Methods we can use to study and understand crime and criminal beaviour
METHODS WE CAN USE TO STUDY AND UNDERSTAND CRIME AND CRIMINAL BEHAVIOUR
There are many methods by which we can better understand criminal minds and crime itself. Forensic criminology is "the scientific study of the non-legal aspects of crime, including juvenile delinquency". Forensic criminology uses many diverse disciplines to better understand causes for committing crime, to gain knowledge that can help us prevent crime. The accumulated findings of criminology may help judges, lawyers and others to better understand crime and criminals, which may lead to more effective sentencing and methods of treatment. Such knowledge can help in improving penal institutions and reforming law.
Criminology offers neutral assistance in treating crime and criminals - it provides wide range of facts to the officials who can draw their conclusions from them.
It is sometimes said that the objectives of criminological research are threefold - descriptive, casual , and normative. The first aspect pools together collections of facts and their interpretations. Usually gathering of the facts is not caused by some occurrence but rather by come theory, 'feeling', an presumption about what the researcher expects to find out. After the facts are collected, the theory may be confirmed or dismissed (which leads to new research).
The second, casual aspect is about searching for causes of committing crime. Theories of causation can be helpful in planning for the prevention of crime, as long as one does not force 'facts' into some preferred theory or proof.
The normative aspect is proving to be the most unreliable. Searching for some kind of laws governing criminal behavior for now seems to be unpromising. The discovered laws turn out to be merely trends and though study of trends may prove useful they are not laws and so far the normative aspect of criminology shows little hope of evolving into something helpful in understanding crime.
Statistics often serve as the first step of any research and there are researchers that consider it as the only reliable source. Using statistics for social and criminological purposes started in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century thanks to the astronomer Adolphe Quetelet, famous for his 'law' that showed that crime in any country remains quite constant over the long term. But his other statement, saying that this constancy can be achieved only when factors like social, economic and political remain stable, made his law insignificant when confronted with rapidly changing world.
The term "crime statistic" usually refers to figures compiled by the Police and similar law enforcement agencies. However, it is well known that many if not most offenses are not reported to the police, and changes in police procedures can have a big impact on how such reported crimes are categorized. This is why public surveys are sometimes conducted to estimate the amount of crime not reported to police and to ascertain levels of victimization.
The differences in frequency and techniques of gathering data, the diverse point of views on what factors should be considered as ...
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The term "crime statistic" usually refers to figures compiled by the Police and similar law enforcement agencies. However, it is well known that many if not most offenses are not reported to the police, and changes in police procedures can have a big impact on how such reported crimes are categorized. This is why public surveys are sometimes conducted to estimate the amount of crime not reported to police and to ascertain levels of victimization.
The differences in frequency and techniques of gathering data, the diverse point of views on what factors should be considered as important as well as thoroughness of carried out surveys makes statistics almost unusable when it comes to creating one system of international criminal statistics. The problem with statistics is that they generalize. Just because according to statistic one out of every ten people is Chinese doesn't mean that out of ten of your friends one has to be Chinese. It just states that one-tenth of population is Chinese. A lot of people don't understand that statistics should be approached with a strong dose of caution and distance. We cannot believe completely in statistics because it may lead to some really unfortunate misunderstandings and innocent people may get hurt. Still, statistics are one of the most reliable sources of information needed in understanding and preventing crime.
Other method of studying criminal behavior are case studies. Case study concentrates on a history of crime of and individual or a group of individuals (like gangs) and is used mostly by psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. Case studies provide a systematic way of looking at events, collecting data, analyzing information, and reporting the results. As a result the researcher may gain a sharpened understanding of why the instance happened as it did, and what might become important to look at more extensively in future research. Case study can help us gain insight into the criminal's mind and his motives but this method isn't completely trustworthy. Criminal's reluctance to uncover himself, and the fact that the case studies are rarely published connected with incomplete nature of published cases due to the ethical questions of revealing details given confidentially makes it difficult to create some patterns in criminal behavior.
Yin, on the other hand, suggests that case study should be defined as a research strategy, an empirical inquiry that investigates a phenomenon within its real-life context. Case study research means single and multiple case studies, can include quantitative evidence, relies on multiple sources of evidence and benefits from the prior development of theoretical propositions. He notes that case studies should not be confused with qualitative research and points out that they can be based on any mix of quantitative and qualitative evidence (Yin, 2002). 1
There is always the option of studying autobiographies and other books written by ex-prisoners, but such books are not objective in most of the cases.
To help us understand crime we can also use typological method. It is the study of criminal behavior involving research on the links between different types of crime and criminals. Because people often disagree about types of crimes and criminal motivation, no standard exists within the field. Some typologies focus on the criminal, suggesting the existence of offender groups, such as professional criminals, psychotic criminals, occasional criminals, and so on. Others focus on the crimes, clustering them into categories such as property crimes, sex crimes, and so on. Danger in this method lies in it's aim to simplify complexity of human mind. Typologies tend to ignore individual differences and sometimes 'label' criminals without looking deeper into the matter. Still, if handled carefully this method can be useful and help find middle earth between statistics and case studies.
Experimental methods involve subjecting one of two closely related groups or situations to a specified change and comparing results. This method is usually carried out by universities and other private bodies because public agencies are bound by the idea of treating everyone equally. I do not think that this method is reliable due to the differences in people. Even if we compare reactions in two strictly controlled groups to the change, we cannot be sure that every other person or group would react in the same way. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately we haven't found yet any way of checking how would every single person react to specific change or situation. Humans are too complicated to depend on such findings. Just because someone reacted this or that way doesn't mean that someone else would react the same way.
Other way of trying to understand crime is prediction. Predictions try to indicate probabilities - the likeness of group or an individual being affected by some conditions or situations. This method is used to list criminals that are likely to become recidivist. However crime prediction frequently relies on the use of data appertaining to past perpetrators and/or past victims. Such data is therefore subject to legal and ethical restriction on its use, resulting in an ethical conundrum. Prediction can only show certain probabilities, it is almost impossible to act on it's findings. It can only help inexperienced judges and administrators in doing their job.
Action research draws on the observations of people who are involved with delinquents, potential delinquents and prisoners, as well as on the observations of field workers. For example social workers while helping slum inhabitants gathered information about their surroundings, their behavior and can draw from this conclusions about factors that influence their behavior. One of the good points of this method is that it helps to connect theoretical and practical work. It supplies us with information we can use in crime prevention and helps in understanding what motivates people to commit crime.
Sociological research consists of diverse methods. It uses statistics, general surveys, personal interviews, typology, experiments and predictions. What distinguishes it from other methods is its focus of interest. Sociological study helps criminology in three fields of study. First involves social institutions, attitudes toward crime, the effects of mass media on crime and others. Second concentrates on social groups, influence of juvenile gangs and criminal subcultures on individuals, as well as effect of prejudices on crime. Third focuses on study of different geographical areas and their rates and kinds of crime. Clifford Shaw and his ecological studies are most interesting and helped in analyzing urban areas that generate crime and those that attract crime. No discipline has made a greater theoretical contribution to the research domain of criminological research than has sociology
Mapping has a long history as a tool to understand crime. It is generally traced back to 19th century France, when cartographers first analyzed national patterns of crime. This promising beginning soon dissipated, however, with resistance to the burden of drawing maps by hand and with a shift of intellectual attention from geographic and statistical patterns of crime to social and individual roots. Even in the 1960s, when police used pins and paper maps to plot the location of crimes, few felt the need to share crime results with the community, with scholars, or even with other parts of local government.
Today, mapping uses computers with greatly increased capacity and is a powerful tool for displaying where problems and resources are and for mobilizing action. More powerful computers allow the development of geographic information systems that include a wide range of information, including data on crime, community perceptions, risk factors, and community resources. New mapping software is letting many more people see the relationship between crime and place. Police departments are regularly publishing crime maps on the Internet and are thereby being held accountable for public safety.
Victimology is the study of why certain people are victims of crime and how lifestyles affect the chances that a certain person will fall victim to a crime. The field of victimology can cover a wide number of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, criminal justice, law and advocacy.
The study of victims is multidisciplinary. It does not just cover victims of crime, but also victims of (traffic) accidents, natural disasters, war crimes and abuse of power. The professionals involved in victimology may be scientists, practitioners and policy makers. Studying victims can be done from the perspective of the individual victim but also from an epidemiolomical point of view.
The study of victimology also includes the "culture of victimhood," wherein the self-professed "victim," reveling in his status of victimhood, goes about proclaiming that self-created victimhood throughout a community in order to salve his low self-esteem by winning the sympathy of professionals and peers
Robert K. Yin. Case Study Research. Design and Methods. Third Edition. Applied social research method series Volume 5. Sage Publications. California, 2002.
