Ch. 1 Criminology, Crime, And Criminal Law

Front 1

Criminology

Back 1

An interdisciplinary science that gathers and analyzes data on various aspects of criminal, delinquent, and general antisocial behavior.

Front 2

Male in se

Back 2

Inherently bad

Front 3

Mala prohibita

Back 3

Bad because they are prohibited

Front 4

Criminality

Back 4

A clinical or scientific term rather than a legal one, and one that can defined independently of legal definitions of crimes.

Front 5

Actus Reas

Back 5

Guilty act

Refers to the principle that a person must commit some forbidden act or neglect some mandatory act before he or she can be subjected to criminal sanctions.

Front 6

Mens rea

Back 6

Guilty mind

Refers to whether or not the suspect has a wrongful purpose in mind when carrying out the actus reas.

Front 7

Arrest

Back 7

A felony suspect first enters the criminal justice system by arrest.

Front 8

Concurrence

Back 8

The act of actus reas and the mental state (mens rea) concur in the sense that the criminal intention actuates the criminal act.

Front 9

Causation

Back 9

Refers to the necessity to establish a causal link between the criminal act and the harm suffered.

Front 10

Harm

Back 10

Refers to the negative impact a crime has either on the victim or on the general values of the community.

Front 11

Preliminary Hearing

Back 11

After an arrest and booking into the county jail, the suspect must be presented in court for the preliminary hearing before a magistrate or judge at the earliest opportunity.

2 main purposes it has:

1. To advise suspects of their constitutional rights and of the charges against them

2. To set bail

Front 12

Preliminary arraignment

Back 12

The preliminary arraignment is a proceeding before a magistrate or judge in which three major matters must be decided:

1. whether or not a crime has actually been committed

2. whether or not there are reasonable grounds to believe that the person before the bench committed it

3. whether or not the crime was committed in the jurisdiction of the court.

Front 13

The grand jury

Back 13

If the prosecutor is successful, the suspect is bound over to a higher court for further processing.

About 7-23 will be selected from a pool of citizens.

Front 14

Arraignment

Back 14

Armed with an indictment(or information in states not requiring grand jury proceedings), the prosecutor files the case against the accuses in felony court (variably called a district, superior, or common pleas court), which sets a date for arraignment.

Front 15

The trial

Back 15

A trial by a jury of one's peers is a 6th amendment right, and is an examination of the facts of a case by a judge.

Front 16

Probation

Back 16

Presentence investigation reports (PSI's) are prepared by probation officers and contain a variety of information about the crime and the offenders background (criminal record, education, work history, marital status, substance abuse history, and attitude.

Front 17

Incarceration

Back 17

If the sentence imposed for a felony conviction is some form of incarceration, the judge has the option of sentencing the offender to a state penitentiary, a county jail, or a county work release program.

Front 18

Parole

Back 18

A conditional release from prison granted to inmates prior to the completion of their sentences.

Front 19

Classical School

Back 19

It emphasized human rationality and free will in its explanations for criminal behavior.

Front 20

Phrenology

Back 20

The basic idea behind this was that cognitive and personality functions are localized in the brian, and that the parts regulating the most dominant functions were bigger than parts regulating the less dominant ones.

Front 21

Theory

Back 21

A set of logically interconnected propositions explaining how phenomena are related, and from which a number of hypotheses can be derived and tested.

Front 22

Hypotheses

Back 22

Are statements about relationships between and among factors we expect to find based on the logic of our theories.

Front 23

Level of analysis

Back 23

The segment of the phenomenon of interest that is measured and analyzed.

Front 24

Ideology

Back 24

A way of looking at the world, a general emotional picture of "how things should be."

Front 25

Constrained vision

Back 25

Believers in this vision view human activities as constrained by innate human nature that is self-centered and largely unalterable.

Front 26

Unconstrained vision

Back 26

Denies an innate human nature, viewing it as formed anew in each different culture.

Front 27

Policy

Back 27

A simply course of action designed to solve some problem that has been selected from among alternative courses in action.