Violence and Crime

1. Violence and Crime By: Aida Venegas

2. Table of content • Slide 3 Reflection Paper • Slide 4 The root cause of Crime • Slide 5 Who is most likely to become a crime? • Slide 6 Causes of Crime - Explaining Crime, Physical Abnormalities, Psychological Disorders, Social And Economic Factors, Broken Windows, Income And Education • Slide 7 Crime and violence • Slide 8 Substance abuse, not mental illness, cause violent crime • Slide 9 Bipolar and Drugs • Slide 10 What causes Violence? • Slide 11 Child Abuse • Slide 12 Violent video games: Myths, facts, and Unanswered Questions • Slide 13 2008 computer and video games sales rating (by Units sold) • Slide 14 Reflection • Slide 15 References

3. Reflection Why is there so much violence and crime in the United States? Do we know how we can prevent violence and crime? I want to learn how I can prevent violence and crime in my neighborhood because before I start to prevent crimes and violence in big city I need to start in my neighborhood. I think that there is something we can all do to prevent crime and violence, if we first know how to manage this two ideas. I believe that no matter what neighborhood we live in there is always crime even if it is theft. Violence always starts somewhere I believe that violence beings at home whenever a child see their parents fighting they believe is right to do it outside of home. When husbands hit their wives is not correct but as a child grows up, they believe that they can do the same thing as they grow up. It is the same way with crime, if a person grows up believing that stealing is ok, this children will do the same thing as growing up. We all know the crime and violence is wrong just like drugs. We all know that crime and violence appears to being in bad neighborhoods or in neighborhood where poverty is seen the most. Violence is seen the most in the minority groups, where Hispanics and African Americans live in neighborhood. Usually crime and violence begins in these neighborhoods because they do not have assistance, shelter, food, and are unemployed . They look for the easiest way out for money.

4. The root causes of crime In the last fifty years, almost every country in Western Europe and North America has experienced an enormous increase in crime rates. Americans are definitely have a problem with murder, overall crime rates are actually higher in many other countries including Canada, Great Britain, France and Sweden. Home invasions are far more common in Britain. It seen like rates seem to have stabilized in the nineties, but it appears to be largely a demographic issue. In places where you find younger people, you will find more crimes than any other neighborhood. High schools have turned from places of learning into armed camps. Conservatives mention that reason for crime is breakdown in moral values. In other hand liberals mention the reason for crime is child poverty and discrimination. Children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are pre-disposed to anti-social behaviors. Liberals believes that the government should spend more of the people’s money on this problem by having welfare, subsidized daycare and more. We need to consider many more factors other than poverty such as : 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes, 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes, 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come form fatherless homes, 70% of juveniles in State-operated institutions come from fatherless homes and 85% of all youth sitting in prisons grew up in fatherless home. It was also mention that children without a father have a more abuse by their mothers and by their mothers husband or boyfriend (MacRae, 2000).

5. Who is more likely to become a criminal?

6. Causes of Crime - Explaining Crime, Physical Abnormalities, Psychological Disorders, Social And Economic Factors, Broken Windows, Income And Education Reasons for committing a crime including greed, anger, jealously, revenge, or pride. People decide to commit a crime and carefully plan everything in advance to increase gain and decrease risk. These people are making choice about their behavior, some even consider a life of crime better than a regular job; believing crime brings in greater rewards, admiration, and excitement until they get caught. Others get an adrenaline rush when successfully carrying out a dangerous crime and others commit crimes on impulse and out of rage or fear. The desire for material gain (money or expensive belongings) leads to property crimes such as robberies, burglaries, white-collar crimes, and auto thefts. The desire for control, revenge, or power leads to violent crimes such as murders, assaults, and rapes. These violent crimes usually occur on impulse or the spur of the moment when emotions run high. Property crimes are usually planned in advance. The purpose of punishment is to discourage a person from committing a crime. Punishment is supposed to make criminal behavior less attractive and more risky. Imprisonment and loss of income is a major hardship to many people. Another way of influencing choice is to make crime more difficult or to reduce the opportunities. This can be as simple as better lighting, locking bars on auto steering wheels, the presence of guard dogs, or high technology improvements such as security systems and photographs on credit cards. Another means of discouraging people from choosing criminal activity is the length of imprisonment. After the 1960s many believed more prisons and longer sentences would deter crime. Despite the dramatic increase in number of prisons and imposing mandatory lengthy sentences, however, the number of crimes continued to rise. The number of violent crimes doubled from 1970 to 1998. Property crimes rose from 7.4 million to 11 million, while the number of people placed in state and federal prisons grew from 290,000 in 1977 to over 1.2 million in 1998. Apparently longer prison sentences had little effect on discouraging criminal behavior. Cleckley's ideas on sociopathy were adopted in the 1980s to describe a "cycle of violence" or pattern found in family histories. A "cycle of violence" is where people who grow up with abuse or antisocial behavior in the home will be much more likely to mistreat their own children, who in turn will often follow the same pattern.Children who are neglected or abused are more likely to commit crimes later in life than others. Similarly, sexual abuse in childhood often leads these victims to become sexual predators as adults. Many inmates on death row have histories of some kind of severe abuse. The neglect and abuse of children often progresses through several generations. The cycle of abuse, crime, and sociopathy keeps repeating itself (Net Industries and its Licensors, 2011).

7. Crime and violence

8. Substance abuse, not mental illness, cause violent crime Illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are not the reason why violent crimes are committed by mental health patients, a study showed today. An exhaustive study which tracked more than 8,000 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and another 3,700 identified as having bipolar disorder over three decades in Sweden found that the abuse of illegal drugs and alcohol caused mentally ill people to perpetrate crimes of murder, manslaughter and sexual violence. Dr SeenaFazel, forensic psychiatry, said: "The relationship between violent crime and serious mental illness can be explained by alcohol and substance abuse. If you take away the substance abuse, the contribution of the illness itself is minimal.“ A solution would be to tackle drug and alcohol abuse across the whole population. The rates of violent crime among people who were mentally ill and abused substances were no different from those among other people who abused substances. People with mental illnesses who abuse substances have violent crime rates which are six to seven times higher than the general population . People with no mental health issues who have similar drink or drugs problems. Research has shown that around 20% of people with bipolar disorder abuse alcohol and drugs compared with about 2% of the general population. Dr Fazel said that one reason for this might be that substance abuse was "genetically programmed" into patients. They are looking at the reason why the figure is higher. One is whether patients to self-medicate with substance abuse. The other is that there is a possibility of genetic predisposition towards substance abuse given that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder both have an element of genetic predisposition (Ramesh, 2010).

9. Bipolar and drugs

10. What Causes Violence? There are two basic conditions that produce violent tendencies in human beings. One condition is that the person has been hurt. A child who is spanked, hit, beaten, or threatened with violence will have a tendency to become violent himself. Sexual abuse and emotional neglect are also hurts that can lead to violent tendencies. The accumulation of minor hurts can lead to violent behavior as well. The anxieties, disappointments, and frustrations of childhood can build up and cause a child to hit or bite. The second basic condition is less well understood. The person has not been allowed to release the emotions resulting from the hurts. He has unresolved and unexpressed feelings about what he has experienced. Only then will he have a tendency to be violent towards others. Being the victim of violence and other distressing experiences breeds violence in the child only when the emotions are blocked and repressed. When this situation occurs, violence toward self or others is almost an inevitable outcome. Violence is a distorted expression of the person's rage or terror in and environment where it is not safe to reveal or release strong feelings. To prevent violence, we must, first, stop perpetrating violence on children. This means no spanking or hitting. We also need to protect children from violent scenes on television or videos. We must change the messages about violence that we give to boys, and expect the same standards of nonviolent behavior from boys that we expect from girls. Boys and girl must be allowed to cry and rage. Otherwise, they harbor unresolved anger, resentments, frustrations, and fears that they may act out as violence toward others or themselves. Crying can be very effective in dissipating aggressive energy. Much of the emotional pain of childhood is an inevitable part of growing and learning. Children get hurt and experience stress even with the most caring parents and teachers. It is therefore vitally important to allow the natural healing mechanisms of crying and raging (AlethaSolter, 1998).

12. Violent video games: Myths, facts, and Unanswered Questions Active role by video games is a double-edged sword. It helps educational video games be excellent teaching tools for motivational and learning process reasons. But, it also may make violent video games even more hazardous than violent television or cinema. Second, the arrival of a new generation of ultraviolent video games beginning in the early 1990s and continuing unabated to the present resulted in large numbers of children and youths actively participating in entertainment violence that went way beyond anything available to them on television or in movies. Recent video games reward players for killing innocent bystanders, police, and prostitutes, using a wide range of weapons including guns, knives, flame throwers, swords, baseball bats, cars, hands, and feet. Some include cut scenes (i.e., brief movie clips supposedly designed to move the story forward) of strippers. In some, the player assumes the role of hero, whereas in others the player is a criminal. The myth most contraviosal is violent video game research a yielded very mixed results. Some studies have yielded non-significant video game effects, just as some smoking studies failed to find a significant link to lung cancer. But when one combines all relevant empirical studies using meta-analytic techniques, five separate effects emerge with considerable consistency. Violent video games are significantly associated with: increased aggressive behavior, thoughts, and affect; increased physiological arousal; and decreased prosocial (helping) behavior. Average effect sizes for experimental studies (which help establish causality) and correlation studies (which allow examination of serious violent behavior) appear comparable (Craig A. Anderson, 2003)

14. Reflection I found this great website that gives you detail information about the crime that goes around your neighborhood, I thought it was great because the pictures of sexual offender and I thought it would be nice if everyone knew about it, the webpage https://www.crimereports.com/. I learn that letting a child cry is good thing because if we do not he/she can take their rage into violence. It is not good to promote violence, we daily promote violence by television, games, toys and any violence seen at home. I learned that buying video games for your children can’t always be good and most children are left alone to watch television without parental permission. Children growing up without a father have more problems with violence and crime. I understand that this children are taken advantage by their mother’s partner. I never thought that a child being fatherless could be such a bad idea, I knew there would be problems but apparently on statistics , it is a very big problem. We see most of the violence in youths than in any other age group. We are no longer seen youths in school but in gangs and seen them vandalizing and stealing. They think is fun and others do it because is easier than having a job . I have learned that violence, is not only cause by poverty but because children are being left a lone without parental vision.

15. Refrences • MacRae, D. (2000, June 10). The Root Causes of Crime. Retrieved November 25, 2011, from Le quilisicoisLibre: http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000610-9.htm • Net Industries and its Licensors. (2011). Cause of Crime-Explaining Crime, Physical Abnormalites, Psychological Disorders, Social and Economic Factors, Broken Windows, Income and Education. Retrieved November 29, 2011, from http://law.jrank.org/pages/12004/Causes-Crime.html • Ramesh, R. (2010, September 6). Substance abuse,not mental illness, causes violent crimes. Retrieved November 30, 2011, from theguardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/06/substance-abuse-mental-illness-crimes • AlethaSolter, P. (1998). What Causes Violence? Retrieved December 1, 2011, from Aware Parenting Institute: http://www.awareparenting.com/violence.htm • Craig A. Anderson, P. (2003, October). Violent Video Games: Myths, Fact and Unanswered questions. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from American Psychological Association: http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2003/10/anderson.aspx