Case Study

Today you were assigned two case histories to analyze. The cases deal with individuals who are currently serving time in prison in South Africa. Your goal is to become familiar with the cases.
Make sure you give this assignment some serious thought and effort. It will allow me to gauge how well you understand the correlate of crime.

I have provided a link to the research project that these case histories were a part of. It may give more insight on your subject.
Perpetrators of Crime

Correlates of Crime Booklet

Which Canadians are most likely to commit crimes? Are older people more likely to commit crimes than younger people? Are men more likely to commit crimes than women? Are upper class people more or less likely to break the law than their lower class counterparts. Which provinces have the highest rate of crime? Each of these quesions asks about a correlate of crime. Correlates of crime are those phenomena that are associated with criminal activity. While a list of such phenomena would include any number of conditions, the discussion in this chapter will be limited to some of the social conditions that are correlated with crime.

On Tuesday I gave the class a booklet that walks you through the key points of the chapter. One important thing to remember is to do the booklet on your own. Use the booklet as a study guide/notes. The material in this chapter is fairly dense...lots of talk about research done by different social scientists. Although there are few definitive answers given...it allows you to appreciate how difficult it is to prove causation.
The booklet will be due this Friday

Today we discussed correlates of crime and how it related to the documentary The Interupters.
The class came up with the following correlates:

Age
    - most crime is committed by youth
    - most of the individuals in the documentary were young
    - ages ranged from 15-24.

Sex
    - most were males (some were females but not many)

Race
    - African American
    - Hispanics

Socio-economic Status
    - poor
    - uneducated
    - unemployed
    - single parent homes

Region
    - inner city
    - Chicago
    - rough part of town
    - easy access to drugs/guns

Drug use
    -  most of the guys were either using drugs or selling drugs


We also starting working on a Ch 5 booklet which is due on Thursday Nov. 29

Interrupters

Today we discussed the issue of correlates of crime.
Correlates of crime....variables or factors that are regularly associated with crime.
We discussed the difference between causation and correlation. Correlates do not cause crime, they are meerly associated with crime. That association is what we will examine in this chapter

One key correlate is AGE.
The age between 15 to 24 represents only 14% of the overall population but counts for 45% of those accused of property crimes and 32% of those accused on violent crimes.

WHY?
     - this age is a period of ambiguity....social postioning
     - joblessness
     - excess energy
     - drugs
     - easily infuenced
     - gangs

All these create tension.....which leads to crime.

We began watching the movie Interrupters.....we will continue next class.

Counting crime Test

Last class you wrote an open book quiz on chapter 4. The test was marked today in class.
Last class you were responsible for making a blog entry on anything intesting you found on the statsCanada website.
There were many graphs and crime stats that were provided. Find one that stood out to you and comment on why.

Data Questions

Today we worked on defining key terms that you will need to know for this chapter. I will post a link to the questions as well.
Both Definitions and Questions will be due on Thursday Nov. 8/12.
Also....those of you who have not linked your blog to the class blog will have until this Tuesday to do that. After that, you will not get credit for the blog entries.

Presentations

Today the students presented their projects. Very interesting that each group ended up having more questions than answers at the end of the project. That was the purpose of the project. Each group did a good job of formulating your experiment and presenting their findings to the class. We will continue with the presentations next class and then work on Data collection and the challenges we face in determining how accurate our crime rate really is.

Here is the title of the book that is a fantastic read!