SOC 2760 Chapter Notes - Chapter N/A: Adolphe Quetelet, List Of Countries By Intentional Homicide Rate, Longitudinal Study
11 Jan 2017
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The us crime rate has declined since the early 1990s, but the prison/jail population stands at over 2. 3 million (highest incarceration rate in the western world) Crime is one of our most important social problems and also one of the least understood. Tv, newspapers, and the internet give us a distorted picture of crime and solutions to the crime problem that ultimately will do little to reduce it. If crime is rooted in the way our society is organized, crime-reduction efforts will succeed only to the extent that they address the structural roots of criminality. Criminology has recently moved away from this structural focus towards individualistic explanations, as the fields of biology and psychology are vying for prominence in the study of crime: these views fail to answer three central questions: How and why is the legal response to crime shaped by extralegal variables: these questions must be answered if we are to reduce crime.
