However the positivistic reliance on such statistics as the basis of their sociology has been brought into question by constructivist approaches – interpretive sociology and critical sociology both of which refuse to take the statistics at face value. The former raised questions about the scientific claims of positivism; demonstrated that the crime statistics were social constructs; and raised awareness of the dark figure.
A critical sociology developed this understanding in relationship to questions of power and ideology and focused on the state production of such figures, but was prepared to use the statistics in a reflexive manner. The trends in crime suggest that the young rather than the old, people living in urban areas rather than rural, working class rather than middle class and lastly males rather than females. In terms of age, both sexes, criminal activity appears to peak in adolescence and early adulthood. C. Coleman & J.
Moynihan suggests that the Official Statistics are biased in such a way as to over-represent young offenders and under-represent the older offender. In terms of sex criminal statistics in all countries have consistently shown that more males than females appear before the courts and are convicted for criminal activities. Official statistics suggest that women tend to commit a relatively narrow band of offences in comparison to men. The difference can be in part explained by differing socialisation and social expectations.
The Term Paper on Limitations Of Theories Of Sociology Of Deviance
... , the result is the lower-class become a criminal justice statistic while the upper-class have the influence and power ... closer to individual adequacy rather than collective adequacy. Despite the criticisms and limitations of the sociology of deviance, the ... limitation of the differential association theory lay in the question: if deviant behaviour is learned and is indeed “contagious”, ...
There is the difference of opportunities as men are more likely to occupy public spaces as against the private spaces. However Pollak has suggested that women may not feature so highly in the statistics as they may meet more lenient policing or sentencing with a greater likelihood of a caution or a non-custodial sentence. In terms of ethnicity black people seem to be disproportionately among the known offender population, at least for certain offences. Official statistics have a number of apparent advantages to the sociological researcher.
Firstly, they are relatively cheap and readily available. Government statistics are published annually; they provide data on crime across the whole of the UK and also provide insight into regional differences in crime. As such, official statistics can thus be regarded as providing a good starting point for researchers. Also, official statistics enable sociologists to make comparisons over time and between different parts of the country and between different types of area, e. g. rural/urban.
For positivist sociologists (following Durkheim’s method), official crime statistics can be seen as providing a measure of crime which is representative, reliable and valid. Official statistics thus provide a true picture of the extent and nature of crime. Anti – positivist, constructivist sociologies have pointed to the social meaning of crime statistics is not straight forward and will be dependent on context. The public statement by the Metropolitan Police that there was increase in violent crime by black offenders in the early 1980’s was not a lie, but its impact was altered if put against a Newcastle statistic.
In Carol Willis’s study of the time Newcastle F Division had a higher rate of similar crime than Lambeth. There were similar problems of unemployment, but the difference in the case of Newcastle was that the offenders were white. Put in that context, people would have had to decode the statistics in a different fashion. However, Sir Paul Condon, Police Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police Force, failed to move beyond the same conclusion over a decade later July 1995. Another report produced by the Home Office in the mid-1980’s also emonstrated that members of the ethnic minorities were more likely to be victims of violent crime as against the perpetrators. Conflict theories such as Marxist and feminist theory; argue that official statistics are neither hard facts. Instead they believe they consist of information which is systematically distorted by the powerful institutions in society. Although the statistics are not complete distortions, they are manipulated through the definitions and procedures used to collect the data, so that they tend to favour the interests of the rich and powerful.
The Term Paper on Reasons To Prevent Hate Crime Against Police Officers
Hate crime, also known as bias crime, is a criminal act committed against a person, property, or society which is motivated by the perpetrator’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or ethnicity/national origin. Congress enacted the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 on April 23 of that same year in response to growing national concern over crimes motivated by bias. ...
They would want to point to most people who commit crime are breaking rules because they are too desperate to care – they are mentally ill, or drug addicted or homeless or so brutalised by their upbringing that they fail to understand what rules are – or because they have calculated that following society’s rules will not bring them the rewards they desire. After a prison sentence they are then sent out as angry, unskilled misfits, without the commitment or the ability to follow society’s rules, so they re-offend.
