John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other apparent racial variations. His book Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995) is about the application of r/K selection theory to humans.
The relationship between race and crime in the United States has been a topic of public controversy and scholarly debate for more than a century. The crime rate varies between racial groups. Most homicides in the United States are intraracial—the perpetrator and victim are of the same race. Research argues that the overrepresentation of some minorities in the criminal justice system can be explained by genetics socioeconomic factors as well as racial discrimination by law enforcement and the judicial system.
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. Taking the nature of the crime itself into consideration may also be a factor.
Marxist criminology is one of the schools of criminology. It parallels the work of the structural functionalism school which focuses on what produces stability and continuity in society but, unlike the functionalists, it adopts a predefined political philosophy. As in conflict criminology, it focuses on why things change, identifying the disruptive forces in industrialized societies, and describing how society is divided by power, wealth, prestige, and the perceptions of the world. "The shape and character of the legal system in complex societies can be understood as deriving from the conflicts inherent in the structure of these societies which are stratified economically and politically". It is concerned with the causal relationships between society and crime, i.e. to establish a critical understanding of how the immediate and structural social environment gives rise to crime and criminogenic conditions.
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 and Richard Rosenfeld (1994).
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. Minority defendants are charged with crimes requiring a mandatory minimum prison sentence more often, in both relative and absolute terms, leading to large racial disparities in correctional facilities.
Race is one of the correlates of crime receiving attention in academic studies, government surveys, media coverage, and public concern. Several causes of racial disparities in treatment by the criminal justice system have been tested by experts in the sociological field. A majority of their results find that a lack of financial means and low social status are likely factors motivating minorities to commit crime. Additionally, blacks and other ethnic minorities are often sentenced to more time in prison than their white counterparts.
Biosocial criminology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to explain crime and antisocial behavior by exploring both biological factors and environmental factors. While contemporary criminology has been dominated by sociological theories, biosocial criminology also recognizes the potential contributions of fields such as genetics, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology.
The self-control theory of crime, often referred to as the general theory of crime, is a criminological theory about the lack of individual self-control as the main factor behind criminal behavior. The self-control theory of crime suggests that individuals who were ineffectually parented before the age of ten develop less self-control than individuals of approximately the same age who were raised with better parenting. Research has also found that low levels of self-control are correlated with criminal and impulsive conduct.
The criminal stereotype of African Americans in the United States is an ethnic stereotype according to which African American males in particular are stereotyped to be dangerous criminals. The figure of the African-American man as criminal has appeared frequently in American popular culture and has been associated with consequences in the justice system such as racial profiling and harsher sentences for African American defendants in trials.
The statistical correlations of criminal behavior explore the associations of specific non-criminal factors with specific crimes.
In criminal justice, the liberation hypothesis proposes that extra-legal factors affect sentencing outcomes more in regards to less serious offenses compared to more serious ones, ostensibly because juries and judges will feel less able to follow their personal sentiments with regard to more serious crimes. The hypothesis also proposes that the extent to which extra-legal factors sentencing outcomes is dependent on the strength of the evidence in the case. The hypothesis was first proposed by Harry Kalven and Hans Zeisel in their 1966 book "The American Jury". Since then, multiple studies have found support for it.
Broadly speaking, the term racial threat refers to how people react to those of a different race. More specifically, the racial threat hypothesis or racial threat theory proposes that a higher population of members of a minority race results in the dominant race imposing higher levels of social control on the subordinate race, which, according to this hypothesis, occurs as a result of the dominant race fearing the subordinate race's political, economic, or criminal threat. Racial threat theory is also known as minority group threat theory. Research has shown a strong association between the size of a state's nonwhite prison population and the likelihood of that state enacting a felon disenfranchisement law, which supports a link between racial threat and the passage of such laws.
In criminology, brutalization refers to a hypothesized cause-and-effect relationship between executions and an increase in the homicide rate. This hypothesis proposes this relationship occurs because executions diminish the public's respect for life. Such an effect represents the opposite of a deterrent effect.
The crime drop or crime decline is a pattern observed in many countries whereby rates of many types of crime declined by 50% or more beginning in the early 1990s.
Crime and Human Nature: The Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime is a 1985 book about the causes of crime by political scientist James Q. Wilson and psychologist Richard Herrnstein.
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." It is related to police legitimacy, and the two serve as important ways for researchers to study citizens' perceptions of law enforcement.
Age of onset is a term that is used in criminology in reference to the age at which the offense of a crime is first committed by a specific person.
Public Criminology, a concept closely tied with “public sociology”, argues that the energies of criminologists should be directed towards "conducting and disseminating research on crime, law, and deviance in dialogue with affected communities." Criminologists argue its need stems from the disconnect between the public and the information circulated by the media. Such authors call for criminologists to focus on providing understandable information to the general public, as well as to help inform crime policy and law makers.
