Modernization and Crime - Definitions: Complex Phenomena, The Long-term European View, Rapid Modernization In The Twentieth Century
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Common beliefs often associate crime with features of modern society such as big cities, mass society, liberal democracy, capitalism, and modern mass media. In reality, the relationship between modernization and crime is highly complex. Modernization may be accompanied by declining, stable, or rapidly increasing crime rates, depending on the place, particular conditions, and time frame under consideration. A look at basic definitions provides a first understanding of the complexity of the relationship between modernization and crime.
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First, crime is behavior defined as criminal by the law of the state. States typically undergo profound changes in modernization processes. So do criminal law and its enforcement. Thus, while behaviors change during modernization, so does their definition as criminal versus lawabiding. Both changes affect crime records. Second, modernization is the replacement of traditional structural elements by…
Social historians in recent decades have produced rich evidence regarding the relationship between modernization and crime in Europe since the Middle Ages (Johnson and Monkkonen, eds.). Long-term European history has indeed been characterized by numerous modernizing shifts: the building of modern nation-states, urbanization and industrialization, functional differentiation, rationalization, and th…
Rapid modernization in the twentieth century led to different effects on crime. Examples include modernization in third world societies, especially after the end of authoritarian or dictatorial rule, and rapid modernization during periods of fundamental reform in societies with state-socialist forms of government. Consider third world countries. Uncertainties of record keeping suggest that we focu…
How can we explain such trends in periods of rapid modernization? What accounts for the differences between these experiences and the decline in violence during the long-term European civilizing process? Classic sociological theorists and contemporary research suggest potential explanations. Robert K. Merton's strain approach, recently revived for an explanation of newer U.S. crime trends (…
Another contrast with the declining rates of violent crime in the long-term European perspective is the recent increase in crime rates in most Western societies. Clearly, these countries have continued their development toward urbanization, general education, economic growth, and technological innovation. Time series indicate that crime rates in Western industrialized countries increased in the po…
——. "Controlling Violence: Criminal Justice, Society, and Lessons from the U.S." Crime, Law, and Social Change 30 (1999): 185–203. …
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