Jacqueline B. Helfgott

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“"Criminal behavior is a cultural and subcultural product”. Media and popular culture and the escalating number of “media junkies” and media-mediated crimes (Black, 1991) call attention to the need to make sense of how media and popular culture shape criminal behavior.”

“Differential association theory suggests that individuals act on the basis of who they associate with. People learn criminal behavior through interaction with friends and family members who engage in such behavior. Burgess and Akers’s (1966) differential association-reinforcement theory combines differential association with conditioning theories to suggest that people learn to engage in crime through differential association but criminal behavior is then maintained through operant and classical conditioning.”

“For the learning theorist, crime is a product of social learning whereby an individual’s decision to commit crime results from observation and association.”

“Evolutionary theories of crime are based on the notion that natural selection is the inevitable result of three fundamental features of live: 1. Heredity-physical and behavioral traits are genetcally passed form parent to offspring. 2. “Variation”-individuals differ in their physical traits and behaviors. 3. Differential reproduction”-the inherited traits of some individuals will result int eh reproduction of more offspring.”

“Biological theories explain crime in terms of the interaction between biological predisposition and environmental conditions on behavioral outcomes (Fishbein, 2001). Studies show that behaviors, characteristics, and traits associated with crime such as aggression, impulsivity, antisocial personality, and psychopathy are influenced by a range of biological factors including evolution and genetics, brain biochemistry and function, brain injury, hormonal influences, physiology, physical anomalies and body build, diet and blood sugar levels, and cognitive deficits (Raine, 1993).”

“"Criminal behavior” is an individual-level behavioral product of an infinite array of factors and forces that converge at a given point in time. The term “crime” can be understood more broadly as the collective amount of criminal behavior in a society.”

“The long history of these two general schools of thought-criminal behavior as a product of social forces versus criminal behavior as a product of individual constitution-has been somewhat resistant to change, and even the titles of text about crime have historically reflected one or the other perspective. Texts titled “Criminology” tend to approach the study of crime from a macrosociological framework whereas texts titled “Criminal Behavior” often focus more on the micro-level dynamics of individual criminality.”

“In some ways, crimes that fall on the more “normal” side of the continuum of criminal behavior are even more interesting because they involve regular people in usual settings making decisions (some spontaneous, some not) about violating the law. The nature and dynamics of these sorts of everyday crimes provide a great deal of information about the root of criminal behavior-in fact, probably more than the extreme forms of criminal behavior, which can often be explained in terms of severe psychopathology or social or political conflict.”

“[C]rime is a social, interpersonal, and personal harm that, more often than not, has tragic and enduring consequences.”