Criminology Social Process Theory

Chapter 7: Social Process Theory Social Process Theories - Views criminality as a function of people’s interactions with various organizations, institutions, individua processes in society. - ASB is a result of their involvement with significant social groups (family, peers, neighbors) and institutions (schools, CJ agencies) - Crime is a learned behavior - 3 main theories: social learning, social control, social reaction - Socialization is the key to understanding criminal behavior choices - Socialization occurs through contact with significant others - Anyone can turn to ASB if their socialization is damaging/destructive; not focused in lower-class - ASB can be reversed and criminals turned around by proper resocialization and prosocial interact Institutions of Socialization - Interaction with key social institutions helps control human behavior - Family Relations - Family-crime relationship is significant across racial, ethnic, and gender lines; frequently in empirical research - - - Parenting techniques, attachment, family history of crime, family violence - Family characteristics may be a function of family stress Educational Experiences - School to prison pipeline - Policies/practices that encourage harsh tactics such as physical restraint, police pre school, and automatic punishments that result in out-of-class time have been show ”push” students out of the classroom and into the CJ system - Research shows being suspended increases the likelihood that students will experience criminal victimization, criminal involvement, and incarceration adults - Black students are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended/expelled compare white classmates Educational Experience (continued) - Bullying Peer Relationships - - Antisocial vs prosocial peers - Antisocial friends are “sticky;” influence continues throughout lifespan Robust association between antisocial peers and antisocial behavior, but hard to determine direction of the relationship - Which came first, antisocial behavior or delinquent peers? Religion, Beliefs, and Values - Participation vs beliefs - Primarily benefits youth living in disorganized high crime areas Social Process Theories Social Learning: Differential Association Theory - SLT: crime is a product of learning the norms, values, and behaviors associated with criminal activity - Can involve the actual techniques of crime as well as the psychological aspects of criminality - 9 Principles of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory - Criminal behavior is learned - - Criminal behavior is learned as a by-product of interacting with others - People actively learn as they are socialized and interact with others who may serve as teac crime Learning behavior occurs within intimate personal groups - Family, friends, peers - Learning criminal behavior involves assimilating the techniques of committing crime, including m drives, rationalizations, and attitudes - The specific direction of motives and drives is learned from perceptions of various aspects of the favorable or unfavorable - Culture conflict: result of exposure to opposing norms, attitudes, and definitions of right a moral and immoral - Conflict of social attitudes and cultural norms A person becomes a criminal when he or she perceives more favorable than unfavorable conseque the law - Individuals are exposed to an excess of definitions favorable toward criminality and are re counteracting forces - This is the principle of Differential Association Differential associations may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity - Frequent exposure to trusted individuals who hold antisocial beliefs beginning early in life continuing into adolescence have the greatest impact on ASB The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning process - - - Although criminal behavior expresses general needs and values, it is not excused by those genera because noncriminal behavior expresses the same needs and values - Only the learning of deviant norms through contact with an excess of definitions favorable criminality produces illegal behavior - Summary: The ratio of definitions favorable to violations of the law vs definitions unfavorable to violatio determines whether a person will engage in criminal behavior Differential Reinforcement Theory - Incorporates differential association concepts with elements of psychological learning theory - Builds upon DAT by specifying the mechanisms and processes through which criminal learning ta - Differential Reinforcement: behavior is reinforced by being either rewarded or punished w - interacting with others - Negative Reinforcement: using either negative stimuli or loss of reward to curtail unwante People learn to evaluate their own behavior through their interactions with significant others and lives - Groups control sources and patterns of reinforcement, define behavior as right or wrong, a behaviors that can be modeled through observational learning - Once indoctrinated into crime, deviant behavior is sustained by social support - Associating with delinquent peers has been shown to accelerate rates of deviance Neutralization Theory - Sykes and Matza: Criminals must first neutralize accepted social values before they are free to commit cr - Do so by learning a set of techniques that allow them to counteract the moral dilemmas posed by - Drift: movement in and out of delinquency, shifting between conventional and deviant values - Behavior falls along a continuum between total freedom and total restraint - Neutralization techniques allow a person to temporarily drift away from conventional beh become involved in ASB Neutralization Theory: Neutralization Techniques Evaluating Learning Theories - Studies have found Differential Association Theory predicts a variety of criminal behaviors - Learning from parents, peers, and romantic partners - Explains criminal behavior regardless of social class - - - Empirical studies have found strong support for Differential Reinforcement Theory - The combined influence of delinquent definitions, associations, modeling, and reinforcement acco substantial amount of variation in crime Mixed results for Neutralization Theory - Some criminals approve of criminal behavior, while others appear to disapprove of illegal behavio they are participants in crime themselves - Empirical support for drifting in and out of crime Critiques - Fails to account for the origin of criminal definitions: “first criminal” - Ignores spontaneous, wanton acts of crime/violence and crimes of individuals who do not have de associates - Circular thinking - Do people become delinquent because they associate with delinquent peers, or do delinqu antisocial peers because they are similar to themselves? - Fails to account for genetic influences - Example: is delinquent behavior learned from parents or inherited? - Self-selection - Little evidence exists that people learn the techniques that enable them to become criminals befor commit criminal acts - Can’t explain the link between antisocial children and future criminal behavior - Most of the support for learning theories comes from the strong association between delin groups and antisocial behavior - Little evidence for social imitation, reinforcement, and neutralization Social Control Theory - SCT: The question is not “why do people commit crime?” but rather, “why do people obey the rules of so - All people have the potential to violate the law - The stronger people’s commitment to conventional institutions, individuals, and processes, the les are to commit crime - The absence of commitment to conformity results in people feeling there is little to lose and enco violating behavior Hirschi’s Social Control Theory - Links the onset of criminality to weakening of the ties that bind people to society - People who care little for others are the ones most likely to prey upon other - 4 main elements of the social bond: - Attachment - Consists of a person’s sensitivity to and interest in others - Parents, peers, schools Commitment - Time, energy, and effort expended in conventional actions - Strong commitments make it less likely an individual will engage in acts that jeopardize th hard-won position - Belief - When individuals share common moral beliefs, they tend to develop values such as sharin to the rights of others, and admiration for the legal code - Involvement - “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop” Absence of these bonds enhances the risk of criminal behavior The interrelationship among the elements of the social bond controls subsequent behavior - Strong attachments to parents/friends are more likely to work toward a legitimate goal - - - People who are highly committed to conventional acts/beliefs are more likely to be involved in co activities Social Control Theory Evaluating Hirschi’s Social Control Theory - Supportive Research - Attachment - Decreases associations with deviant peer groups, increases children’s feelings of respect, d delinquent involvement - Detachment and alienation from school may be even more predictive of delinquency than failure or academic underachievement - Belief - Teens who live in areas marked by strong religious values and who hold strong religious b themselves are less likely to engage in delinquent activities - People with a strong moral sense cannot imagine crime as an alternative option regardless circumstances - Commitment - - Kids who are committed to school and educational achievements are less likely to become delinquent behavior - May be reciprocal Involvement - Youth involved in supervised conventional leisure activities are less likely to engage in de Critiques - The influence of friendship - Researchers have argued that delinquents seem not to be “lone wolves” but rather form str friendships with delinquent others - - Failure to achieve - People who are committed to success but fail to achieve it may be crime prone Deviant involvement - Teens who are involved in unsupervised activities outside of the household are the ones m get involved in antisocial acts Deviant parents and peers - Attachment to deviant peers/parents may support and nurture antisocial behavior Mistaken causal order - Hirschi’s theory claims that weak bonds lead to delinquency, but there is evidence that del weaken social bonds - Increases in adolescent behavior problems may result in decreases in parental control/support Social Reaction (Labeling) Theory - Explains criminal careers in terms of stigma-producing encounters - Behaviors that are considered criminal are highly subjective - Crime is “crime” because society/laws say it is - - - Crime is defined by those in power - Criminal laws are defined by the values of those who rule and are not an objective standar conduct Not only acts are labeled, but people are as well - Labels create assumptions about behaviors and people - Positive labels can improve self-image and social standing - Negative labels provide a negative stigma and reduce self-image - Stigmatize: to apply negative labeling with enduring effects on a person’s self-ima social interactions Both positive and negative labels involve subjective interpretation of behavior - These symbolic messages and their interpretations play a role in the development of self-i Consequences of Labeling - Labels carry significant meaning - If a devalued status is conferred by a significant other the negative label may permanently harm th - May affect treatment at home, work, school, etc. - Successful degradation ceremony: the denounced person is ritually separated from a place in the l and set outside the world occupied by citizens of good standing - Cooley’s “Looking Glass Self” - Self-labeling - Negatively labeled individuals will become increasingly committed to a deviant career - Depends on the visibility of the label and the manner/severity with which it is appl Joining deviant cliques - People labeled as deviant may join w/ similarly outcast peers - Leads to ASB becoming habitual/automatic - Retrospective reading - The reassessment of a person’s past to fit a current generalized label - Labels become the basis of personal identity Primary and Secondary Deviance - Primary deviance: involves norm violations/crimes that have little influence on the actor and can forgotten - - - - Little bearing on future life Secondary deviance: occurs when a deviant event comes to the attention of significant others or s agents, who apply a negative label that has long-term consequences for the violator’s self-identity interactions - Involves resocialization into a deviant role - Produces a deviance amplification effect: offenders feel isolated from the mainstream of s become locked within their deviant role - Increased association with deviant peers - Escalating cycle of deviance, apprehension, more powerful labels, identify transfo Crime and Labeling - Criminal Careers - - Labeling theorists blame the establishment of criminal careers on the social agencies originally de crime control (i.e. police, courts, corrections) - These agencies help to maintain and amplify criminal behavior Differential Enforcement - Law is differentially applied, benefiting those who hold economic and social power while powerless Discretion of criminal justice actors works to the detriment of minorities Long-Term Effects of Labeling - Negative labels may have long-term and cumulative effects - Empirical evidence shows that negative labels may cause significant long-term damage to how someone well as their self-image - Early police intervention is indirectly linked to adult substance abuse, unemployment, and welfare receip - Arrest records tend to increase levels of future ASB - High recidivism rates - Arrest may amplify a person’s “cumulative disadvantage” and trigger exclusionary processes that conventional opportunities - Deviant labels restrict future economic opportunities - Is Labeling Theory Valid? - Inability to specify the conditions that must exist before an act or individual is labeled deviant - Labeling comes after, rather than before, chronic offending - Hard to determine whether stigma produces crime - Features of Labeling Theory that are important contributions to the study of criminality: - Identifies the role played by social control agencies in crime causation - Focuses attention on the social interactions/reactions that shape individuals and their behavior - Distinguishes between criminal acts and criminal careers and shows that these concepts must be i treated differently Recognizes that crime often results from complex interactions and processes - Draws attention to interactions as well as circumstances surrounding the crime Social Process Theory and Public Policy - Policies derived from social process theories typically focus on young offenders - - Social Learning Theory - If people become criminal by learning definitions and attitudes favoring criminality, they unlearn them by being exposed to definitions favoring conventional behavior - Highfields Project in New Jersey - Silverlake Program in Los Angeles - Social Control Theory - Education: programs designed to improve students’ basic skills and create an atmosphere in which develop a bond to their school - Family bonds: programs designed to strengthen the bond between parent and child - Example: prison programs such as work furlough and educational opportunity programs - Labeling Theory - Programs aimed at reconfiguring an offender’s self-image may help them develop a revamped ide from crime - Diversion programs: remove offenders from the normal channels of the CJ process by placing the programs, thus enabling them to avoid the stigma of a criminal label - Restitution: permitting an offender to repay the victim or do useful work in the community rather the stigma of a formal trial and a court-ordered sentence - There is little hard evidence that these alternative programs improve recidivism rates Social Process Theory and Public Policy Theory Major Premise Strengths Research Focus Social Learning Theories Differential People learn to comm Explains onset of criminality. Measures definitions to association theory crime from exposure t the presence of crime in all el crime; influence of devi antisocial definitions. of social structure. Explains w peers and parents. people In high-crime areas re from criminality. Can apply to and juveniles. Neutralization the Youths learn ways of neutralizing moral restraints and periodic drift in and out of criminal behavior patt Theory Social Control Th Major Premise Explains why many delinquen Whether people who us become adult criminals. Expl neutralizations commit youthful law violators can par crimes; beliefs, values, in conventional behavior. crime. Strengths Research Focus Hirschi’s control A person's bond to soc Explains the onset of crime. C The association among theory prevents him or her fr to both middle- and lower-clas commitment, attachmen violating social rules. Explains its theoretical constru Involvement, belief, and bond weakens. the per adequately so they can be mea crime. free to commit crime. been empirically tested. Social Reaction Theory Labeling theory People enter into Explains society's role in creat law-violating careers wdeviance. Explains why some they are labeled and offenders do not become adult organize their persona criminals. Develops concepts around the labels. criminal careers. Measures the associatio between self-concept an crime; differential application of labels; th effect of stigma.