Question 1: What Should We Do About the Problem of Crime?
Criminal cases are among the significant social challenges that every community has been struggling to curb or remedy through the incorporation of various approaches. The problem of crime is not only a national but an international issue of concern that should be given vital consideration. Crime leads to multiple adverse effects to individuals, communities, and nations whereby these impacts can be felt in felt in many dimensions, including disruption of social order, health hazards, the risk to the economy, and deterioration of behaviors and beliefs, among others. However, the main issue is not the effects of crime on our lives, but the strategies than we can implement to prevent or mitigate criminal cases.
According to the psychodynamic theory by Sigmund Freud, a person’s personality is influenced by unconscious cognitive processes grounded in early childhood. Therefore, the primary step in solving crime is establishing an enabling environment to facilitate the growth and development of our children and adolescents. The contention is profoundly supported by Bronfenbrenner’s theory of ecology system, which argues that the situation that a child grows in, including the closest to them and the factors that affect them indirectly like a political crisis, extensively influences their behaviors. Therefore, one of the first things that we should do in the fight against crime is the establishment and promotion of programs and policies that are set to observe and enhance the welfare and well-being of children. The creation of a pleasant background starting from early childhood through the school system and finding and appraising various social cultures are significant first approaches in solving crime.
Furthermore, social behaviors can be changed using various methods, as indicated by many cognitive theories that propose social learning and behavior modeling as significant approaches. Social learning is a concept that argues that a person or a group of individuals can change their characters after they are exposed to an environment that comprises the desired behaviors. Therefore, such interventions can be substantially initiated in the community by using various institutions like schools and religious centers to influence people into a predictable response. However, it is necessary to consider the factors that inhibit the progress of such interventions and the achievement of the desired social codes and practices. Thus, starting from the most basic ones, including social, political, and economic factors.
Research has proved that areas settled by people of low socioeconomic status report several crimes compared to the neighborhoods of wealthy people. Therefore, the government and other responsible organizations should ensure that people from rural and undeveloped localities are considered by offering them employment opportunities, educational programs, and community support interventions aimed at promoting social justice. Most people tend to engage in criminal cases either due to idleness or due to poverty. Therefore, approaches focused on engaging many people in economic activities will enable them to afford convenient livelihoods, and due to increased engagements, there will be no chance for wicked thoughts. Essentially, promoting education among less privileged people, including economic minors, is paramount following that research has proved that an increase in educated population relatively leads to a decrease in crime-related activities. Consequently, the government and policy enforcers should ensure that every child or young individual attends learning programs by making the entire process affordable.
Remarkably, research indicates that children whose parents have a criminal record or exhibits criminal behaviors are at a higher risk of displaying illegal actions themselves. It is essential to protect children from their violent parents or caregivers to ensure that they are not affected or made to conform to similar behaviors. The study also suggests a possible and practical strategy that involved rehabilitating violent or criminal parents and allocating their children to foster parents for the rehabilitation period. The approach is significant following that it will enable children to experience a proactive foundation free from violence, thereby turning them into responsible citizens. However, the intervention raises various ethical issues due to the periodic separation of children from their caregivers, although the concern can be solved by ensuring that the child pays regular visits. The approach can extensively help in coping and controlling the crime problem in the future through modeling children’s behavior during early childhood and adolescent stages, thereby enabling them to uphold social order and justice, keeping off from crime.
Question 3: Abolition
Abolition is the act of terminating or bring into an end the regime of a system, institution, or practice. For instance, the movement established to end slave traded in the Atlantic and give the slaves their freedom was referred to as abolitionism. In our context, abolition regarded to actions that were demanding for the end of the prison system following that it was impartial and probably violated social justice. Precisely, abolitionists believe in reconciliation rather than punishment through imprisonments as a proper strategy in responding to criminal deeds. They aim at reforming the criminal justice system by offering alternatives to incarceration from offenders. In their argument, abolitionists believe that crime is an outcome of economic factors like racial discrimination and poverty. Therefore, the essential thing is to mitigate those factors rather than imprisoning criminals.
However, abolition significantly differs from the current system of dealing with criminal behavior, following that their motives are entirely different. Currently, the current penal system seeks to change social practices by eliminating the criminals from society and incarcerating them for rehabilitation. However, the current system upholds victim rights and observes the necessities of the imprisoned people. Besides, the current system appreciates and integrates other alternatives to incarcerations like paying fines and bonds, home imprisonment, and engaging in community services, among others. On the other side, the abolition profoundly deferred with the traditional systems that dealt with criminal behavior following that they strictly believed in criminals’ corporal punishment.
As a result, prison abolitionism contributed to the initiation of the non-reformist reform, conceived from the perspective of what should be made possible concerning human demands and requirements. For instance, prison abolitionists contended that there is a need to consider the mental health of incarcerated individuals following that detention should be for lawbreakers but not for people who engage in criminal or related behaviors due to their cognitive status. Therefore, we can deduce that currently, the prison abolitionists have had achieved a lot of their objectives following that the current system conforms with most of their grievances. For instance, the jury requires a mental health check-up presentation before passing any verdict to test whether the offender was at their right state of mind. Moreover, the current judicial system acknowledges that some people might be having other critical objectives, and incarceration would not be the most effective punishment for such people. As a result, there are alternatives to captivity in the current justice system, thereby ensuring that the individual’s needs are considered.