles Partner makes positive contact Partner insults, threatens, makes demands Partner bumps or jostles We might use a similar approach to determine whether individual offending is situationally clustered. For example, if we apply the schema of Table 2 to a sample of violent events nested within individuals, we could pool all events to determine the proportion committed against strangers. An individual’s behavior would be considered situationally clustered if his or her proportion of violence directed at strangers deviated substantially from that mean. Similarly, we could use the same approach to assess situational clustering with regard to location (for example, at home, school, work, bars, or on the street). Evidence of situational clustering could point to the situations serving as discriminative stimuli for violence for particular individuals. Social factor is a number of factors as for example education, family, school, unemployment and other factors. In addition to requiring the study of situations linked to individuals, an appreciation of the situational specificity of behavior would lead us to look for environmental consistencies in individual lives. If traits are assumed to predispose people to criminal behavior and to be relatively stable across the life course, there is then a strong inclination to attribute observed stability in behavior to the existence of such traits. We even find consistency in inconsistency by relying on the concept of heterotypic continuity, a term used to refer to different behavioral manifestations of an underlying trait. This concept is particularly useful when looking across broad age spans when behavioral repertoires are changing. Thus if we believe that very young children develop personality traits that will govern their adolescent or adult behavior, we look for different, age appropriate behavioral manifestations of those traits at different stages of the life course. Kagan, who introduced the concept of heterotypic continuity (1969), has cautioned, however, that assumptions of stability may lead to ignoring mediating environmental factors because it becomes very easy to view “any theoretically reasonable occurrence of stability...as reflecting an inherent disposition within the child” (1980: 64). Kagan6 (1980) provided the example of assuming that the correlation between attentiveness in infants and later intelligence as measured on an IQ test, represents heterotypic continuity—a consistency in behavior reflecting the underlying trait of intelligence. In fact, Kagan, Lapidus, and Moore (1978) found that when social class of the children was controlled, the relationship between attentiveness and IQ disappeared. Social class is determinative of environments that affect both attentiveness and IQ test performance, and social class most often remains stable across the early years. Similarly, environmental situations associated with individual offending may remain stable for many years and lead us to mistakenly attribute behavioral stability to an underlying trait. To avoid such mistakes, we would need to pay as much attention to assessing change and stability in environmental factors as to assessing change and stability in offending behavior. It is absolutely evident that successful secure system of the country requires both factors to be taken into account. Some specialists propose some methods to reduce criminality via changing the environment . The phrase crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) was first used by C. Ray Jeffery, a criminologist from Florida State University. The phrase began to gain acceptance after the publication of his 1971 book of the same name.7 Jefferys work was based on the precepts of experimental psychology represented in modern learning theory. (Jeffery and Zahm, 1993:329) Jefferys CPTED concept arose out of his experiences with a rehabilitative project in Washington, D.C. that attempted to control the school environment of juveniles in the area. Rooted deeply in the psychological learning theory of B.F. Skinner, Jefferys CPTED approach emphasized the role of the physical environment in the development of pleasurable and painful experiences for the offender that would have the capacity to alter behavioral outcomes. His original CPTED model was a stimulus-response (S-R) model positing that the organism learned from punishments and reinforcements in the environment. Jeffery "emphasized material rewards . . . and the use of the physical environment to control behavior" (Jeffery and Zahm, 1993:330). The major idea here was that by removing the reinforcements for crime, it would not occur. (Robinson, 1996) So as a conclusion it must be said that there are some cases in which the certain approach is recommended. For example when talking about murders, sexual offenders some other crimes that had been committed with awful violence it`s necessary to observe the whole life of the maniac, to analyse his habbits, his child hood etc. But when talking about some single crime commited by thoroughly succssseful people it`s nessasary to observe the second one. To my mind the most effective way of commiting the crime is changing the ituation in families to make some parrents look after their children References 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_science 2. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20modern/fb/20040907a 3. LaFree, Gary, and Christopher Birkbeck. 1991. The neglected situation: A cross-national study of the situational characteristics of crime. Criminology 29:73-98. 4. Mischel, Walter, and Yuichi Shoda. 1995. A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review 102:246-26 5. Shoda, Yuichi, Walter Mischel, and Jack C. Wright. 1994. Intra-individual stability in the organization and patterning of behavior: Incorporating psychological situations into the idiographic analysis of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67:674-687 6. Kagan, Jerome, Deborah R. Lapidus, and Michael Moore. 1978. Infant antecedents of cognitive functioning. Child Development 49:1005-1023. 7. Jeffery, C. Ray. (1971). Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications 8. Samenow, S.E. Inside the Criminal Mind. New York: Times Books, 1984. 9. Wilson, J.Q. & Herrnstein, R.J. Crime & Human Nature. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985 10. Birkbeck, Christopher, and Gary LaFree. 1993. The situational analysis of crime and deviance. Annual Review of Sociology 19:113-137. 11. Briar, Scott, and Irving Piliavin. 1965. Delinquency, situational inducements, and commitment to conformity. Social Problems 13:35-45. 12. Skinner, B. F. 1953. Science and Human Behavior. New York: Free Press. 1992. 13. Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub. 1993. Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 14. Blackburn, R. The Psychology of Criminal Conduct. New York: Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1993. 15. Raine, A. The Psychopathology of Crime: criminal behavior as a clinical disorder. New York: Academic Press, 1993. Read More