Culture and Crime: The Relationship Between Cultural Values, Socialization, and Criminal Behavior
Overview
This paper examines the relationship between culture and crime by exploring how cultural values and norms are internalized through socialization processes from birth. It argues that cultural systems function as powerful determinants of criminal behavior, with societies' learned behaviors and value judgments shaping individual propensity toward or away from criminal activity based on whether cultural institutions encourage or discourage such conduct.
What this essay covers
- Definition and characterization of culture drawing on Kroeber and Kluckhohn's framework
- Analysis of how cultural values are transmitted and internalized through socialization and social institutions
- Examination of the relationship between general and limited cultures and their influence on criminal behavior
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Culture and Crime
Although anthropologists and sociologists have different definitions of culture, the most accurate and complete characterization of the concept is given by A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn. They defined culture as entailing explicit and implicit patterns of behavior acquired and conveyed by symbols, which comprised the society's unique achievement. Cultural systems are both products of action as well as regulators of future action. Given the broad variance in how humans fulfill their biological and social needs, each society's behaviors dictate how these human drives and needs should be satisfied. These behaviors are founded on geographical factors, historical events, or random occurrences and are transmitted from generation to generation. The rules regulating social relations may be based on etiquette, morality, or law, depending on the nature and strata of society. Every member of society is conditioned to observe the endorsed social rules from birth: certain behaviors are encouraged while others are strongly condemned.
Cultural values are not always authentic variables and may sometimes be shaped by the quality and structure of economic relations or moral transformations. However, they are independent in their effects once established: because cultural values are enacted through involuntary socialization, they continue to dictate human relations independent of the economic, moral, or intellectual factors that created them. Despite the differences in how people are brought up and the varying influences of chance encounters with people and events outside one's social circle, our behavior patterns are generally shaped by the standards of our settings and background.