Breaking The Cycle Of Criminology

The idea of crime and punishment was a key part of the formative lessons learned from my parents. Crime touched my life early on and so rather than going on facts, I often looked at it through emotions. Therefore, criminology was definitively black and white without any gray areas. Erroneously, I often thought that once a person committed a crime they should be locked away and forgotten. While my father was adamantly not religious, my religious upbringing and biblical instruction came from my mother. Her words then drastically affected my Christian Worldview on every aspect of life. It was not until I joined the military at age seventeen, that my eyes were opened to the world. I often struggled to merge the world I was experiencing with my Christian Worldview. In this fog of questioning, I found myself starting to take Criminal Justice classes. The greatest impact on my view towards criminal behavior came during a juvenile delinquency class in which it became clear that in order to break the cycle of criminology, more needed to be done to protect, advise and mentor at risk youth. “If an act has been characterized as …show more content…
Too often crime is highlighted in these media platforms causing a court of public opinion. “Scholars attribute the public’s low level of knowledge about sentencing and corrections to its lack of extensive criminal justice experience and consequent reliance on the media for justice-related information” (Pickett, Mancini, Mears & Gertz, 2015). Criminal behavior is given the spotlight, while the victim is often times forgotten. Forms of rehabilitation, in particular faith based examples, are many times looked over for tough on crime legislation. In a country, where the corrections system has become a warehouse of citizens and more prisons are being built to house them, this is troubling because the current crack down on criminal behavior has not produced less crime