Dr.

Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law

University, Lucknow.

2014-2015

"PSYCHOLOGY"
Final Report On

Social Perspective of Crime: Brief Study Of

Sociological theories of Crime

Submitted to,

Submitted by,

Ms. Isha Yadav

Soumil Pastore

Assistant Professor (Law)

Roll On: 138

Dr. RMLNLU

B.A. LL.B.(Hons.)
3rd Semester
Section- B

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:
It is my pleasure to recall many people who have been involved more or less directly in
inspiration and production of this project.
I take this opportunity to express a deep sense of gratitude and humble regards to my subject
teacher Ms. Isha Yadav for her keen interest, constant guidance and encouragement which
enabled me to complete this project successfully.
I also owe sincere thanks to my parents, teachers, friends, library, cyber caf for their endless
help and support without whom this project wouldnt have been completed.
Finally I wish to put on record this fact, that without the help given to me by my teachers and
parents, my project would have been in shambles and all efforts would have been nullified.
It is hoped that the project will fulfill the expectations of Dr. RMLNLU, Lucknow.

Thanks !!

Soumil Pastore

TABLE of CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION
SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION THEORY
FOUR WISHES THEORY
GANG THOERY
CULTURAL TRANSMISSION THEORY
BROKEN WINDOWS THEORY
SOCIOLOGICAL CRIME THEORIES
1. STRAIN THEORY
2. SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY
3. LABELING THEORY
QUESTIONNAIRE
BIBLIOGRAPHY

 INTRODUCTION:
Crime and society are closely linked for better and for worse. Society is strongly affected
by crime, both due to the cost of crime, as well as the decline in the quality of life that
citizens suffer as a result of crime. However, society can also play a role in reducing and
deterring crime. Many agencies and programs in the crime prevention field are based on
societal and community efforts.
Crime is a worldwide issue that people try to fight and find ways to prevent. Even though
police and prisons do exist, crime continues to happen every day and every minute of the day
world wide. Crime is in existence from the beginning of humanity. Individuals around the
world may have various definitions of crime and may consider different actions as crime.
However, overall, crime is a violation of law; a breach of rules or laws.
From the time Adam and Eve were around till todays time, crime is an ongoing issue. Adam
and Eve were not supposed to take any apples off the apple tree. They warned that if they do
they will face punishment. However, Eves curiosity took over and she took the forbidden
apple. As a result both Adam and Eve faced punishment; Eve because she took the apple and
Adam because he tried it, knowing that he was not suppose to. Stealing the apple was the
very first crime committed. Even though it was not a serious crime, it was still a crime. Crime
can be as harmless as stealing to as severe as murder. Rules and laws are set to protect people,
their lives as well as their belongings. Even though laws vary all over the world, they serve
the same purpose.
Laws are set and punishments given, but what are they given for? Many may define crime as
only something as severe as murder, while other will include that crime is a violation of any
law; a breech of contract. Both definitions are correct; however when summed up, crime is
an action or an instance of negligence that is deemed injurious to the public welfare or morals
or the interests of the state and that is legally prohibited (dictionary.com). Each state,
province, country and continent has its own set of definitions for crime. While some acts such
as smoking marijuana, or may be legal in some places, others may consider those a serious
crime. Severity of a crime depends on the laws and regulations that it broke.

Estimating the cost to society of individual crimes is essential to the economic evaluation of
many social programs, such as substance abuse treatment and community policing. A review
of the crime-costing literature reveals multiple sources, including published articles and
government reports, which collectively represent the alternative approaches for estimating the
economic losses associated with criminal activity. Many of these sources are based upon data
that are more than ten years old, indicating a need for updated figures. This study presents a
comprehensive methodology for calculating the cost of society of various criminal acts.
Tangible and intangible losses are estimated using the most current data available. The
selected approach, which incorporates both the cost-of-illness and the jury compensation
methods, yields cost estimates for more than a dozen major crime categories, including
several categories not found in previous studies.

SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION THEORY:

Social disorganization is a rather difficult term to define. It basically refers to the failure of
social institutions or social organizations (e.g., schools, business, policing, real estate, group
networking) in certain communities and/or neighborhoods (although nothing prohibits such
theories from being couched at the "macro" level to talk about all of society). It has its
origins in the study of ecology, which is the examination of relations between an organism
and its environment.

In criminology, social disorganization is usually treated as both

perspective and theory, while ecology is an approach or "school." The ecological school
refers to a group of professors associated with the Department of Sociology at the University
of Chicago from 1920 to 1932, hence their other name, Chicago School Sociology. These
professors included: Small, Thomas, Mead, Park, Burgess, Faris, Ogburn, and Wirth. In
addition, Sutherland and Thrasher worked there for awhile, and some of the more wellknown students were Shaw and McKay, Everett and Helen Hughes, and Saul Alinsky. An
important predecessor to the Chicago School was Charles Horton Cooley at the University of
Michigan from 1895-1925, who is perhaps best known for his concept of the "looking glass
self."
Modern social disorganization theories exist, but Shaw & McKay (1942), who borrowed
from Park & Burgess, and developed cultural transmission theory in the 1930s and 1940s, are
probably the most famous. However, as you can imagine, Shaw & McKay's ideas have been
extensively improved upon in recent years. For example, the work of Harvard professor
Robert Sampson and colleagues (1997) added the terms "collective efficacy" and "social

capital" to the criminological vocabulary. Collective efficacy refers to a community's ability

to maintain order in public places; social capital refers to having many informal networks
(interdependence, relying upon one another, ties) within a community; and a community must
first have social capital in order to have collective efficacy. Cohen and Felson's (1979)
routine activities theory is also often treated in criminology as an example of a modern social
disorganization theory. Routine activities theory holds that in order to eliminate crime
anyplace, you need to address three necessary conditions: pool of motivated offenders;
suitable targets of opportunity; and ineffective guardianship. All social disorganization
theories are really theories about place, not people (contextual, not compositional), and to
understand them, it's best to start at the beginning with the Chicago School.

FOUR WISHES THOERY:

One of the first things to be called a theory out of the Chicago School was really a typology,
not a theory. The theoretician behind "Four Wishes Theory" was W. I. Thomas, who is
famous in sociology for the "Thomas Theorem" (if a person defines something as real, it's
real in its consequences). Thomas is also famous for co-authoring a book called The Polish
Peasant which, among other things, discussed the Polish concept of neighborhood, "okolila",
which means a neighborhood stretches as far as a person's reputation stretches. This concept
became part of the idea in sociology that secondary groups and reference groups play as
important a role as primary agents of socialization like the family or school.
Four Wishes Theory is based on the idea that values in a given environment produce
"wishes", which are the sociological equivalent of drives or instincts. In other words, what
the person senses is important to their community or neighborhood as a whole becomes the
core of their being in terms of the fundamental or generalized thing that "drives" them. The
Four Wishes are:

New experience (Bohemian personality type)

Security (Philistine personality type)
Response (or mastery of instinct or emotion)
Recognition (or status)

Thomas' definition of social disorganization is often characterized as "the inability of a

neighborhood to solve its problems together" which is a very simple and useable definition,
almost as quick and dirty as "no sense of community." To be sure, the term "disorganization"
was objectionable to some Chicago School sociologists. It smacked of overtones associated

with pathology and personal disorganization. The term, "differential social organization" was
preferred by many, and may have been the source of Sutherland's (1947) differential
association theory.

Many of the psychological ideas of Thomas were never really

incorporated into social disorganization theory, or criminology for that matter, primarily
because Thomas was frequently willing to postulate "subconscious" and/or "unconscious"
motivations for crime which were far more deterministic about non-social factors that
sociology was willing to tolerate. Thomas's wife also developed a quite deterministic model
in business which connected crime rates to economic boom and bust cycles.

GANG THEORY:

One of the more important contributions of the Chicago School was the defining features
(classic definition) of a "gang." Frederick Thrasher made much out of the Recognition wish,
extracting the significant features of a "gang" -- group awareness, shared tradition, solidarity
and cohesiveness, group cooperation, esprit de corps, turf, and unreflectiveness. Even today,
some of the most common reasons for joining a gang -- status and belonging -- are derived
from Thrasher's pioneering work. Modern sociologists have added identity, discipline, love,
and money as further reasons for joining a gang, and modern criminology even has general
models. Thrasher saw gangs as originating in play groups, like juvenile delinquency, and like
dust, collecting in the nooks and crannies of "interstitial areas" -- low level neighborhoods
existing in places located on the boundaries between developed neighborhoods.
Early gang theory gave way to a host of different approaches that are often called cultural
deviance or subcultural theories, which emerged in the 1950s. These involved explorations
into how delinquent subcultures arise in urban, lower class areas (strain theories); how
subcultures of violence remain so enduring in city slums (Wolfgang's approach) or
throughout the South (Southernness hypothesis); how lower class culture as a whole
influences urban gang delinquency (Miller's controversial focal concerns); and how the
mechanisms of learning delinquency work (Akers et al.'s approach). Many modern gang
theories continue to reflect these concerns and have decidedly cultural and subcultural
emphases. Much of Kornhauser's (1978) devastating (or "straw man") critique against social
disorganization theory is aimed at these offshoots, and it may be worthwhile to examine
Kornhauser's criticism in depth.

CULTURAL TRANSMISSION THEORY:

Shaw and McKay were a prolific couple of researchers at the Chicago School who
specialized in using official data to make pin maps, spot maps, rate maps, and zone maps.
They took over the Institute for Juvenile Research from Healy. They aggressively borrowed
from Park and Burgess. They were hardcore sociologists of deviance. Shaw once said: "I
never met a delinquent who acted alone." They studied and noticed that the same
neighborhoods in Chicago seemed to have about the same delinquency rates irregardless of
which ethnic group moved in. This fact proved true for most later research except for Asian
ethnic groups which didn't fit the pattern.
Their ideas developed into Cultural Transmission Theory (or Shaw & McKay's 1942 social
disorganization theory), which was a dominant criminological theory for much of the 20th
century. The theory simply states that "traditions of delinquency are transmitted through
successive generations of the same zone in the same way language, roles, and attitudes are
transmitted." They defined social disorganization as "the inability of local communities to
realize the common values of their residents or solve commonly experienced problems."
Many researchers in criminology have focused on how criminal traditions get embedded into
the functioning of a community and co-exist alongside conventional values. Some of these
foci resulted in subcultural theories, a separate (and somewhat ethnocentric) area of
criminology that emerged in the 1950s, which argues that lower-class neighborhoods simply
tend to have different values and needs, and are simply organized differently in ways that best
serve their interests. Sutherland (1947) himself termed the phenomenon differential social
organization (instead of disorganization, to avoid any implied value judgments the term
"disorganization" implies). The three traditional sources of social disorganization in social
disorganization theory are: residential instability; racial/ethnic heterogeneity; and poverty.
These were also the three ways in which "criminal traditions" got embedded into
communities.

BROKEN WINDOWS THEORY:

The broken windows theory is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling
effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The

theory states that maintaining and monitoring urban environments in a well-ordered condition
may stop further vandalism and escalation into more serious crime.
The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George
L. Kelling. Since then it has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and
the public sphere. The theory has been used as a motivation for several reforms in criminal
policy, including the controversial mass use of "stop, question, and frisk" by the New York
City Police Department.
The reason why the state of the urban environment may affect crime may be described as due
to three factors:

social norms and conformity,

the presence or lack of routine monitoring, and
social signaling and signal crime.

In an anonymous, urban environment, with few or no other people around, social norms and
monitoring are not clearly known. Individuals thus look for signals within the environment as
to the social norms in the setting and the risk of getting caught violating those norms; one of
those signals is the area's general appearance. Under the broken windows theory, an ordered
and clean environment one which is maintained sends the signal that the area is monitored
and that criminal behavior will not be tolerated. Conversely, a disordered environment one
which is not maintained (broken windows, graffiti, excessive litter) sends the signal that the
area is not monitored and that one can engage in criminal behavior with little risk of
detection. It is assumed that under this theory, the landscape "communicates" to people. A
broken window transmits to criminals the message that a community displays a lack of
informal social control and is therefore unable to or unwilling to defend itself against a
criminal invasion. It is not so much the actual broken window that is important, but rather the
message the people receive from the broken window. It is a symbol of defenselessness and
vulnerability by the community and is a representation of the cohesiveness of the people
within. Neighborhoods that have a strong sense of cohesion will fix broken windows and
assert social responsibility upon themselves and effectively giving themselves control over
their space. Although the theory puts significant emphasis on the built environment, human
behavior must also be taken into consideration.

SOCIOLOGICAL CRIME THEORIES:

Criminology is a field of the behavioral sciences focusing on the causes, incidences and
control of individual and group criminal behavior. Criminologists research the forms of a
crime and the legal punishments for criminal behavior. There are two main schools of thought
within criminology, which developed in the middle of the 18th century: Classical and
Chicago.

STRAIN THEORY:

Strain theory, developed out of Robert Merton concept of anomie, which is the split
between an individuals goals and the impediment society poses to achieving those goals. The
Theory, created by Robert Agnew in 1992, postulates that stress and worry is the impetus for
criminal behavior, and that these emotions are due to anomie. There are three major types of
strain: inability to achieve goals, the loss of positive motivations and the amount of negativity
in an individuals life. Strain can be measured in one of two ways: either by the subject
identifying the aspect of his life that causes his strain, or by the researcher pre-determining
causes of strain and asking the subject whether those causes exist in his life. Agnews
research drew connections between the strains in a persons life and negativity, which was
subsequently connected to criminal behavior.

SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY:

The social learning theory, developed by Albert Bandura, argues that individuals do not
possess inherent criminal tendencies, but rather learn criminal behavior from others. The
majority of Banduras work focused on children, analyzing how their criminal behavior was
learned from parents. Bandura believed that if criminal behavior was not learned or prevented
from being learned during childhood, the individual would not have a tendency to commit
crimes later in life. While the theory is accepted as a cause of criminal behavior, it is also
criticized for overlooking biological tendencies.

LABELING THEORY:

The criminological theory of labeling was developed by Thomas Blomberg, a professor at the
University of California Berkley during the student-led protests of Vietnam. This theory rests
on an individuals rejection of established social structures. This theory focuses on the
development, application and subsequent reaction to labels established by a ruling body, such
as the government or president of a university. Rejection of labels under this Theory can be

primary, such as in breaking a law, or in secondary, such as an individual choosing an

alternative career path.
For the purpose of studying the perception of people about crimes and criminals in the
society a brief questionnaire was prepared and circulated in the locality of Bhopal and the
survey was done which included people aged 7-10, 16-21 and 58-62. The copy of the
questionnaire is given below.

QUESTIONNAIRE:
1) Please rate how serious you feel the level of crime is in your community.
2) In the past three years would you say the level of crime in your community has increased,
stayed about the same, or decreased?
3) Would you say the level of police protection in your community has increased, stayed
about the same, or decreased over the past three years?
4) Do you feel there need to be more police patrols, about the same number of police patrols,
or less police patrols in your community?
5) Does your community have a neighborhood crime watch program?
6) Do you belong to a neighborhood crime watch?
7) How safe do you feel in your community?
8) In the past three years, have you been a victim of crime in YOUR community?
9) Have you purchased a gun for protection from crime?
10) Do you own a dog for protection from crime?
11) How safe do you feel going out at night in your community?
12) Please rank what you feel are the most important causes of crime with 1 being Least
likely to cause crime and 5 being Most likely to cause crime.
13) Do you feel more crimes in your community are committed by juveniles, adults, or are
they about the same?
14) What type of crime do you feel is more of a problem in your community: property crimes
such as vandalism and theft, violent crimes such as assault and armed robbery, or are they
about the same?
15) Please rank the following crime-reducing measures based on how effective you feel each
would be with 1 being least effective and 5 being most effective at reducing crime.

16) What do you feel is the main source of crime in your community?
17) What, if anything, do you feel could be done to decrease crime in your community?
18) What is your age?
19) Are you male or female?
20) What is your total household income?
21) What is the highest level of education you have completed?

CONCLUSION:

Crime is often glorified through movies and music. Crime happens in many forms and has
different effects. Typically, crime is kept under control by processes of the law and law
enforcement. Sometimes, however, crime has a tremendous effect on society and the people
within it as a whole.
Crimes are not committed solely by any single race of people or class of people. Crime is
committed by people of all origins and backgrounds, and its effects are felt by all in society,
not just those in direct contact with the crime. In the end, all those who are involved in active
society end up experiencing some effect of crime.
Society loses when investing in new jails rather than paying employees higher wages. A study
has proven that society pays over twice the average household income for one inmate's
incarceration (see Resources below). This means that instead of that money being invested in
prevention through higher wages or better education, taxpayers pay more to keep criminals
safe and well fed. Parents have also felt the sting of crime by changing the ways their
children play. It is less likely for children in present days to play outside because of the
general unrest of unpredictable and heinous crimes. Alarm systems are on rise for the average
American household, as well as paranoid and depressive behavior associated with the effects
of crime.
The questionnaire which was distributed showed the same results as expected when i started
working on this project. I had somewhere in my mind that people will be answering the same
as i thought it would be. Maximum of them were having the same feeling that the crime rates
in their locality has increased and they dont feel safe in sending their children out. While on
the other hands the minors surprisingly showed a fancy kind of behaviour towards crimes and
criminals. This left me somewhere that the relation between crime, criminals and society
needs to be studied a lot. But one thing which i can conclude from this project is that one
never inclines towards crimes by himself or herself its other factors like culture, community,
gang, biology which also influences a person.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1. http://www.ehow.com/about_4578187_effects-crime-society.html
2. http://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector/drivers-of-crime/publications-andbackground-information/documents/spb-theories-on-the-causes-of-crime
3. Bratton, William J (1998), Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime
Epidemic, Random House.
4. Skogan, Wesley G (1990), Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in
American Neighborhoods, University of California Press.

5. http://www.criminology.net/resources/criminology-studies-sociological-crimetheories/
6. https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=94378
7. https://www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/boundless-sociologytextbook/deviance-social-control-and-crime-7/theories-of-crime-and-deviance61/sociological-theories-of-deviance-371-10205/