Cause Of Crime Essay

Crime is an in inevitable occurrence in today 's culture. Despite the best efforts of our country 's criminal justice system, crime continues to be on the rise. In an effort to reverse this rising tide, efforts are being made to understand the underlying cause of crime and factors that can lead an individual into the life of crime. From the sociological perspective, there are three theories that are used to explain the cause of crime. They are the social structure theory, the bad neighborhood theory, and the social process theory.

The first theory that is discussed is the Social-Structure theory (Siegel & Worrall, 2015). This theory states that people that are in the lower socioeconomic classes are more likely to commit crimes and get punished more severely than those of the higher socioeconomic class (Siegel & Worrall, 2015). Generally, the people in the lower socioeconomic class make less money than those who are in

I think that the bad neighborhood theory, whereas it is still a valid theory, is based too largely off of an individual 's environment. Next, I believe that the social process theory just has too many individual factors to be able to prove or disprove it. What I mean by this is it depends on the influences that the individual gets like who his or her friends are, who his or her role model is and so forth. It is for those reasons that I am going to support the social structure theory. I believe that the social structure theory also, in a very large part, can dictate where a person lives. A family of four making less than $24,000 per year, the national poverty line is not going to be living in a million dollar house, rather they will most likely be living in a low income neighborhood where crime rates are much higher (Siegel & Worrall, 2015). Also because the individual is low income, he or she will be more likely to turn to crime as a means of