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Running head: LITERATURE REVIEW 1 Literature Review
Cynthia Wade
Dr. Brandy Goldston
PSY 610 Applied Social Psychology LITERATURE REVIEW 2
Literature Review For a long time now society has been clear of blame when individuals develop characters
that are questionable. A lot of people when criminals are caught blame it on the financial
situation of the offender as the reason why the offender engaged in crime whereas others blame it
on the economic situation of the country and others blame it on poor policing by the disciplined
forces to ensure that crime is stamped out of a locality or a region (Assink et. al, 2015). However
after a close research, I would like to believe otherwise. So is a person’s character really
determined by the morals of the society that they came from or their behavior is influenced by
the economic situation of a country that they are in, that is what this paper is about to discover.
Analysis
According to (Punyasavatsut, 2016), he states that the crime rates that are experienced in
a country are directly related to the economic condition of the country. He states that most
criminals are people who have been frustrated emotionally because they have always lacked
what they need in life. For this reason, they have always ended up looking for it by force. He
goes on to give an example by saying that the reason why a carjacker would steal a car, is
because he needs money. If the same carjacker had a car, he would not have gone into stealing;
instead he would take his car and resell it so that he could be able to make profit out of it. His
idea is supported by (Park, Kim & Mi-Seon, 2012) who in their studies reveal that almost 70% of
the people who they interviewed and they were incarcerated especially as juveniles were in jail
cells because they lacked money and they had to find ways to survive even if it meant stealing so
that they could be able to maintain their needs. Their study was opposed by that, which was
conducted by (Ott, 2014), the following statistic was revealed; LITERATURE REVIEW 3 According to the statistics that they had collected it became visible that the crime rate in
the US was going down despite the rising level of unemployment rate. According to the statistics
that they used in their study, it can be correctly seen that while the level of unemployment was at
an all-time high of 5.8% in the United States, the crime rate was at an all-time low at 5%. This
study revealed that although there are people that engage in criminal activities because of their
living standards, it is not the only reason why people engage in theft and crime. There are far
many different reasons that make people engage in crime which is not related to the economic
conditions of a person or a country.
According to the social cognitive theory that was written by (Tavory, 2015) in his
research, he was able to find out that an individual becomes who is environment makes him to
become. He seems to agree with what the advancer of the social cognitive theory who was called
Albert Bandura had to say. According to him, if an individual has been brought up in an LITERATURE REVIEW 4 environment that is rough and which is full of rowdy individuals, they are likely to become what
their environment is teaching them to become. According to him, an individual grows and
becomes what his environment teaches them to become. According to the theory advanced by
Bandura, kids who were brought up watching violent television shows, they are most likely to be
violent when they grow up. Therefore according to Tavory, sometimes criminals do not engage
in crime because they have to, but sometimes they do it because they think that it is cool by their
standards and therefore, they engage themselves in criminal activities.
He gives an example of the Al Qaeda arm which before the death of their leader Osama
Bin Laden used to threaten the United States and even in a number of times they were able to
inflict damage on the citizens of the United States of America. In his study he investigates a
former member of the group who states that, most of the people who were in Al Qaeda were
learned individuals. These were people who could have been able to use their skills to gain
meaningful employment and steer away from crime. However, the desire and the hunger of
engaging in crime was more and they ended up joining Al Qaeda. He says that, while they were
growing up they were made to believe that the US despises Muslims and therefore the people in
the US did not have a reason to live. This led to the growth of hate for the US as a country and its
citizens such that when they had to join Al Qaeda they did not have hard time thinking about it,
because to them, they had a cause and they were willing to fight for that cause regardless.
This is the same situation according to (Day, 2015) in which he states that the rise in
shooting in schools by teenagers is not because most of them come from homes that have
financial difficulties, but rather they come from homes that did not make them grow very much
individually in terms of character and personality. He says that if individuals can be given proper
care then some of the issues that the modern youths of today are passing through would not be LITERATURE REVIEW 5 present. The lack of parental guidance and the rise in popularity of violent video games are some
of the few things that he attributes for the rise in number of people who are juveniles and those
that end up in crime while they are still young as well as the rise in number of single families.
This is an issue that more should be done to ensure that children grow into human beings who
are responsible.
Conclusion
Based on the above analysis, it is correct to state that although the state of the economy
and the financial situation of an individual can be able to drive the individual into conducting
crime, it is not the only thing that can be able to make a person be into criminal activities. For
this reason, an individual needs to be surrounded by positive energy because that is what
determines the way and the direction that an individual takes in life. Parents should bring up their
children well because in doing so they will create individuals, full of character, who would rather
work hard when they lack instead of stealing. LITERATURE REVIEW 6
References Assink, M., van der Put, C., Oort, F., & Stams, G. (2015). The development and validation of the
Youth Actuarial Care Needs Assessment Tool for Non-Offenders (Y-ACNAT-NO). BMC
Psychiatry, 15(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12888-015-0421-1
Day, A. (2015). Correctional Psychology and the Desistance Paradigm. Criminal Justice And
Behavior, 42(1), 121-124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0093854814550032
Ott, T. (2014). US law enforcement strategies to combat organized crime threats to financial
institutions. Journal Of Financial Crime, 17(4), 375-386.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/13590791011082742
Punyasavatsut, A. (2016). Determinants of the Weighted Crime Rate in Thailand. Journal Of
Economics, Business And Management, 4(2), 161-165.
http://dx.doi.org/10.7763/joebm.2016.v4.384
Seongsu Park, & Kim, Mi-Seon. (2012). A Study on Prediction of Recidivism by a Risk
Assessment for Juvenile Offender at Police Investigation : The Specialist Participation
System on Investigation of Juvenile Offenders. Journal Of Korean Public Police And
Security Studies, 9(1), 27-47. http://dx.doi.org/10.25023/kapsa.9.1.201205.27
Tavory, I. (2015). Causality and the Cognitive. Journal For The Theory Of Social
Behaviour, 46(1), 27-31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12082