Midterm Review for PSYC 3402

Contents

1. Measuring Crime and its Correlates
2. Biological and Sociological Theories of Crime
3. Psychological Theories of Crime
4. Risk Assessment
5. Offender Treatment
6. Young Offenders

Measuring Crime and its Correlates

• Defining crime
• Measuring crime
  • Prevalence rates, incidence rates, per capita crime rates (calculator)
• Ways of measuring crime
  • Official statistics, victim surveys, self reports
• Problems with measuring crime
  • Dark figure, winnowing effect, hierarchy issue
• Measuring crime correlates
  • Pearson correlations
• Problems with measuring correlates  (REC)

Biological and Sociological Theories of Crime

• Biological Theories of Crime (brief): focus on the primary causes of crime; what’s the evidence that exists in support of this theory; criticisms to theories. (No dates.)
  • Lombroso’s Born Criminal
  • Sheldon’s Somatotypes
  • Jacob et al.’s Chromosomal Theory
  • Twin studies
• Sociological Theories of Crime
  • Merton’s Strain Theory – 5 modes
  • Cohen’s Subculture Theory – not on the exam.
  • Becker’s Labelling Theory

Psychological Theories of Crime

Understand the theory in general, what supports it, criticisms, evidence etc.

• Psychodynamic theories
  • Freud’s id, ego, and superego
  • Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation
  • Glueck and Glueck’s work
  • Hirschi’s control theories – list BAIC
• Learning theories
  • Classical conditioning (know what the CR, CS, UCR, UCS etc)
  • Operant conditioning – the four types of contingencies; impact of the behaviour; real-world examples.
  • Eysenck’s bio-social theory
• Social learning theories
  • Vicarious conditioning
  • Sutherland’s differential association theory
  • Akers’ social learning theory

Risk Assessment

• What is risk assessment? Know how it differs from the past.
• Static and dynamic (stable/acute) risk factors; provide examples.
• How can we carry out risk assessment?
  • Clinical judgment, actuarial tools, structured clinical guidelines
  • Are we good at assessing risk? Know the general trends.
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches?
  • Consistency, accuracy, accountability, validity
• How do we measure the accuracy of our risk assessments?
  • ROC analysis – what the AUC is, how to interpret it, how to interpret the graph;

Offender Treatment

• Historical background
• What works in offender treatment
  • Meta-analysis (know what this is, what an effect size is (magnitude and sign), how to interpret it).
• Punishment-based strategies
  • Meta-analytic results
  • Reasons why punishment doesn’t work (intensity, immediacy, etc)
• Principles of effective correctional treatment
  • Risk, need, responsivity – be able to list, define and talk about studies
• Specific Populations: what populations work with RNR.
• Effective Correctional Workers – 5 important characteristics (high quality of approval, etc)

Young Offenders

• History of juvenile justice (focus more on the YCJA)
• Youth crime rates and sentencing
  • Patterns but don’t memorize numbers
• Juvenile offending trajectories
  • Talk about two trajectories – their commonality etc
• Theories of juvenile crime
• Risk and protective factors: list them
• Interventions for young offenders: list and give examples
• Internalizing and externalizing problems: list and give examples