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12 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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What is a criminal career?
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It is the longitudinal sequence of crimes committed by an individual offender. Ranges from your first to your last offence.
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What are the 6 parts to a criminal career? |
Onset - age of first crime. Duration: long history or one offence. Frequency: lots of offences/few. Persistance: Continues to commit Desistance: stops committing Crime type and seriousness: e.g. burglaries specialise in non violent cases. |
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What do we know about the development of offending?
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Peak of offending in late teenage years, the earlier you start is the sign of a long criminal career, a small fraction of population commits a large fraction of all crimes.
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Explain Sampson and Laubs theory
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Founded the age graded theory of social informal control in 1993, they tried to map criminal careers up to age 70. They found that crime is more likely to happen when bonds to society are weak. |
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Explain their findings about informal social control.
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You are less likely to commit crime if you have good bonds, e.g. employment, marriage, parenthood. these are ex-amples of informal social control. If you have weak bonds, crime is more likely to be committed.
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What is a 'turning point'?
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Good things happen to bad people and act as a turning point. This is due to informal or direct social control.
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What are the two types of offenders known as?
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Moffitt (1993) states that there are 2 subgroups of offender: adolescence limited and life course persistent. Adolescence limited is when you commit crime in teenage years but stop in adulthood. Life course persistant means crime pattern is established and hard to get rid of.
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Explain why life course persistant offenders may reoffend.
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They could be born with disorders, or something happened to the brain, e.g. smoking/lack of oxygen. This could cause the child to be difficult to parent. OR they could be born into a criminogenic environment.
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What is the downhill snowball? |
Criminals may have little opportunity to learn pro-social behaviour, they end up labelled/stigmatised and do poorly in all domains.
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Give examples of Adolescence Limited Behaviour.
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Normal healthy people, hit puberty, think theyre already adults, don't want to go to school, don't have status so this causes tension. To relieve tension they commit crime.
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Why do AL offenders desist?
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Loss of motivation, as they enter adulthood they exit maturity gap and criminal behaviour dies out. They opt for change (adult roles)
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Lecture 3 - Theories of Offending |
Janna Verbruggen |
