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Huay Ching Ngoh, Clarissa

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Criminal Law Major Essay - assignment 3

Topic: "There will always be crime". Discuss.

If there is no justice in the world, no one is going to be arrested (Henslin 2008, p.231).Thus there will always be crime in the society and there are different styles of crimes across different social boundaries. The white-collar crimes of premium classes often settle their issues outside the court whereas the police and court are more likely to dealt with street crimes of lower classes. The disadvantage of lower classes crimes are more likely to stay in prison or in detention. A research question is carried out in this essay that  how do social inequalities impact on individual's life. A few explanations of theories in this essay will help us to grasp the arguments of why there will always be crime in the society; these social inequalities include the influences of family life, mental health, geographical role and immigration.

First of all, when considering about family violence as a cause of crime, despite it is a common sense for us to perceived that victims of child abuse are more likely to grown up as abuser and have a tendency towards family violence, but there has been little or no attention paid to these victims in criminal justice policy making. Thus, it is good to establish policies based on a recognition that crime prevention policies needs to be more concern in woman abuse and child abuse. Many researchers focused on the cycle of violence theory and the problems of the methodologies involved;to proposed that there is no adequate 30 years study with controls and making any conclusions so far with fully speculation (Thornton et al, 1987, p.207). Today, there are only theoretical studies and an empirical evidence to uphold the view that no apologies need to be made for the fact that most studies in this field are still reviewing (Sorenson et al, 1989). On the other hand, Wilson and Herrnstein (1985) debated that it would be foolish to ignore the general agreement particularly since it displays with common sense. The consensus is that men who are violent to woman are most probably had the chance of experience family violence during childhood. Besides, these men are not only violent in the family but also outside the family which cause crimes in the society.

There are a few distinct theories to illustrate why men are violent and why women are tolerated it. First, based on social learning theory, Giles-Sims (1985) discovered children who are abused learned the example that violence is a right way to solve issue. Secondly, a medical model theory perceived violence as a disorder or virus. From medical perspective, violence cycle is perceived as a sort of pathology, for example, personality malfunction and pathological lying (Knudson, 1988, p.17). Besides, Edleson et al (1985) proposed that men usually justify their own behaviour by claiming their violent childhoods. Maybe they read cues from the research papers that this is the exactly excusable reason. As a discussion result, Feldman et al (1986) proposed a few models to demonstrate violent behaviour caused by the past abused, such as showing rage, bad parenting role and a lack of parental attachment. More than that, Shengold (1979) claimed that these explanations are not enough and disputed that the repetitive abusive behaviour damages ability of a child to feel empathy for other victims.

Secondly, in the aspect of mental health, the assumption that mental disorder is a cause of crime, but conceptually, empirical evidence revealed that it is neither crime nor causation, it is about explicit concepts (Arckarsater et al. 2009). Mental health indicated the manifold aspects of an individual such as psychological experiences, cognitive abilities as well as behaviour patterns. Based on the lawmaker’s point of view, the assumption of relationship between mental disorder and crime has great impact. Most countries need defenders to take accountability for their own actions, but mental disorder is a best excuse to minimize their punishments. In Sweden’s penal law, there is an exception of imprisonment for crimes who committed crimes under severe mental disorder and this has become a factor to lead more crime rates. Probabilistic theory explains the relationship between determining factors and consequences as an increased probability of the effect in risk factor (Cartwright, 1979 &Reichenbach, 1956). The term of ‘probability’ meant by particular forms of mental disorders are more likely to be interrelated with certain forms of criminal acts. In other circumstances, risk factors can be assumed as coincidence or reflections of general causes. By utilizing the method of probabilism, scientific research has been well proven than experimental models testing the causing effect.

 In the empirical evidence, a number of longitudinal studies have shown that “hyperkinetic conduct disorder” (WHO,1990) which serve as a leading factor of criminality as these victims have difficulty adjusting behaviours to a certain norm and possess aggressive behaviours.  Thus, it showed an increased risk to develop any other mental disorders in adulthood which will lead to criminality in later (Kim-Cohen et al, 2003). Furthermore, other surveys showed that schizophrenic patients always had discontinued their treatment prior to committing an act of violence (Arango, Bombin, Gonzalez-Salvador, Garcia-Cabeza&Bobes, 2006), yet it is still unknown that there is a causative relationship between this discontinued of treatment and the act of criminality. Besides, in the controlled trials, research also revealed the fact that treatment for schizophrenia has no link to the risk of violent crimes. As a result, it may be assumed that aggressive individuals with particular disorders are at increased risk of growing into adult crimes and a record with mental health. In the discussion of the research, it showed that the relationship between mental disorder and crime should not consider as conspicuous.

Thirdly, McDowall and Loftin (2009) have surveyed whether crime is a trait or geographical disaggregated crime rates. In the process of surveying, they discussed a few interrelated empirical issues such as the national and sub-national role as determining factors in criminological theory.First of all, a number of interrelated empirical issues can be gather up as the extent to which previous research has used national-level data in the crime analysis and disregard the possibility of variation in disaggregated series and then observed at the relationship between national and disaggregated crime rates. Subsequently, McDowall and Loftinsummarize these issues as follows. In the first place, they cite research by using city and neighbourhood-region data without considering potential variation (Levitt, 2004; Zimring, 2007). However, this method outcome has always does not show a close relationship between behaviour at national and disaggregated level. Through the application of Vector Auto-Regressive (VAR) to a panel of change in city-level crime rates, McDowall and Loftin measured the degree of a national crime tendency through the examination of connection of a temporal puppet variable with change in crime risks.

 As an outcome, McDowall and Loftin (2009) discovered an indirect examination of regional variation in US crimes rate through consideration of the degree to which disaggregated city-level crime rates are promoted by national factors. A full series of data is carried out in the annual observation of US crime rates across 50 states (O'Brien & Cook, 1965-2009). Thereby, the level of geographical disaggregation considered the result of the research in the 50 area units. The data are implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation through the Uniform Crime Reporting Statistic website. The set of data included violent crimes, murder, rape, robbery, assault, property crime, thefts and motorcycle crimes. The tally result came out that violent crime found to be the sum in four categories of crime listed whereas property crime is the sum in three categories of crimes listed. In the discussion of results of the previous research, repeated reference has been used to observed a quick growth in crime from 1960's to 1980's and fall in 1990's (Inter Alie, Cook and Zarkin, 1985; Witt and Witte, 2000; McDowall and Loftin, 2005; Arvanites and DeFina, 2006). This caused three different periods in the growth of national crime rates in United States and has lead to some related references such as 'Crime Boom of the 1960s'.

Lastly, based on the empirical case of Spain, the relationship between crime and immigration has been becoming an argument around the globe. From 1999 to 2009, Spain had a higher rate of immigration from different countries of the world and at the meanwhile it is found that there was a growth in crime rates. Comparatively to other European countries which had the similar high immigration rate during the same period, crime rates in Spain increased less considerably. Thus, it is proven that there is a significant relationship between crime and immigration. Nonetheless, the factor is found in the certain features of the different immigrant groups, especially in the amount and type of human capital (JEL K42, J15, C23, C25). Some studies have looked at data from United States, but they found out the relationship between crime rates and immigration do not have a consistent pattern (Butcher et al 1998). However, the European Union (EU) has a different circumstance from United State, in the late of 1990s, immigration from the outside of the EU is not really obvious, but Spain considered the special case. Spain had a significant but not dramatic increased rate in crimes, whereas there was a very obvious increased immigration rate in a short certain period. Thus, this puzzling fact had tell that there is a strong relationship between immigration and crime.

 The first significant response is there is no casual relationship between crime and immigration in Spain, anyway based on the econometric analysis, this relationship does present and  quite obvious. The analysis demonstrated the changed of the crime rate over the last decade showed that the two factors are somehow interrelated. The economic model of crime is used to determine the rational comparison between the benefits and the consequences of committing a crime (Becker, 1968; Garoupa, 1997; Polinsky and Shavell, 2000). And in this case, the second response interpreted the growth of economic in Spain over the last decade had attracted the labour immigrants in Spain. Therefore, when the benefiting area provided a higher salary for everyone and subsequently had lead to the opportunity of crime rates in Spain. In order to distinguish between nations and immigrants in a data, Spanish Labour Force Survey assumed individuals who have completed at least secondary education at the regional level as the criteria of being a nation, and respectively classified into two age groups which are 15-24 and 25-34 years old. For every crime rate measurement, they have used three different estimation methods and show the result in a descriptive statistic (legal reform, 2003), which are the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimations of the untransformed model to serves as a benchmark, Hansen-Sargan test to examine the validity of the instrument and AR(2) test as error autocorrelation (Roodman, 2006). Based on the estimation results from the different crime types which classified into felony rate, property crime rate, misdemeanours crime rate and crime rate, the result show that presence of immigrants at the different states have certain impact on crime rates, different immigrants have different characteristics and previous crime history of the immigrants brought up the crime rate.

As a conclusion, crime can be concluded as a price of inequality whether in the aspect of family life and mental health or in the aspect of immigration and geographical role. One of the possible factor of immigration is the former civil war of the origin countries which lead to nations emigrating initially and caused a new long-term anti-social behaviour in another new country. To some extent, the unhappy childhood may only experienced by a number of immigrants from a certain country, and thus it depends on the adaptation level of individuals. Under this circumstance, these conditions would not largely affected for everyone but a part of remnants. However, the majority of the gap in the crime list between the children of immigrants and children of pure European, as opposite to what has been previously proposed, crime can be explained by differences in family and also neighbourhood resources. The most crucially, the bulk of crimes still came from the childhood environment. This factor is crucial and may apply to everywhere around the globe, for which reason we believe that we should put our research into practice to reduce the criminality in the society.

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