The Sociology of Crime

• A. Positivist criminology
• B. Classical criminology ✓
• C. Labeling theory
• D. Strain theory

Why: Classical criminology, developed by thinkers such as Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, assumes people are rational actors who weigh the pleasures of crime against its likely punishments, so punishment should be swift, certain, and proportionate to deter offending.

• A. Classical criminology
• B. Positivist criminology ✓
• C. Conflict theory
• D. Social control theory

Why: Positivist criminology applies the scientific method to study offenders, seeking the causes of crime in biological, psychological, or social factors. Lombroso's idea of the 'born criminal' is a well-known example, rejecting the classical assumption that offenders freely choose crime.

• A. A lack of police presence in a neighborhood
• B. A gap between culturally valued goals and the legitimate means available to achieve them ✓
• C. Inherited physical traits linked to aggression
• D. Labeling by authorities that creates a criminal identity

Why: Merton argued that societies emphasize goals such as wealth and success, but not everyone has equal access to legitimate means to reach them. When this gap creates strain, some individuals may turn to crime as an alternative route to success, which is the core of strain theory.

• A. Routine activities theory
• B. Rational choice theory
• C. Labeling theory ✓
• D. Biosocial theory

Why: Labeling theory holds that deviance is partly created by societal reactions. Once someone is labeled a criminal, others may treat them accordingly, limiting conventional opportunities and encouraging them to see themselves as deviant, which can produce a self-fulfilling cycle of offending.

• A. Fear of severe punishment alone
• B. Economic deprivation
• C. Strong bonds to conventional society, such as attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief ✓
• D. Exposure to criminal role models

Why: Hirschi's social control theory asks why people obey the law, rather than why they break it. He argued that strong social bonds, including attachment to others, commitment to conventional goals, involvement in conventional activities, and belief in shared moral values, restrain individuals from offending.

• A. Any act that causes harm to another person, regardless of whether it is legally prohibited
• B. An act or omission that violates criminal law and is subject to formal state sanctions ✓
• C. Any behavior that society finds morally offensive, regardless of legal status
• D. Any deviation from social norms, including minor etiquette violations

Why: Sociologists typically define crime as an act or omission that violates criminal law and is punishable by the state. This legal definition separates crime from broader concepts like deviance or harm, which may not be codified in law.

• A. The UCR measures crimes known to police, while the NCVS measures crimes reported by household victims ✓
• B. The UCR surveys offenders directly, while the NCVS collects data from police records
• C. The UCR covers only violent crime, while the NCVS covers only property crime
• D. The UCR is conducted internationally, while the NCVS is limited to the United States

Why: The UCR is based on crimes reported to and recorded by police agencies, whereas the NCVS is a household survey asking random samples of people whether they experienced victimization, including crimes never reported to police.

• A. They capture the full extent of all criminal activity in a society
• B. They are unaffected by changes in police recording practices
• C. They reflect only crimes that come to the attention of authorities, leaving the 'dark figure of crime' unmeasured ✓
• D. They always produce more accurate results than victimization surveys

Why: Official statistics undercount crime because many offenses are never reported or recorded. This gap between actual and recorded crime is known as the 'dark figure of crime,' a central concern in criminological measurement.

• A. A study in which police officers report on their own criminal activity
• B. A study in which researchers analyze court records of convicted offenders
• C. A study in which individuals anonymously disclose their own offending behavior through surveys or interviews ✓
• D. A study in which victims report crimes directly to researchers rather than police

Why: Self-report studies ask respondents to admit to offenses they have committed, often anonymously. They help reveal hidden offending and are useful for studying crimes that rarely appear in official records.

• A. Because crime is a fixed, universal category of human behavior
• B. Because criminal law reflects changing social values, political power, and cultural norms ✓
• C. Because scientific measurement has only recently made crime definable
• D. Because crime rates are determined solely by economic conditions

Why: Sociologists emphasize that what counts as a crime is socially constructed. Legislation changes as societies revise their values and as different groups gain or lose political influence, so the same behavior may be criminal in one context and legal in another.

• A. Conformity
• B. Innovation ✓
• C. Ritualism
• D. Retreatism

Why: Merton's innovation adaptation describes individuals who accept the cultural goal of success (such as wealth) but lack or reject approved means, so they pursue the goal through unconventional or illegitimate methods.

• A. To earn money through organized crime
• B. To cope with status frustration arising from failure in middle-class schools ✓
• C. To rebel against their parents' religious beliefs
• D. To gain access to illegal drug markets

Why: Cohen argued that working-class boys experience status frustration when they cannot meet middle-class standards valued in school, and delinquent subcultures offer an alternative status system where they can gain respect.

• A. Ritualism
• B. Rebellion
• C. Retreatism ✓
• D. Innovation

Why: Retreatism is the adaptation in which individuals reject both the culturally prescribed goals and the legitimate means of attaining them, withdrawing from mainstream society.

• A. The individual's genetic predisposition
• B. The availability of illegitimate opportunity structures ✓
• C. The level of family income alone
• D. The strength of religious belief

Why: Cloward and Ohlin argued that access to illegitimate opportunities, not just the lack of legitimate ones, determines which deviant subculture (criminal, conflict, or retreatist) a person joins.

• A. Ritualism ✓
• B. Innovation
• C. Rebellion
• D. Conformity

Why: Ritualism occurs when individuals abandon the cultural goal of success but mechanically continue following the institutionalized rules, such as a bureaucrat who follows procedures without caring about results.

• A. An inherent quality of certain acts that exists regardless of how society responds to them
• B. The product of social reactions and the application of rules to particular people and behaviors ✓
• C. Entirely the result of biological predispositions passed down through families
• D. A rational choice made by individuals after weighing costs and benefits

Why: Labeling theory holds that deviance and crime are not inherent in acts themselves but are created through the social process of defining certain behaviors as deviant and applying those definitions to specific individuals.

• A. Emile Durkheim
• B. Cesare Lombroso
• C. Howard Becker ✓
• D. Robert Merton

Why: Howard Becker, in his 1963 book 'Outsiders,' argued that deviance is created by social groups who make rules and by those who successfully apply those rules to 'offenders,' labeling them as outsiders.

• A. Crimes committed by juveniles versus crimes committed by adults
• B. Initial rule-breaking that has minimal impact on identity versus deviance that becomes central to a person's self-concept after being labeled ✓
• C. Violent offenses versus property offenses
• D. Crimes reported to police versus crimes never discovered

Why: Primary deviance is the initial, often minor act of rule-breaking. Secondary deviance occurs when the individual internalizes the label and reorganizes their identity around it, often leading to further deviant behavior.

• A. The media's tendency to sensationalize violent crime for ratings
• B. The process by which minor misbehavior is magnified and labeled as serious criminality, shaping how the person is treated and perceived ✓
• C. Theatrical performances used by courts to deter offenders
• D. The biological mechanism by which evil intentions manifest in behavior

Why: Tannenbaum argued that repeatedly identifying and treating a young person as a delinquent can turn them into one, as the community's labeling process dramatizes their behavior and fixes a criminal identity on them.

• A. A person commits a robbery during a period of unemployment and later stops offending once employed
• B. A teenager is stopped by police for minor misbehavior, labeled a troublemaker, is excluded from school, and then associates with other labeled youths and offends more ✓
• C. A wealthy executive commits fraud because of greed and is rarely prosecuted
• D. A neighborhood has high crime rates due to poor street lighting

Why: The teenager's initial minor act is amplified by official and informal labeling, which restricts legitimate opportunities and pushes them toward deviant peers, confirming and deepening the criminal identity the label assigned.

• A. Lower-class individuals commit a greater proportion of all crimes than other classes
• B. The law is written and enforced in ways that protect the interests of those with economic and political power ✓
• C. Lower-class neighborhoods have more police officers, which increases arrests
• D. Wealthy individuals are naturally less inclined to break laws due to better moral upbringing

Why: Conflict theorists argue that laws reflect the interests of the powerful and that the justice system enforces these interests, so working-class and poor people are disproportionately criminalized and punished, while elite forms of harm are often treated more leniently.

• A. Street crime
• B. Organized crime
• C. White-collar crime ✓
• D. Hate crime

Why: Edwin Sutherland coined the term white-collar crime in 1939 to describe offenses like fraud, embezzlement, and corporate violations committed by people of high social status in the course of their work.

• A. Labeling
• B. Anomie
• C. Differential justice ✓
• D. Desistance

Why: Differential justice describes how social class affects how offenders are treated by the system, with access to better legal representation, bail, and negotiation giving wealthier defendants advantages at every stage.

• A. Judges sentencing all offenders to identical terms regardless of background
• B. Police concentrating patrols in low-income neighborhoods while overlooking similar violations in affluent areas ✓
• C. Courts reducing sentences for first-time offenders across all social classes
• D. Legislatures passing laws that apply equally to every citizen

Why: Selective enforcement occurs when authorities focus their attention unevenly, such as heavier policing of poor neighborhoods, which produces higher recorded crime rates there even when offending rates are comparable across areas.

• A. The policy of providing welfare to people who commit minor offenses
• B. The process by which behaviors associated with being poor, such as homelessness or loitering, become subject to criminal penalties ✓
• C. The rise in crime rates during economic recessions
• D. The practice of charging wealthy offenders higher fines than poor offenders

Why: Criminalization of poverty describes how survival-related activities of people without resources, like sleeping in public, panhandling, or unpaid fines, are turned into offenses, drawing many poor people into the justice system.

• A. The physical location where most crimes occur in urban areas
• B. The way multiple social identities such as race, gender, and class combine to shape experiences of crime, victimization, and criminal justice treatment ✓
• C. The overlap between police jurisdictions in a metropolitan area
• D. The point at which a juvenile offender transitions into adult court

Why: Intersectionality, developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, examines how overlapping social categories like race, gender, and class interact to produce distinct patterns of offending, victimization, and institutional response, rather than treating each identity in isolation.

• A. Women commit violent crime at rates roughly equal to men
• B. Men are arrested for the large majority of violent and property crimes compared to women ✓
• C. Women are more likely than men to be arrested for homicide
• D. Gender has no measurable relationship with arrest rates

Why: Across nearly all countries and crime categories, official data consistently show men accounting for the large majority of arrests, particularly for serious violent offenses. Sociologists study this gap through explanations involving socialization, opportunity, and differential policing.

• A. The idea that male offenders are more likely to confess to crimes than female offenders
• B. The proposal that women receive more lenient treatment from police and courts because they are seen as less dangerous or more deserving of protection ✓
• C. The belief that women are naturally more law-abiding than men
• D. The theory that female criminals are more often motivated by romantic relationships

Why: The chivalry hypothesis suggests that criminal justice actors treat women more leniently, reflecting paternalistic attitudes. Researchers test this by comparing sentencing outcomes for men and women with similar offenses and records.

• A. Creating detailed psychological profiles of offenders after a crime
• B. Using race or ethnicity as a factor in deciding who to stop, question, or search, beyond what individual behavior would justify ✓
• C. Recording the racial background of victims for statistical purposes
• D. Assigning officers to neighborhoods that match their own racial background

Why: Racial profiling refers to law enforcement treating race or ethnicity as grounds for suspicion. Sociologists examine it because disproportionate stops of minority groups can inflate their recorded offending rates and contribute to cycles of over-policing.

• A. Official data is usually collected only in urban areas
• B. Official crime statistics reflect policing and reporting decisions as well as actual offending, so racial disparities may partly reflect differential enforcement and social conditions like poverty ✓
• C. Race is not a legal category and cannot appear in crime data
• D. Most offenders refuse to identify their race when arrested

Why: Official statistics measure arrests and convictions, which are shaped by where police patrol, whom they target, and which crimes are reported. Structural factors such as concentrated disadvantage also correlate with both race and crime, so the statistics alone cannot establish inherent differences.

• A. Deviance amplification
• B. Social control ✓
• C. Labeling
• D. Anomie

Why: Social control refers to the methods, both formal (laws, police, courts) and informal (family, peer pressure, customs), that societies use to promote conformity to norms and rules.

• A. Capital punishment
• B. Corporal punishment in public squares
• C. Surveillance and discipline of the body and mind ✓
• D. Exile and transportation to colonies

Why: Foucault argued that modern societies replaced public torture and execution with subtler disciplinary power, using surveillance, routines, and institutions like prisons to shape behavior.

• A. Police focusing enforcement on some groups or areas more than others, even for similar offenses ✓
• B. Police choosing which laws to repeal
• C. Courts deciding which cases to hear
• D. Citizens voluntarily choosing to obey laws

Why: Selective enforcement describes the uneven application of laws, where certain populations or neighborhoods face disproportionate scrutiny and arrest, which can shape official crime statistics.

• A. Karl Marx
• B. Max Weber
• C. Emile Durkheim ✓
• D. Cesare Lombroso

Why: Durkheim argued that punishing deviance publicly reinforces shared values and the collective conscience, strengthening social cohesion.

• A. Reducing the number of police officers on the street
• B. Expanding the number of people brought under state control, often through new alternatives to incarceration ✓
• C. Building more prisons in rural areas
• D. Increasing the length of sentences for violent crimes

Why: Net widening occurs when alternatives such as probation, electronic monitoring, or diversion programs bring more people into the justice system than would otherwise have been processed, rather than replacing incarceration.