Summary Of Pyramid Of Crime By Agnew

In this published book, Agnew provides the substructure of integration into just one cumulated position by assessing the ways of the postulations themselves, unlike anterior other criminologists that have failed or just didn’t get proximate enough to prove its subsisting function. Instead, Agnew takes a inversion approach in which organizing his book around theories, he organizes it around the key scopes of analysis, which are the definition of malefaction, free will or determinism, human nature, view of society and the nature of authenticity. Along each quantification Agnew endeavors to assess the contributions of each theoretical position to the rounded overall amalgamated theory. He is meticulous to include both mainstream and critical criminology’s …show more content…
As he acknowledges, this goes a little, but not much, further than Hagan’s (1985) original statement in his “pyramid of crime,” (p.28) and not quite as far as our own “prism of crime” (p.29) as discussed in reference by Henry and Lanier (1998,2001), with the exception that it draws on international law to define blameworthy harm. However, as far as addressing the issue of what is to be integrated, all we have is an end-to-end list of elements rather than one integrated definition. What is problematic about this is the relativity of the definition, and its failure to define crime other than by political process. Determining harm is fastened to the variable politics of a legal process, although international. Public criticism can be facilitated by so many factors from mass media to knowledge of harm, to perception of loss. Its relativity is reflected in its changing assessment depending on who is the perceiver and what is their social context, cultural and spatial location and historical period. Finally, acts determined by the state are part of a power facilitated political process, which hardly addresses the harms created by corporations or the state, or those omitted from criminalization because of the …show more content…
First it has to be fine-tuned to intentional or avoidable harms that are independent of definition by a political process. This demands the desideratum to define what it is to be human, so that gainsaying or undermining that is the harm that establishes malefaction. Such harms represent an avoidable loss to persons or groups as human beings, who are biologically, gregariously, economically and culturally established. We first defined what determined humanity, as distinct from other species, as the competency to make a difference to their environment and to the others with whom they engaged. Its then developed a harm-predicated definition of malefaction as an intentional or avoidable act that reduces or curbs another’s facility to make difference, and we defined the act of avoidable harm as an expression of potency over others that reduces, curbs or results in a loss of their