Crime and Delinquency
Biology and Crime
There is a long tradition in criminology that there are biological roots to criminal behavior. The major issue revolves around how much of an influence biology has on crime compared to other known social factors. This issue has been revisited recently with advances in our understanding of the brain and brain chemistry. This is a politically charged issues, often related to questions of racism and gender bias.
Early Ideas:1860-1970
The book presents excellent reviews of the work of the early leaders of this field:
Lombroso
Dugdale
Goring
Lange
Hooton
Sheldon
Crime Control and Drug Therapy
The use of lobotomies as a means of making the criminally violent docile has been in decline for decades.
Since crime is so often related to psychological or emotional injuries, for example, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or mental illness, control of these conditions with drugs has some crime reduction effects.
Crime and Social Structure
Recall that social structure refers to all the norms, roles, statuses, institutions and values of a society.
All these factors influence crime in one way or another.
Generally speaking, research on crime and social structure centers on the criminogenic effect of economy and other social institutions, such as the neighborhood or family.
Delinquency and Juvenile Justice
Delinquency
Delinquency is a status imposed by a state juvenile court in cases where a person below a specified age, generally 16, is responsible for a criminal act.
The legal tradition of holding youth to a lower standard of criminal culpability dates back to Roman law, and has been a part of American law since 1900.
The Juvenile Court
Juvenile Court
The first juvenile courts in the US were created around 1900. The book presents a very good history of this movement and its proponents.
The contemporary juvenile court is widely viewed as dysfunctional for a wide variety of reasons.

Determine this disturbance’s “Effect on the Environment”, and re-run the rest of the model to see how your output could likely be affected.

• Next, instead of using a Goal as a “Reference Value”, now substitute this “Threat: you have determined that to avoid any contact with a car, it is best to cross a street when vehicles are at least 100 feet away from you. “ What would be the result of the comparator function? What would be a possible output?
• Hints to Guide Your Reading
• Questions for Reflection:
• What kind of affect occurs when a goal is going well? What type of behavior is likely produced?
• What kind of emotion occurs when a goal is going poorly? What type of behavior is likely produced?
• What kind of affect occurs when a threat is going well (is being avoided)? What type of behavior is likely produced?
• What kind of affect occurs when a threat is going poorly (you are getting closer to the threat value)? What type of behavior is likely produced?
• In which type of behavior feedback loop are you trying to produce an output that moves you closer to the ideal?
• In which behavior feedback loop are you trying to produce an output that moves you away from the ideal?
• How do these cybernetic models indicate when you could or should shift from one reference situation to another. For example, how do you know, according to these models, when to shift from the reference of “spending time with my significant other” to the reference of “earning a 90% on my chemistry exam”?
• Discussion Group Case Study
• The goal of this case study is to get you to consider why or how failures in self regulation could occur.
• Janie, a person with an avoidant temperament approaches you, a clinical psychologist, and indicates that she is having an anxiety problem. Specifically, she suffers from “generalized anxiety” which means that she is chronically anxious and really doesn’t know why. In other words, nothing in her environment triggers anxiety, per se, she just feels anxious all the time.
• Why should this make sense to you, knowing that she has an avoidant, rather than an approach temperament?
• You decide to use a cognitive therapy strategy to assist her in alleviating her anxiety. In preparation for your first counseling session, you create a cybernetic behavioral and affective feedback loop that would indicate how an anxiety disorder would occur (NOTE: the KIND of behavior feedback loop you use is critical to understanding this task)
• So, pick you behavior loop. Next indicate how a malfunction in the components would likely create chronic anxiety that would lead to her anxiety disorder. Look at each component, consider how it should function for a person to have a normal affective life, and then consider how that specific component could work improperly, thereby causing an erroneous affective output.
• After identifying all of the possible malfunctions, focus in on one and formulate a strategy to help her regain adaptive self regulation that would decrease her anxiety disorder.
• Discuss your thoughts with your group, then post your collective feedback loop and explanation of the malfunction within the class discussion.