Columbine Shooting Essay

Crime manifests itself in various ways in society and oftentimes difficult to pinpoint what drives people to commit certain actions. The Columbine shooting was a particular incident that ended in tears and suffering which resulted in numerous research as to what was going through the minds of these young individuals at the time of the shooting. Therefore, this paper will analyze specifically the role of differential association- reinforcement as altered by Akers in propelling Dylan Klebold to commit such heinous act, while also giving credit to Edwin Sutherland for first formulating the framework of differential association.
“Dylan Klebold was born to a middle class family on September 11th 1981” (Dylan Klebold Biography, 2016). “His father
In addition to this overview Sutherland outlines nine specific factors which may enhance one’s ability to learn the criminal behaviors but for the purposes of this paper, three of the nine will be analyzed closely;
Firstly, “criminal behavior must be learned through interaction with other persons in the process of communication” (Gongenvare & Dotter, 2007, 384). Furthermore, the idea of communication is broken down into two forms, verbal and gestures. Sutherland indicates that through gestures the conversation elicits a stimuli that allows for response from each individual, by analyzing these responses can indicate attitudes towards the topic or object.
Secondly, differential association varies based on the intensity, duration, frequency, priority, and timing of one’s process of learning. Through this notion, the individual’s self is disregarded and more emphasis is placed on the extrinsic factors. Furthermore, “it is an individual’s experiences and the ways in which the individual defines those experiences which constitute to the learning of criminality”. (Gongenvare & Dotter, 2007,
In light of this, looking more in depth into Aker’s alteration of this theory he takes into account the three factors listed above but proposes that on top of it “behavior is learned based on the principles of Skinner’s operant conditioning with classical conditioning as a secondary factor” (Burgess & Akers, 1966, 137). This gives way to the idea of reinforcement, that social reinforcement enhances the learning of criminal behaviors. For this process to take flight Akers outlines the necessary components. Firstly “the group/gang must have normative definitions of what they perceive is right or wrong which will eventually turn into discriminative stimuli” (Bartol, Curt, & Bartol, 2010, 97) which are signals transmitted by subcultural or peer groups to indicate whether certain actions should be rewarded or punished. In this regards, “the strength and likelihood of one adopting these values are indicative of the amount of reinforcement and the frequency of it” (Burgess & Akers, 1966,