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Legal cynicism is a domain of legal socialization defined by a perception that the legal system and law enforcement agents are "illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill equipped to ensure public safety." [1] [2] It is related to police legitimacy, and the two serve as important ways for researchers to study citizens' perceptions of law enforcement. [3]
Sampson and Bartusch (1998) defined legal cynicism as ""anomie" about law". [4] Based on Sampson & Bartusch's work, and on that of Leo Srole, [5] Piquero et al. (2005) defined it based on respondents' answers to a five-question survey. In the survey, respondents were asked to rank, on a four-point scale, the extent to which they agreed with each of these statements:
- Laws are meant to be broken,
- It is okay to do anything you want,
- There are no right or wrong ways to make money,
- If I have a fight with someone, it is no one else's business, and
- A person has to live without thinking about the future. [6]
Legal cynicism can be exacerbated when police engage in aggressive misconduct in a community, which can lead to greater violence and less cooperation between the community's citizens and the police. [7] It has been found to be higher in neighborhoods with higher levels of concentrated disadvantage, even after controlling for demographic factors and crime rates. [4] The strongest predictor of legal cynicism is self-reported delinquency. [8]
Legal cynicism and legitimacy both have significant effects on criminal offending, even after accounting for self-control. [2] Legal cynicism is also associated with lower rates of desistance from intimate partner violence, [9] higher homicide rates, [10] and higher recidivism rates among released prisoners. [11] It has also been found to affect parents' assessments of their adolescent children's violent behavior. [12]
In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.
Juvenile delinquency, also known as juvenile offending, is the act of participating in unlawful behavior as a minor or individual younger than the statutory age of majority. In the United States of America, a juvenile delinquent is a person who commits a crime and is under a specific age. Most states specify a juvenile delinquent as an individual under 18 years of age while a few states have set the maximum age slightly different. In 2021, Michigan, New York, and Vermont raised the maximum age to under 19, and Vermont law was updated again in 2022 to include individuals under the age of 20. Only three states, Georgia, Texas, and Wisconsin still appropriate the age of a juvenile delinquent as someone under the age of 17. While the maximum age in some US states has increased, Japan has lowered the juvenile delinquent age from under 20 to under 18. This change occurred on April 1, 2022 when the Japanese Diet activated a law lowering the age of minor status in the country. Just as there are differences in the maximum age of a juvenile delinquent, the minimum age for a child to be considered capable of delinquency or the age of criminal responsibility varies considerably between the states. Some states that impose a minimum age have made recent amendments to raise the minimum age, but most states remain ambiguous on the minimum age for a child to be determined a juvenile delinquent. In 2021, North Carolina changed the minimum age from 6 years old to 10 years old while Connecticut moved from 7 to 10 and New York made an adjustment from 7 to 12. In some states the minimum age depends on the seriousness of the crime committed. Juvenile delinquents or juvenile offenders commit crimes ranging from status offenses such as, truancy, violating a curfew or underage drinking and smoking to more serious offenses categorized as property crimes, violent crimes, sexual offenses, and cybercrimes.
In the United States, the relationship between race and crime has been a topic of public controversy and scholarly debate for more than a century. Crime rates vary significantly between racial groups. Academic research indicates that the over-representation of some racial minorities in the criminal justice system can in part be explained by socioeconomic factors, such as poverty, exposure to poor neighborhoods, poor access to public education, poor access to early childhood education, and exposure to harmful chemicals and pollution. Racial housing segregation has also been linked to racial disparities in crime rates, as Blacks have historically and to the present been prevented from moving into prosperous low-crime areas through actions of the government and private actors. Various explanations within criminology have been proposed for racial disparities in crime rates, including conflict theory, strain theory, general strain theory, social disorganization theory, macrostructural opportunity theory, social control theory, and subcultural theory.
Sex differences in crime are differences between men and women as the perpetrators or victims of crime. Such studies may belong to fields such as criminology, sociobiology, or feminist studies. Despite the difficulty of interpreting them, crime statistics may provide a way to investigate such a relationship from a gender differences perspective. An observable difference in crime rates between men and women might be due to social and cultural factors, crimes going unreported, or to biological factors. The nature of the crime itself may also require consideration as a factor.
The feminist school of criminology is a school of criminology developed in the late 1960s and into the 1970s as a reaction to the general disregard and discrimination of women in the traditional study of crime. It is the view of the feminist school of criminology that a majority of criminological theories were developed through studies on male subjects and focused on male criminality, and that criminologists often would "add women and stir" rather than develop separate theories on female criminality.
In sociology and criminology, strain theory states that social structures within society may pressure citizens to commit crime. Following on the work of Émile Durkheim, strain theories have been advanced by Robert King Merton (1938), Albert K. Cohen (1955), Richard Cloward, Lloyd Ohlin (1960), Neil Smelser (1963), Robert Agnew (1992), Steven Messner, Richard Rosenfeld (1994) and Jie Zhang (2012).
Routine activity theory is a sub-field of crime opportunity theory that focuses on situations of crimes. It was first proposed by Marcus Felson and Lawrence E. Cohen in their explanation of crime rate changes in the United States between 1947 and 1974. The theory has been extensively applied and has become one of the most cited theories in criminology. Unlike criminological theories of criminality, routine activity theory studies crime as an event, closely relates crime to its environment and emphasizes its ecological process, thereby diverting academic attention away from mere offenders.
Ronald Weitzer is a sociologist specializing in criminology and a professor at George Washington University, known for his publications on police-minority relations and on the sex industry.
Race in the United States criminal justice system refers to the unique experiences and disparities in the United States in regard to the policing and prosecuting of various races. There have been different outcomes for different racial groups in convicting and sentencing felons in the United States criminal justice system. Experts and analysts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to these disparities.
Victimisation is the process of being victimised or becoming a victim. The field that studies the process, rates, incidence, effects, and prevalence of victimisation is called victimology.
Biosocial criminology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to explain crime and antisocial behavior by exploring biocultural factors. While contemporary criminology has been dominated by sociological theories, biosocial criminology also recognizes the potential contributions of fields such as behavioral genetics, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology.
The criminal stereotype of African Americans in the United States is an ethnic stereotype according to which African Americans, and African American males in particular, are dangerous criminals. The origin of this stereotype is that as a demographic, they are proportionally over-represented in the numbers of those that are arrested for committing crimes: for example, according to official FBI statistics, in 2015, 51.1% of people arrested for homicide were African American, even though African American people account only for 13.4% of the total United States population. The figure of the African-American man as a criminal has appeared frequently in American popular culture, further reinforcing this image in the collective unconscious.
The statistical correlations of criminal behavior explore the associations of specific non-criminal factors with specific crimes.
Criminology is the study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is an interdisciplinary field in both the behavioural and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, biologists, social anthropologists, as well as scholars of law.
Legal socialization is the process through which, individuals acquire attitudes and beliefs about the law, legal authorities, and legal institutions. This occurs through individuals' interactions, both personal and vicarious, with police, courts, and other legal actors. To date, most of what is known about legal socialization comes from studies of individual differences among adults in their perceived legitimacy of law and legal institutions, and in their cynicism about the law and its underlying norms. Adults' attitudes about the legitimacy of law are directly tied to individuals' compliance with the law and cooperation with legal authorities.
Anthony Allan Braga is an American criminologist and the Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. Braga is also the Director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. He previously held faculty and senior research positions at Harvard University, Northeastern University, Rutgers University, and the University of California at Berkeley. Braga is a member of the federal monitor team overseeing the reforms to New York City Police Department (NYPD) policies, training, supervision, auditing, and handling of complaints and discipline regarding stops and frisks and trespass enforcement.
David Philip Farrington is a British criminologist, forensic psychologist, and emeritus professor of psychological criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellow. In 2014, Paul Hawkins and Bitna Kim wrote that Farrington "is considered one of the leading psychologists and main contributors to the field of criminology in recent years."
Thomas G. Blomberg is an American criminologist. He is an expert in criminology research and public policy; delinquency, education and crime desistance; penology and social control; and victim services. He is currently the Dean, Sheldon L. Messinger Professor of Criminology, and the executive director of the Center for Criminology and Public Policy Research at the Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
Public criminology is an approach to criminology that disseminates criminological research beyond academia to broader audiences, such as criminal justice practitioners and the general public. Public criminology is closely tied with “public sociology”, and draws on a long line of intellectuals engaging in public interventions related to crime and justice. Some forms of public criminology are conducted through methods such as classroom education, academic conferences, public lectures, “news-making criminology”, government hearings, newspapers, radio and television broadcasting and press releases. Advocates of public criminology argue that the energies of criminologists should be directed towards "conducting and disseminating research on crime, law, and deviance in dialogue with affected communities." Public criminologists focus on reshaping the image of the criminal and work with communities to find answers to pressing questions. Proponents of public criminology see it as potentially narrowing "the yawning gap between public perceptions and the best available scientific evidence on issues of public concern", a problem they see as especially pertinent to matters of crime and punishment.
The issue of crimes committed by illegal immigrants to the United States is a topic that is often asserted and debated in politics and the media when discussing Immigration policy in the United States.
