Cultural And Cultural Context

The concept of cultural context defines how a person’s culture and background can affect the manner in which they choose to behave. Each individual person on this earth has different cultural contexts whether ethnical, financial or gender based. In recent years, criminologists have long sought to find out how an individual person’s cultural context influences their chances at becoming criminals. After searching through numerous amounts of criminological statistics, research has revealed that there are not only many implications that the contextual role of culture has played, but there is also an answer that exposes certain cultures who are likely to become offenders or victims as a result of the implications of culture context.

The Background

The first theory is known as the social conflict theory. This theory states that people are more likely to commit crimes against people from a higher social and economic status than theirs. This theory can best be exemplified in the earlier example of the rich African man and the poor Hispanic woman. The poor African woman cannot find a job because she has an extensive criminal history, so she needs money and food to provide for her three children. She walks in the rich African man’s residence and finds a wallet full of money. She grabs twenty dollars out of his wallet and sneaks out. A few minutes later she is caught by the rich African man’s security guard and he calls police. Upon arrival, the police arrest the woman for trespassing right on the spot. After police ask the woman why she trespassed, she states that she was desperately trying to find money to support her kids. The second theory involves the cultural deviance theory. According to Julian Hermida, the cultural deviance theory states that conformity to the norms of lower class society is what causes crime (n.d.). In the previous example, the woman was conforming to standards of the lower class by trying to steal from the rich simply because of the idea that poor cannot afford

Not only have researchers found two cultural theories that explain why people commit crimes, there are statistics in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report that further emphasis the overall correctness of those two theories. Furthermore, culture has implications on what the types of situations a police officer can expect to encounter while on patrol in the