Criminolgoy Paper
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My topic is is growth from a adolescent to a young adult, and how I learned to avoid my societies defined deviant behavior. The theory that I have chosen that I feel is applicable to my personal topic is the social learning theory. This theory is a combination of structural theories, such as sub-cultural and anomie. The main idea of the socal learning theory is that “social behavior is determined neither by personality drives nor by outer sociological and environmental factors. Rather, it is a cognitive process in which personality and envioronment engage in a continuous process of reciprocal interaction.” In other words you interact with both your own ideas, and whomever you place yourself
around ideas.
This theory goes along with the theory of differential association, Aker tred to modify Sutherland’s theory with it’s two major concepts being differnetial reinforcement and positive and negative definitions.
The basis of the social learning theory is idea of reinforcement. Tying in with B.F. Skinners study with reinforcements, and the process of learning through rewards and punishments. This theory assumes that some behavior patterns are learned, while others are observed. Clarence Ray Jeffery says that whether a person commits a crime in any situation, depends on there past conditiong history. In other words, what a person has seen and understood as right, is what they are more likely repeat when they are older. When it comes to crime, the social theory states that is a reward for the criminal behavior. An example of this is robbery, the reward is financial. If never caught by the police, this activity is likely to continue.. They have been desensitized to the feeling of gulit or wrong doing, because that attitude was never revealed to them as a child or youth. On the other side, there is the punishment