Criminal theories help people to be cognizant of crime and criminal justice. The theories cover the development and breaking of the law, atypical behaviors, criminal and the patterns of criminal activities. Individuals becoming criminals is related by their differential associations, sub-cultural and social learning theories. Differential association theory involves a perception that an individual learns criminal behavior by getting into contact with people who commit criminal offenses (Matsueda, 2014). During a person’s relation with a criminal, the perceptions and criminal definitions should, fortunately, be conveyed. An individual gets criminal behaviors by learning more viewpoints that favor violating the laws. The theory is based on the assumption that getting into contact with the criminals makes a person inherit their vantage point as one learns the corresponding behavior. It also proposes that the criminal activities and perceptions can be logically presumed of the attributes, attitudes, and behavior that can be achieved first. Society and the justice system should dissolve social places and surround the criminals to reduce their motives and activity patterns.
The sub-cultural theory is based on the perception that criminal activity is learned when the positive repercussions of an atypical behavior are stronger than the positive repercussions of the rational behavior. People get inspired to commit crimes due to the people with whom they relate with. The theory emphasizes that people learn new behaviors, principles, and values through experience and observing other people's behavior which affects them either positively or negatively. The theory assumes that criminal activities should have more negative consequences, which outweigh the positive ones. The theory suggests that delinquent and criminal behaviors are repeated, acquired, and changed by a similar behavior as conforming behavior.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The code of street assesses the impacts of neighborhood street culture regarding violent delinquency. The theory proposes that the inner-city is standardized to be related to random violence. People’s dressing codes, talks, and behavior determine their life-or-death repercussions, especially youth. Also, the violence in the inner-city is controlled by an informal code of streets. The inner-city codes enable those black people to authorize respect and loyalty and enable people to govern the ways of negotiating public spaces. Anderson assesses the street codes in the inner-city and assumes that they are facilitated by poor living conditions, lack of jobs, use of drugs, and race stigma (Anderson, 2000) . The street code proposes developing an approach to understanding the youth's violence, especially in risky neighborhoods.
My critical response is that all these theories have helped individuals understand how criminal behavior is acquired. The differential association has helped draw into the attention of the various needs and preferences of the learning individuals, who contribute to deciding whether attitudes and actions are acceptable. The theory has a limitation because it is not the number of people with atypical attitudes that are judgmental for learning crimes, but the degree of identification of one of several people. On social learning, the theory has helped combine the techniques and processes of differential associations and social leaning towards criminal activities. The theory has the limitation of accounting that only the environmental factors are incorporated in the learning behavior and assumes the biological factors; thus, not comprehensive on how behavior is learned. Cullen et al. (2017) argue that environmental factors create egoist but do not necessarily suggest that they will become criminals. On the street codes, I understand that most of the youth’s behavior is influenced by culture in the streets, which prescribes violent responses and disrespects. The theory had limitations since it only focused on the single racial group instead of determining whether other neighborhood cultures have similar impacts.
The justice system can strengthen the criminal theories by emphasizing the differential associations and considering that individuals' emotional and mental abilities are different. Combating crimes requires understanding the cause of the criminal offense (Cullen et al., 2017). The judicial system should develop criminal laws that are ideal for rehabilitating individuals. They should also create social learning principles by advancing on the theory and operant conditioning. The justice system should develop evidence-based policies to influence the country's criminal and police justice research that could support the creation, deployment, and assessment of dynamic crime-fighting plans (Bueermann, 2012) . The approach would help on regulating crimes more effectively and less expensively.
References
Anderson, E. (2000). Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition.
Bueermann, J. (2012). Being Smart on crime with Evidence-Based policing. National Institute of Justice . https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/being-smart-crime-evidence-based-policing
Cullen, F. T., Agnew, R., & Wilcox, P. (2017). Criminology Theory: Past to Present (6 ed.). Oxford University Press.
Matsueda, R. L. (2014). Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization. In : Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory (pp. 899-907). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412959193.n250
