Introduction
Crime is a highly complex phenomenon that changes across both time and cultures. Activities that are legal in one country may be illegal in another country. As cultures change over time, behaviours that were once criminalised may not be criminalised anymore. Most people consider crime as deviant behaviour however not all crimes are deviant and not all deviant behaviour is criminal. Crime is the behaviour that breaks the formal laws of a given society. The punishment of crime will be more severe than the punishment of deviance. Deviance is behaviour that deviates or moves away from the norms of society. It is considered abnormal. Deviant behaviour is considered unacceptable however depending on the context it may be viewed differently by others.
Criminals are placed in institutions that are meant to rehabilitate them and according to …show more content…
They learn beliefs that are favourable to crime and they are exposed to criminal models. According to the article Mzuzephi did not take long to realise that he had, purely by chance, taken up employment with one of the many gangs of highway robbers who thrived amidst the unsettled conditions of the early Witwatersrand and over the following weeks Mzu served his criminal apprenticeship by observing how Tyson and his accomplices staged coach robberies, waylaid the company carts taking wages to the more isolated gold mines or, less ambitiously, they deprived black migrants of their earnings by posing as policemen who, on the pretext of going through their pockets for passes or other documents, instead removed cash from their persons. From this piece in the article one can see that Mzu learnt his criminal behaviour from the people he was associated with and this then justifies the social learning theory. This also justifies the fact that people aren’t born criminals however we can learn criminal
Crime is a highly complex phenomenon that changes across both time and cultures. Activities that are legal in one country may be illegal in another country. As cultures change over time, behaviours that were once criminalised may not be criminalised anymore. Most people consider crime as deviant behaviour however not all crimes are deviant and not all deviant behaviour is criminal. Crime is the behaviour that breaks the formal laws of a given society. The punishment of crime will be more severe than the punishment of deviance. Deviance is behaviour that deviates or moves away from the norms of society. It is considered abnormal. Deviant behaviour is considered unacceptable however depending on the context it may be viewed differently by others.
Criminals are placed in institutions that are meant to rehabilitate them and according to …show more content…
They learn beliefs that are favourable to crime and they are exposed to criminal models. According to the article Mzuzephi did not take long to realise that he had, purely by chance, taken up employment with one of the many gangs of highway robbers who thrived amidst the unsettled conditions of the early Witwatersrand and over the following weeks Mzu served his criminal apprenticeship by observing how Tyson and his accomplices staged coach robberies, waylaid the company carts taking wages to the more isolated gold mines or, less ambitiously, they deprived black migrants of their earnings by posing as policemen who, on the pretext of going through their pockets for passes or other documents, instead removed cash from their persons. From this piece in the article one can see that Mzu learnt his criminal behaviour from the people he was associated with and this then justifies the social learning theory. This also justifies the fact that people aren’t born criminals however we can learn criminal