Final Exam

Final Exam

Question 1

Research over the past few decades on normal child development and on development of delinquent behavior has shown that individual, social, and community conditions as well as their interactions influence behavior. There is general agreement that behavior, including antisocial and delinquent behavior, is the result of a complex interplay of individual biological and genetic factors and environmental factors, starting during fetal development and continuing throughout life (Nofziger 2001). Clearly, genes affect biological development, but there is no biological development without environmental input. Thus, both biology and environment influence behavior.

Many children reach adulthood without involvement in serious delinquent behavior, even in the face of multiple risks. Although risk factors may help identify which children are most in need of preventive interventions, they cannot identify which particular children will become serious or chronic offenders. It has long been known that most adult criminals were involved in delinquent behavior as children and adolescents; most delinquent children and adolescents, however, do not grow up to be adult criminals (Sickmund 2004). Similarly, most serious, chronically delinquent children and adolescents experience a number of risk factors at various levels, but most children and adolescents with risk factors do not become serious, chronic delinquents. Furthermore, any individual factor contributes only a small part to the increase in risk. It is, however, widely recognized that the more risk factors a child or adolescent experiences, the higher their risk for delinquent behavior.

Question 2

The situational approach to crime prevention was developed in Britain, where researchers from the Home Office concluded that little more could be done to prevent crime through conventional justice system responses. The catalyst for this was research done in the 1960s and 1970s which showed that misbehavior in juvenile institutions seemed to depend more on the way the institution was run than on the personality or the background of the juvenile (Davis 2004). This research led Clarke to suggest that opportunities were a function of the institutional regime and could be “designed out”. Other research, including an Edmonton study by Kupchik (2006), which showed that geographical factors such as the location of bars could be used to explain patterns of crime, gave further support to the situational approach. Offenders themselves told researchers that they selected targets based on their perception of risk and reward, again suggesting the possibility of reducing crime by changing the risk/reward perceptions of potential offenders (Myers 2005).

A few criminologists, including Schwartz (2009) and Streib (2007), began to explore the idea that delinquents were not strongly committed to their deviance, but in many cases were reacting to situational inducements. This work was the basis of rational choice theory which postulated that crime was the result of deliberate choices made by offenders based on their calculation of the risks and rewards of these choices. The basic assumption of rational choice theory was that “crime is purposive behavior designed to meet the offender's commonplace needs for such things as money, status, sex, and excitement, and that meeting these needs involves the making of ...