Social deprivation and crime are inextricably linked
Almost half of the 83,000 people in prison ran away from home as a child and cannot read as well as an 11 year old. Almost 30 per cent have been through the care system and similar proportions were homeless before entering prison.
Today’s prison population shows that an overwhelming majority of prisoners are the product of social breakdown. Prisoners are far more likely to have lived in poverty, to come from broken families, to be unemployed and in considerable debt and to be experiencing an addiction. Deprivation is an important factor that leads to crime. Poverty doesn’t cause crime but there is an obvious direct relationship between them. Effects of deprivation can impact on
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This could include such crimes as theft or prostitution. It is also a crime to use, possess, and partake in drug trafficking, manufacture or distribution of illegal drugs.
Drugs can also affect someone’s likelihood to commit crime because of the effects it has on the person while they are under the influence. Drug use can affect an individual’s speed, memory, alertness and reactions. Crimes related to drugs or alcohol may be the result of the effects that the substances have on their thought processes and behaviour which causes them to commit criminal activity.
Gender
Gender is clearly one of the major factors in the causes of crime as men commit far more crimes than women. “90% of those found guilty are men.” – the poverty site
This may be because of the socialisation men receive when growing up. It is argued that men and women are socialised differently as children. Women are essentially expected to conform to norms and values that society impose on them: they are generally considered by society as the weaker and passive sex, labelled as a mother, a carer and are expected to be a conformist, deferential and diligent. Girls may be brought up to fear violence inflicted upon them whereas men are often socialised differently in that they are brought up to oppose it if threatened. Men are encouraged at a young age to be competitive, aggressive and sexually
For example murder, rape, manslaughter, breaking and entering, even taking of goods from stores or from individuals to give a few examples.
In this period of mass incarceration and tough on crime era policies, harsh prison and jail conditions are being utilized as a form of deterrent to reduce crime and improve public safety. Accordingly, well over “2.3 million people are in prison or jail, and 700,000 former offenders are returned into society each year and 77 percent were sent back to prison costing taxpayers massive amounts of revenue.” (Mears & Cochran, 2015) As a result of this the United States possesses the “highest incarceration rate in the world” due to this faulty theory. (Mears & Cochran, 2015) For many politicians and the general public, they believe the idea that stringent and austere prison conditions will create a milieu in which an offender will want to reform to avoid these intolerable living environments. This situation is exacerbated by the lack of studies, and politicians not heeding the existing research. According to Listwan et al., limited number of studies that has paid systematic attention to how exposure to the deprivations or pains of imprisonment might foster reoffending. This omission is somewhat perplexing, given that the pains of imprisonment have long been documented and that policymakers have explicitly celebrated the painfulness of prisons as a way of teaching offenders that “crime does not pay.” (Listwan et al., 2013)
Over the past forty years the increased of mass incarceration within the Federal Bureau of Prisons has increased more than 700 percent since the 1970’s, between the different type of ethnicity. Billions of dollars have spent to house offenders and to maintain their everyday life from rehabilitation programs, academic education, vocational training, substance abuse programs and medical care. The cost of incarceration climbs according to the level of security based on violent and non-violent crimes. Fewer staff is required in minimum and medium-security prisons that house low-level offenders. Incarceration is likely to serves as one indicator of other co-occurring risks and vulnerabilities that makes families particularly fragile. Mass incarceration is likely to increase if awareness is not implicated to reduce the rate of imprisonment and broken families to take back their communities and reclaim their hope for the future.
The incarcerated population are typically of low socioeconomic and low education levels. (4) Interestingly, low socioeconomic status and education levels on their own are directly linked with poor health. (5) When these social determinants of health are combined with prisonisation; the adaptation process in which incarcerated individuals adjust themselves to behavioural standards within the institutions which are not comparable with those of life outside prison.(6) This confines the already vulnerable to an environment of violence and drug use, which leads to further decline in health status while serving sentences. (1) In addition to the low socioeconomic status and education level of prison inmates, we can also establish that inmates are predominately male when compared to the
Drug trafficking in the United States has established itself to be one of the most profitable businesses in today’s world (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, 2004). There is such a high demand as more people buy, use and sell drugs for a variety of reasons, not really knowing all the risk that are at stake. With new laws in affect and more determined citizens of the U.S. everyone can help keep the streets clean. Drug trafficking is at an all-time high and must be brought to a halt.
The United States criminal justice system, an outwardly fair organization of integrity and justice, is a perfect example of a seemingly equal situation, which turns out to be anything but for women. The policies imposed in the criminal justice system affect men and women in extremely dissimilar manners. I plan to examine how gender intersects with the understanding of crime and the criminal justice system. Gender plays a significant role in understanding who commits what types of crimes, why they do so, who is most often victimized, and how the criminal justice system responds to these victims and offenders. In order to understand the current state of women and the way in which gender relates to crime and criminal justice, it is first
In 2014, the United States incarcerated 449,000 newly convicted offenders while releasing 636,300 inmates (Carson, 2015). Upon release, offenders were expected to be able to function back in society under parole supervision. This is not the case for many offenders. As they are released from prison, they lack the necessary skills, education, opportunities and support system to successfully reintegrate back into society (Petersilia, 2000; Travis & Visher, 2003). In 2005, research showed that 67.8% of released prisoners were arrested for a new crime within 3 years, and 76.6% were arrested within 5 years (Cooper 2014). The high percentage of recidivism is overpopulating correctional facilities while producing a cycling effect for offenders. To attack the issue of recidivism this paper will address the following question: How does lack of support system and resulting poverty influence prisoner re-entry? What are some programs or policies we can incorporate to reduce recidivism?
In viewing the information contained in the aforementioned articles, one can immediately understand the underlying reasons that women are committing more crimes than men. Through the mid-1990s, the arrest rates of both genders has increased steadily, with the male rate far exceeding that of females (Gross, 2009, pp. 84). However, in recent years, a shift has been seen, with the numbers of female offenders rising significantly, especially at the juvenile level, which significantly raises the likelihood of re-offending later in life. As such, an understanding of the differences between the sexes in terms of the reasoning behind their offenses has long been researched.
Despite the general consensus that the number of females involved in crime is continuing to rise, males are still the dominant gender committing crimes, especially for violent offences. This may be why there is a continued lack of research on female offenders using a gender specific approach that accounts for gender differences. Historically, female offenders have been primarily studied using a gender-neutral model comprising mainly male offenders. Although there is support that a gender-neutral model can effectively apply to both male and female offenders (van der Knaap et al. 2012), there has been an ongoing debate on whether the pathways and processes that lead to female offending can be successfully explained and ultimately applied to interventions and preventions by using theories originally created to explain male crime (Steffensmeier & Allan, 1996).
Females are said to be very emotional and if they were troublemakers at a young age they are said to possess “masculine traits and characteristics” (Siegal & Walsh, 2015). Males tend to commit crimes like robbery, assault and burglary. This has changed in the last decade. The rate of offending has decreased for males by 27 percent and females about 15 percent. “Girls have increased their
Crime and criminalization are dependent on social inequality Social inequality there are four major forms of inequality, class gender race and age, all of which influence crime. In looking at social classes and relationship to crime, studies have shown that citizens of the lower class are more likely to commit crimes of property and violence than upper-class citizens: who generally commit political and economic crimes. In 2007 the National Crime Victimization Survey showed that families with an income of $15000 or less had a greater chance of being victimized; recalling that lower classes commit a majority of those crimes. We can conclude that crime generally happens within classes.
A lot of people link drug abuse with crime, at times even with violent crime. This association comes from psychopharmacological association that imply that people may engage in criminal acts after taking some kind of substance known to undermine their judgment as well as self-control result in paranoid thoughts and distortion of inhibitions (Sewell, Poling and Sofuoglu, 189). Though all substances that affect the central nervous system might result in this kind of relationships, scientific information indicates that some type of drugs have a more strong effect than others. Such drugs are alcohol, cocaine, phencyclidine and amphetamines (McCauley, Ruggiero, Resnick and Kilpatrick, 136). Inversely, cannabis and heroin are less associated with desire to commit
Drug abuse is a multifaceted problem that is highly correlated to crime. It can be understood in three different perspectives that drug abuse causes crime, crime causes drug abuse, and drug abuse, as well as crime, is linked to broad factors. The broad factors involve the international drug trade affecting local
The social process and traditional structure theory explained why female crime rates are rather lower than males. The social process theory tend to explain the traditional crime with regards to differential opportunity to lean criminal techniques and values. The use of the traditional theory shows evidence in which considered the overlap on the causes of crimes committed by both genders. Studies shows that both male and female offenders that came in contact with the criminal justice system often came from a social background that are typically of low socioeconomic status, poorly educated, under or unemployed, and minority groups (Steffensmeir and Allan, 1995). The only difference between male and female offenders is, female
Poverty and the relationship it has to crime is a long standing sociological, humanists and historical phenomenon. From the plight of the third world to the violence soaked inner city streets of the 1980’s, the relationship of crime and poverty has been the source of a great deal of social commentary. In societies throughout the world and throughout history there has always been a traditional measure of deviance through relative income gaps. Both poverty and crime as well as their connections are heavily weighed topics of political and social discourse. Opinions in these areas contain a great deal of variance. The prejudices of the old guard from the professional police era still utilize association with poverty as a measuring stick for social deviance. Meanwhile, intelligent social science continues to give insight to factors such as social disorganization, socialization into violence, as well as, the far reaching impact political, economic and justice based policies have on those in poverty.