PSYC 3402 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Mental Disorder, Uniform Crime Reports, Social Class
27 Mar 2017
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Why care about definitions of criminal behaviour: definition relates to prevalence; prevalence relates to costs, definition must reflect cultural sensitivity, different beliefs and values within communities/cultures. Societies views change the law has to change with it. Cross cultural consistency (newman, 1976: samples from 6 countries, variation in terms of abortion, homosexuality, public protest, consistency about certain behaviours being criminal, robbery, theft. Refers to intentional behaviour that violates a criminal code; intentional in that it did not occur accidentally or without justification or excuse (bartol and. Bartol: note: this definition accounts for ncrmd. Most common measures are aggregated crime rates (at the level of large areas consisting of populations of people) Number of offenders in a given area over a given time period divided by the population of people in that area in that time period (i. e. , number of criminals. Example: 900 criminals / 5,000 people equals a prevalence rate in that area, for that time period, of 0. 18.
