How to Reduce Crime in Our Society free essay sample

Whether a behavior is a crime is determined from one society to the next through its system of laws. In Nigeria, citizens usually subject to three separate systems of laws federal, state and local. Federal laws are passed by National Assembly House of Representatives and Senate that apply to everyone in Nigeria. State laws are passed by the state’s House of Assembly and can vary widely from state to state. Local laws, usually known as ordinances, are passed by the local government councils. Local ordinances usually control how residents are expected to behave in the community such as disposing of trash properly. To understand the concept of crime, one must first understand the Conflict Theory founded by Karl Marx. Conflict theory sees society as two struggling groups engaged in conflict over resources. Under this theory, it is believed that the capitalist class (or the society elites) commits acts of deviance just as the working class does. The main difference is that society elites determine the rules regarding what is deviant. This difference among the people will always lead to conflict. This idea explains why there is crime in societies and why it will never cease to be. Sociologists classify crimes by three types; crimes against a person, crimes against property and victimless crimes. Crimes against a person include any offenses where violence is used or threatened. Mugging and assault are examples of crimes against a person. Crimes against property include theft of property or damage done to someone elses property. Burglary and arson are crimes against property. Finally, victimless crimes are crimes that are against the law, but no victim exists. Prostitution and marijuana are common examples of victimless crimes. In sociology, all crimes fall into one of these three categories. HOW TO REDUCE CRIME IN A SOCIETY How can we reduce the frightening levels of crime and violence that plague out society today? The usual answer from politicians and the media is that we have to be tougher on crime. But thats just a myth, and a dangerous one, because it is actually preventing us from solving the crime problem. Understanding crime and sociology together has great significance for the future of any society. By identifying the who and the why of crime, we are better equipped to find solutions that dont lead to a life of crime. For example, removing a child from an abusive home is the first step in making certain that child does not learn to express himself in only a physical manner. Without understanding the make up of the criminal, it is not possible to understand his or her motives. Sociology seeks to understand these individuals and their situations. By doing so, the goal is to determine a way to treat these individuals that will reduce their recidivism rate. A lower crime rate has a positive effect on society as a whole, including more money available for more necessary projects, greater property value in urban areas and less children incarcerated. Drug cases are clogging our nations prisons. Some 61 percent of federal prison inmates are there for drug offenses, and all this incarceration is doing nothing to solve the drug problem. Many wardens, judges, and other officials know this, but it has become political suicide to discuss decriminalization. We need to insist upon a more mature dialogue about the drug problem. Keep in mind that the high-level drug dealers arent cluttering up our prisons; theyre too rich and smart to get caught. They hire addicts or kids, sometimes as young as eleven or twelve, to take most of the risks that result in confinement. But its not the dealers who create the drug problem anyway. Among the poor, drugs are a problem of alienation and isolation, of feeling unknown, unimportant, powerless, and hopeless. Among the affluent, they are an attempt to keep up with or escape from an insanely frenzied lifestyle that has almost nothing to do with simple human joys such as friendship or hearing the birds sing. We need to address these issues in ourselves, our families, and our communities. At the same time, we must press for changes in drug laws. Im not advocating that we legalize all drugs, because its not that simple. But we do have to decriminalize their use, treating the problem as the public-health issue it is. Doing so would have tremendous benefits. Without drug offenders, our prisons would have more than enough room to hold all the dangerous criminals. As a result, we wouldnt need to build a single new prison, saving us some N5 billion a year. And if we spent a fraction of that money on rehabilitation centers and community revitalization programs, wed begin to put drug dealers out of business in the only way that will last -by drying up their market. Its inconceivable that we routinely dump nonviolent offenders in prison cells with violent ones, in local jails and holding tanks. What are we thinking? I know one fellow who was arrested for participating in a post June 12 1993 election annulment and was jailed. In a forty-eight- hour period, he was savagely raped and traded back and forth among more than fifty violent prisoners. That was nineteen years ago, and since then he has had years of therapy, and yet he has never recovered emotionally. His entire life still centers on the decision of one prison superintendent to place him in a violent cellblock in order to teach him a lesson. Most nonviolent offenders do in fact learn a lesson: how to be violent. Ironically; we spend an average of N200, 000 per year, per inmate, teaching them this. For less than that we could be sending every nonviolent offender to college. None of us, including prison staff, should accept violence as a fact of prison life, and it would be easy not to. We c ould designate certain facilities as zero-violence areas and allow inmates to live there as long as they dont commit-or even threaten to commit-a single violent act. The great majority of prisoners would sign up for such a place, I can assure you. To make matters worse, in most prisons when an inmate is threatened he or she is the one who gets locked up in a little cell for twenty-four hours a day, while those doing the threatening remain in the open population. We must revise this practice and begin to expect prisoners to be nonviolent. And we need to support them in this by offering conflict-resolution trainings such as the Alternatives to Violence programs currently being conducted by and for convicts around the US. Such trainings should be required for all prisoners and staff. Over the past years, we have increasingly legitimized cruelty and callousness in response to the cruelty and callousness of criminals. In a number of prisons across the country we have reduced or eliminated the opportunity for inmates to earn college degrees, clamped down on family visits, and restricted access to books and magazines. And now there is even a growing public sentiment to strip prisons of televisions and exercise facilities. Its as if we want to make sure inmates are miserable every second of the day. We no longer want them to get their lives together. We just want them to suffer. In the long run, however, this approach will not make us happy, nor will it keep our children safe from crime. In fact, as I see it, this vengeful attitude may actually be leading our young people toward violence. The peak age for violent crime in Nigeria is now eighteen, and its edging downward every year. Our children sense that its all right to be mean and violent toward people they dont like. They are not learning compassion or reconciliation. Dont expect a youngster to be able to master the difference between an enemy you define and an enemy he or she defines. Im certainly not advocating that we open the prison doors and let everybody out. In fact, I feel that there are many types of behavior that can cause a person to yield his or her right to stay in free society. But we need to work intensively with people who break the law; we have to structure our responses in ways that show them that they have value, that we believe in them and that we need them. We must relegate prison to the status of last resort after all other measures have failed. Our ideas of rehabilitation usually revolve around education, job skills, and counseling. But many ex-cons have told me they left prison merely better-educated and skilled criminals. If we forget that in every criminal there is a potential saint, we are dishonoring all of the great spiritual traditions. Saul of Tarsus persecuted and killed Christians before becoming Saint Paul, author of much of the New Testament. Valmiki, the revealer of the Ramayana, was a highwayman, a robber, and a murderer. Milarepa, one of the greatest Tibetan Buddhist gurus, killed thirty- seven people before he became a saint. Moses, who led the Jews out of bondage in Egypt, began his spiritual career by killing an Egyptian. We must remember that even the worst of us can change. Over the past twenty years Ive had the privilege of knowing thousands of people who did horrible things and yet were able to transform their lives. They may not have become saints, but I have seen murderous rage gradually humbled into compassion, lifelong racial bigotry replaced by true brotherhood, and chronic selfishness transformed into committed altruism. The promises of every great spiritual tradition are indeed true: Our deepest nature is good, not evil. For decades our justice system has been run according to the tenets of retributive justice, a model based on exile and hatred. Restorative justice is a far more promising approach. This model holds that when a crime occurs, theres an injury to the community; and that injury needs to be healed. Restorative justice tries to bring the offender back into the community; if at all possible, rather than closing him out. Whereas retributive justice immediately says Get the hell out of here! When someone commits a crime, restorative justice says Hey, get back in here! What are you doing that for? Dont you know we need you as one of the good people in this community? What would your mama think? Its an entirely opposite approach, one that, I think, would result in stronger and safer communities. Im not saying that every offender is ready to be transformed into a good neighbor. Advocates of restorative justice are not naive. Sadly, prisons may be a necessary part of a restorative justice system. But even so, prisons can be environments that maximize opportunities for the inmates to become decent and caring human beings. One of the more powerful initiatives within the restorative justice movement is the creation of victim-offender reconciliation programs (VORPs), which bring offenders and victims face to face. When offenders come out of those meetings you hear them say things like: I feel so ashamed now of what I did, because I never realized how much I affected someone elses life, or I never meant to do that. I was just being selfish. Meanwhile, some of the classic responses from victims are: I really wanted to go in there hating those guys but I discovered theyre just people. They really werent as bad as I thought theyd be, or I was expecting to see someone evil, and in- stead I saw somebody stupid. Such victim-offender interaction humanizes both the injury and the healing process. What can you do? If you become the victim of a crime, insist upon meeting your assailant. Insist upon being involved with the process of his or her restoration. Join or create a VORP in your community. Tour your local jail or prison to see first-hand what your taxes pay for. Go in with a church group or civic group to meet inmates. Become a pen pal to a prisoner who is seeking to change his or her life. Talk to your friends and colleagues about employing ex-cons (in nationwide surveys, most employers admit they wont hire a person with a criminal record, so where are they supposed to work? ). Please reclaim your power and your responsibility, because the retributive system you have deferred to is not serving your best interests. Negative trends can be reversed. True to the maxim that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, intervention programs aim to prevent criminal behavior before it occurs. Whether targeting primary school children or prison inmates, such programs are implemented to curb criminal tendencies. Stiff penalties, such as capital punishment, are a deterrent for many criminals. Individuals who are deterred by little else than these drastic penalties operate at stage one of the preconventional level of morality, outlined by the prominent social psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. This level of morality deems obedience necessary only as a means for avoiding punishment. Thus, punishment of a violent sort possibly resulting in death is meted out to individuals who habitually engage in violent crime in order to deter other would-be criminals from engaging in similar behavior. Furthermore, in order to identify who commits crimes and why they do it, the study of sociology utilizes age, gender, race, social class, and ethnicity. These features are helpful when breaking down what demographics commit which types of crime. By using this information, sociologists have been able to determine that younger individuals in society are more likely to commit crimes than older ones. They found out that men are more likely to commit a crime than women. A more appropriate example to the study of sociology and crime is that violent crimes are most often perpetrated by poor individuals. White-collar crime is more prevalent among the wealthy, and the laws involved in that sort of crime are less frequently enforced. Studying crime together with sociology is important due to the effects that crime has on society. In addition to the victims of the crime, the rest of society is charged with the responsibility of paying for the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of criminals each year. Crimes against property often have devastating financial impacts on areas of high crime, particularly urban areas filled with low-income individuals unlikely to report crimes committed against them. Studying crime and sociology together seeks to identify why these individuals turn to crime, and it shows how we, as a society, can prevent it. With nearly 300 individuals under the age of 19 incarcerated in federal prisons, learning how to prevent children from turning into lifetime criminals is a current goal of sociologists. Finding alternative rehabilitation facilities is a first step in making sure underage offenders dont perfect their criminal skills while in the presence of career criminals. Undercover operations can be used both to expose criminal behavior as well as to hold individuals accountable for their actions. While police sometimes conduct undercover stings that are focused on rooting out drug dealers or exposing prostitution rings, citizens also can use undercover techniques to record criminal activities within their own communities. Videos of illegal activity that have been posted on online social networking sites have assisted law enforcement officials in prosecuting criminals for their behavior. Keep your finger on the pulse of your community by nurturing relationships with family, neighbors or employees of local businesses. In many respects, citizens are more effectively prepared to combat crime than are seasoned law enforcement officials. Communication is key to the process of crime prevention. Law enforcement officials should be encouraged to create proactive response programs, such as the Amber Alert that is used to report abducted children. By permitting citizens easy access to crime reports, officials can further increase opportunities for volunteer collaboration in reducing the crime rate. In conclusion, since crime does not require any kind of education or work experience, the person who has nothing to lose can easily choose crime as his/her career. Regardless of whether a community engages in a crime prevention program, crime rates may continue to rise if such a program is not implemented wisely. Violent crime as well as non-violent crime should be cause for concern. We have to realize that we are all a part of this problem and so we all must make real changes-not just political ones, but also in our personal attitudes and lifestyles.