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Inferences: The data establishes that the combination of feebleminded individuals with poor environments is likely to result in criminality.
Assumptions: Goddard assumes that morality and feeblemindedness are negatively correlated, without providing any data to support that assumption.
Implications: If one were to accept Goddard's reasoning, one would assume that criminal behavior was genetic and linked to intelligence, which could have positive consequences, such as focusing prevention efforts on the most at-risk individuals.
Point-of-View: The author seems to believe that feeblemindedness contributes to criminality in a manner that goes beyond the fact that the feebleminded may be forced to resort to criminal behavior in order to survive.
Chapter 23: The American Criminal
Purpose: The purpose of the study is to determine whether or not a criminal's physical characteristics are relevant to his crimes.
Question: Are criminals physically different from non-criminals of the same ethnic origin?
Information: To investigate the question, Hooton looked at the physical characteristics of criminals and non-criminals,...
including: body weight, stature, cranial measurements, chest depth, chest breadth, nose height, ear length, and facial characteristics.
Concept: In order to understand Hooton's research, one must understand the non-subjective criteria and forms of measurement of his physical data.
Inferences: There are links between certain physical characteristics and certain types of criminal behavior.
Assumptions: The study attempts to demonstrate non-ethnically related links between physical characteristics and criminal behavior by comparing prison and non-prison populations of certain areas, and does so without investigating whether certain ethnicities are overrepresented in the prison population.
Implications: If one were to accept Hooton's reasoning, one would assume that criminality could be determined by looking at an individual, which would lead to intense profiling.
Point-of-View: The author believes that physical characteristics are linked to criminal behavior and ignore the racist implications of such a statement, which could account for differing rates of arrest, prosecution, and conviction, while not actually impacting the rate of criminal behavior.
Criminology What was the "rational choice theory" of crime causation? The "rational choice theory" of crime causation holds that crime is consciously committed out of an intellectual desire to improve one's situation. Accordingly, the theory does not believe that delinquents are motivated through unconscious urges, but instead contends that people are goal-oriented. Another implication of the theory is that everyone, regardless of their neurological profile, has the ability to act in a
This is a form of punishment that is incremental in application, and establishes what the public perceives as unbreakable pattern of individual criminal recidivism (Siegel, p. 110). However, there is no evidence to support incarceration itself as a deterrent to crime (pp. 110-111). Many criminologists disagree with public opinion on the topic of three strikes incarceration (p. 110), which is, in brief, when a person commits a felony, that
All students would be responsible for monitoring the halls at all times and for telling their fellow students when they were violating one of the rules. To give them an incentive to engage in such monitoring, students would be responsible for certain duties, such as picking up litter, removing graffiti, and straightening the lunchroom when students violated school rules. A violation of the rules of the school would be
Though the Positivist thinking does not contradict the beliefs toward human nature, it does argue that the majority of crimes that are of a serious degree are attributed to people whom have failed to the civilized norms of modern society (PSC, 2004). In sum, the beliefs that invoked by criminal behavior have differed throughout time as much as the varying degree of crimes that we have seen through history. Sociologically
Criminology Theories Biological Theory of Crime The biological or bio-physiological theory of crime regards human behavior in general and of deviance and criminality in particular as mainly the result of internal states of mind (Schmalleger, 2009). More specifically, the biological perspective, as it was originally detailed in the 19th century by Cesare Lombroso, emphasized the role of heredity in conjunction with the (then) new concept of Darwinian Evolution also in conjunction with
That is, in understanding an issue or phenomenon, it is vital for the observer or the sociologist to put it into context in order to create the right "picture" of what is happening. For example, the structural functionalist perspective of criminology posits that crime occurs because of deviant behavior, and that deviance is but an inevitable part of the society. From this perspective, crime is the counterpart of society's