Adequacy of Criminological Theories

Adequacy of Criminological Theories

Introduction

Adequacy refers to the state of being sufficient for a specific purpose. The sense of adequacy is very important in any case or theory being considered for any subject. Adequacy of any theory should be logical and as well as empirical so that it could be proved that the theory being considered is fairly adequate for a given condition. It is very important for a theory to be adequate empirically and a theory is considered empirical when the observable consequences are viewed to be true. The core aim of this paper is to examine and analyze the logical and empirical adequacy of a number of criminology theories that are significantly applied to the studies of crime. It is obvious that the purpose of criminological theories is to explain and analyze the nature or the prevalence of a certain type of crime based on the observation of various social factors and other variables. There are a number of criminological theories in the field of criminology that are contributed towards the field of criminology. Three criminological theories have been selected for analysis in this paper and the studies of previous researches will be elaborated in the following section of this paper to explain the adequacy of the selected criminological theories. The criminological theories selected for discussion include the Routine Activity Theory, Social Disorganization Theory and the Strain Theory. A brief discussion on the literature related to the above mentioned criminological theories are mentioned as follows.

Literature Review

A brief discussion on each of the selected theories of criminology including the logical and empirical theory of these criminological theories is presented under the separate headings of each criminological theory.

Routine Activity Theory

Routine Activity Theory is a theory that has been extracted from a theory called Crime Opportunity Theory which focuses on the different situations of crimes. This theory was developed by Marcus Felson and Lawrence E. Cohen. The premise of the Routine Activity Theory is that the occurrence of crime is unaffected by social causes including inequality, poverty and unemployment. An example of the increase in criminal activities is the effects after the end of the Second World War when the Welfare states were expanding and the economy of the Western countries was booming. Felson and Cohen (1980) state that this happened because there was much opportunities in the society for the rise of criminal activities so there were also much more things to steal. There are various crimes that are very well explained by the Routine Activity Theory and these types of crime include employee theft, corporate crime and copyright infringement related to peer to peer file sharing. A very important thing to note is that this theory is controversial among different sociologists who believe in the social causes of crime.

It is significant that there are three observable aspects that are need required for a crime to take place which are given as follows.

A target that is suitable and lacks a capable guardian ...