Crime

Webster's college dictionary defines a crime as an action that is deemed injurious to the public welfare and is legally prohibited. Within the United States today, crimes are taking place every few seconds. In fact, in 1995, one crime index offense took place every two seconds within the US. There are many factors in this world today, which play key roles on affecting crime. Age, gender, social class, drug use, and educational level all have a key affect on not only the amount of crimes which are being committed, but which types of crimes are being committed by which people. One interesting aspect which has an affect on crime today is ethnic and cultural origins. By breaking down crimes into which types of people commit them, one can better understand and eventually learn how to prevent certain crimes from occurring.

Social Factors

Our social structure mirrors to citizens and communities what we value and how we set priorities. Social root causes of crime are: inequality, not sharing power, lack of support to families and neighborhoods, real or perceived inaccessibility to services, lack of leadership in communities, low value placed on children and individual well-being, the overexposure to television as a means of recreation. In the 1990s a new idea spread through the criminal justice field concerning the influence of a person's social environment on crime rates. The idea was that general disorder in the neighborhood leads to increased antisocial behavior and eventually to serious crime. For most of the twentieth century, (Hawley 398-405) police primarily reacted to serious crimes such as rape, murder, and robbery often with little overall success in curbing crime rates. "Broken Windows," referring to a neighborhood of abandoned vehicles, vacant buildings with actual broken windows, and litter scattered around, is an idea that contends much of serious crime comes from civil disorder. So, the thinking went, if authorities eliminated disorder, then serious crimes would drop(Siegel 45-56)

Police found Broken Windows a convenient way to control serious crime at less cost. As some critics also pointed out, it was simpler for the city to crack down on minor crimes than address social problems like poverty and limited education opportunities —which probably caused much of the criminal behavior in the Broken Window communities in the first place.

Religious Factors

Sociologists and criminologists have long recognized the potential links between religious belief and delinquent behavior. A number of sociological theories have attempted to explain the mechanisms through which religious belief may affect criminality. (Bursik 393-413) “hellfire” hypothesis, a theory that has received wide attention in the criminology literature, posits that religion deters criminal behavior by increasing the costs of delinquency through the promise of punishment in the afterlife. More recent work has emphasized the role of religious bodies as reference groups against which individuals frame behavior or modeled religious organizations as providers of neural stimulation, the absence of which leads individuals to a higher propensity toward committing crime (Siegel 45-56). A number of threads in the sociology literature have examined whether religion has a differential effect on certain types of crime or whether religious deterrence is more efficacious in predominantly religious ...