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2.3 B. Roots of Crime

What factors help to create a criminal: social, individual, or combination of factors?

1. Read the article and say whether your vision of breeding grounds of crime differs from the writer’s?

Roots of Crime10

Whenever the question of the social roots of crime arises the researchers of the problem will resort to strain theory and start speculating about criminal underworld, providing for the security, safety, shared interests of its members, segregated from the rest of the society. Those authors take solace in the knowledge that crime is engendered in the underprivileged world where poverty, unemployment, obtrusive overcrowding in poor physical conditions and a lack of leisure opportunities other than the pub expedite the process of transgression against laws and morals and a drift into criminal career.

An urban underworld forms an occupational community which is especially auspicious for the development of a subculture with implicit norms of criminal behavior, slang, and a special spirit sustaining the shared identity. Central to underworld code is the injunction11 not to inform on others. Association with other criminals complemented by the lack of association with the targets of crime inhibits any remorse about sustaining the shared identity.

The underworld, however, in the past decades has been fundamentally altered by the urban redevelopment of the inner-city areas and dispersal of the population to the suburbs. It now forms an extended social network rather than a particular physical locale. Crime character has also changed. In the previous century law-abiding community viewed burglary, violence against person, gambling, and prostitution as the most heinous acts. However today they are considered “petty, unsophisticated, unorganized, brutal and largely unprofitable”.

Growing affluence and, in particular, the increasing scale of business activity have given rise to project crime when criminals are especially fastidious about planning. Project crime involves a much smaller number of large thefts. To implement their plans criminals have to organize themselves more effectively: improved safes, alarm systems, and security vans require advanced discreet planning and a much higher level of cooperation. It is not unknown that people of high respectability have been associates in such crimes.

But a learned scholar once an epitome of cool, will be confused by the question about the frequency with which high-status people commit crimes themselves. With vehement anger this supporter of the thesis that crime and deviance are caused by pains of poverty and want will rebuke you saying that it’s the case for psychotherapists rather than researchers of law as those people are simply crazy.

Now however a new concept of white-collar crime is gradually gaining ground. White-collar crimes are committed by “a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation”, and they quite often involve violations of trust. Though zealous advocates of strain theory believe that those people involved in fraudulent shams need medical rehabilitation rather than prison sentence and their wealth is extenuating circumstance and a proof that the crime was committed in the fit of insanity, their opponents, now numerous, will refute this argument. They maintain that if upper-status people flout the rules of the society they shouldn’t redeem themselves by just making amends. There is no disparity in motivation impelling the poor and the rich to break the law. Princes as well as paupers can be overcome by greed and temptation.

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