Final Paper Writing Workshop 1
Abstract
The crime I am researching is the murder of the 12-year-old girl Stephanie Crowe, which was committed in in the wake of January 21, 1998. The most notable feature of the crime is that no definitive perpetrator has been and charged up to date thanks to manner in which it was committed indicating a highly specialized murder with the perpetrator(s) wiping the scene clean leaving no traces of who they were or no signs of forced entry into the little girls room or their house, which has made it significantly hard for the police to pin down the main perpetrator of the crime. Who killed Stephanie Crowe?
The first theory that I would apply in my research is the rational choice and deterrence theory. The key components of the theory includes the thesis that the “motivation for actions, criminal or otherwise, are universally grounded in individual self-interest and the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain” (McCarthy & Chaudhary, 2014).
The second theory is the social disorganization theory that has just recently “emerged as the critical framework for understanding the relationship between community characteristics and crime in urban areas” (Kubrin & Wo, 2015) with this ability to confer correlation marking its key component that can help in this research to identify why such a crime occurred in the area code where Stephanie and her family lived.
The final theory is the social learning theory the proponents of its thesis who believe that behavior is learned through socialization (Brady, 2017). The key components of this theory include differential association, differential reinforcement, imitation, and definitions, which renders it capable of explaining both delinquent and conventional behavior (Brady, 2017).
In determining which of the theories is persuasive and which are not, I would employ a retrospective kind of approach to researching this crime, mostly concerned with the analysis of the crime scene working backwards to try piece together the motive as to what could have led to such a gruesome murder and from my analysis of the crime scene, the most probable perpetrator.
References
Brady, M. C. (2017). Social Learning Theory. In The Encyclopedia of Juvenile Delinquency and Justice.
Kubrin, E. C. & Wo, C. J. (2015). Social Disorganization Theory’s Greatest Challenge. In The Handbook of Criminological Theory, pp. 121-136
McCarthy, B. & Chaudhry, R. A. (2014). Rational Choice Theory and Crime. In Brunisma, D. and D. Weisburd (Eds) Encyclopedia of Crime and Criminal Justice. Springer