Essay on the Effect of Circumstances on Crime !
Before concluding this discussion, a word must be said about the recent sociological school of criminology which seeks to locate causation of crime in social environment. As stated earlier, Trade was the first to reject the anthropological approach of positivists and held that crimes were the outcome of human tendency to imitate others.
Sociologists, however, carried their researches and attempted to со-relate variations in crime rate to changes in social organisation. They successfully established that other factors such as mobility, culture, religion, economy, political ideologies, density of population, employment situations, etc., have a direct bearing on the incidence of crime in a given society.
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Placing reliance on these multiple causes, Sutherland sought to explain various processes through which a person becomes criminal. In his theory of Differential Association he suggested that human personality and culture are directly related and a person becomes a criminal mostly by the chain of circumstances in which he associates or moves.
It is for this reason that sociological school has often been characterised as a rational school of criminology which recommends the application of humanitarian methods for treatment of offenders. The persons prone to criminality should be corrected through persuasive methods rather than traditional punitive methods.
However, the advocates of recent ‘multiple factor theory’, while explaining causation of crime, contemplate that crime is a product of a great variety of factors which cannot be reduced into general propositions. In other words, no specific theory of criminal behaviour is ever possible.
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Thus, crimes are caused due to combination of a number of factors or circumstances. But this view has been vehemently criticised by Cohen on the ground that the advocates of multiple factor theory have confused ‘factors’ with ’causes’, of crime. He further states that it is erroneous to locate ’causes’ of crime in the ‘factors’ because the latter can readily be eliminated without changing the social environment.