Correctional Administration

• Parole is the conditional release from prison of their sentence under community supervision. to serve the remainder
• Crime is defined as acts or omissions forbidden by law that can be punished by imprisonment and or fine.
• Crime is a highly complex phenomenon that changes across cultures and across time.
• Crime does not evolve from any single source and there are several reasons behind a person’s criminal behavior.
• Theory is a series of statements that seek to understand and explain a particular phenomenon.
• In criminological perspectives, theories help us to understand the way things are, not the way things ought to be.
• Crime has been around as long as civilization itself.
• Crime has high and diverse costs.
• Crime has become more prevalent in poor inner city neighborhoods than those who are rich.
• Criminal behavior pertains to physical environment like geography and topography, crowding, pollution, and recreational opportunities which influences the physical and emotional development of people over their lives as well as the level of hostility, fear, or well being they feel from moment to moment as they experience, for example, a crowded subway, dark lonely parking lot, or serene park.
• Societal or Macrolevel Factors deal with systematic interactions between social groups which describe the ways society is structured.
• Societal or Macrolevel Factors include the relative distribution among groups and flows of information, resources, and people between groups.
• Societal or Macrolevel Factors also encompass the variety and heterogeneity of racial/ethnic/cultural/productive groups, their behaviors and beliefs, and economic relations.
• Motivation is the driving force behind our actions and includes “ I could ”, what will I cost me compared it what I think I’ll get and is this right and proper.
• Individual or microlevel factors describe how a person becomes motivated to commit a crime.
• Some people generally approve of certain minor forms of crime, like certain forms of consensual sexual behavior, gambling, “soft” drug use, and for adolescents – alcohol use, truancy, and curfew violation.
• Conformity is the pursuit of cultural goals.
• Some people hold certain general values that are conducive to crime.
• Ritualism is the use of the same socially approved means to achieve less elusive goals.
• Innovation is the use of socially unapproved or unconventional means to obtain culturally approved goals.
• Rebellion is to reject the cultural goals and means, then work to replace them through socially approved means.
• Anomie/Strain Theory posits that people experience strain or stress, become upset, and sometimes engage in crime as a result.
• When criminal behavior is learned, the learning includes techniques of committing the crime, which are sometimes very complicated, sometimes very simple, and the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes learned in interaction with other persons in a process of communication.
• Some people conditionally approve of or justify certain forms of crime, including some serious crimes.
• Retreatism is to reject both the cultural goals and the means to obtain it, then find a way to escape it.
• Differential Association Theory (DAT) emphasizes that crime is a result of social learning by engaging in deviant behaviors by those with whom we sociologically interact.
• The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups.
• Social disorganization theory posits that location matters when predicting illegal activity.
• Motivation alone cannot cause a crime to occur; required opportunity.
• Characteristics of communities where crime is more likely to happen include being economically deprived, large in size, high in multiunit housing like apartments, high in residential mobility, and high in family disruption.
• The sociological approach theorizes that crime is shaped by factors external to the individual: their experiences within the neighborhood, the peer group, and the family.
• Excellent posture, muscle gain, and thick skin are characteristics of those most prone to commit crime or other deviant behaviors.
• Gabriel Tarde (1843 - 1904) maintained that individuals learn from each other and ultimately imitate one another.
• Psychological theory has a general perspective that looks to the psychological functioning, development, and adjustment of an individual in explaining criminal or deviant acts.
• Goring found that criminals are more likely to be insane, to be unintelligent, and to exhibit poor social behavior.
• Charles Goring (1870 - 1919) examined more than 3,000 convicts in England.
• Psychological theory focuses on the association among intelligence, personality, learning and criminal behavior.
• Out of 100 individuals, only 1 was creative or inventive and the remainder were prone to imitation, according to Jacoby (2004).
• Antique Philosophy (4th Century B.C) offers a philosophical standpoint on crime causation who stated that the crime is poverty related describing poverty as a mother of all revolutions and crime.
• Medieval Philosophy (17th Century) stated that criminality will depend on social situations and described his standpoint in this sentence: “ opportunity makes a thief ”.