Concepts of Law and Justice
A strategy to justify, explain, or excuse criminal behavior.
What is Defense?
Self-report studies that investigate crime over a period of time.
What are Longitudinal Studies?
Posits that people engage in criminal behavior as a result of their own free will and that people make a choice to engage in illegal acts.
What is the Classical School of Criminology?
Task force created in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan to develop recommendations to reform the experience of crime victims.
What is Presidential Task Force on Victims of Crime?
A political perspective that follows more of a law-and-order philosophy and generally cites retributive values in punishing offenders.
What is Conservative?
The relationship between mens rea and actus reus.
What is Attendant circumstances?
System of crime data that offers expanded data categories of crime statistics. Removes the hierarchy rule of the UCR.
What is NIBRS?
Theory that investigates how neighborhood environments contribute to criminal behavior.
What is Social Disorganisation Theory?
A process whereby victims feel traumatized not only as a result of their victimization experience but also by the official criminal justice system response to their victimization.
What is Secondary Victimization?
A political perspective that tends to focus on the importance of due process, individual freedoms, and constitutional rights.
What is Liberal?
Body of law that governs the creation and function of state and federal government agencies.
What is Administrative Law
A crime that involves the taking of property without the use of force.
What is Larceny-Theft?
Theory that focuses on how relationships, particularly peer relationships, influence delinquent behavior.
What is Differential Association Theory?
Federal legislation that established the Crime Victims Fund.
What is the Victims of Crime Act?
Political process by which prospective laws are proposed for voters to approve during an election.
What is Initiative?
A defense strategy that describes people who are forced to violate the law out of fear for their own safety or the safety of others around them.
The largest victimization study in the United States. Attempts to fill the gap of understanding between reported and unreported crime.
What is the National Crime Victimization Survey?
Theory that refers to a sense of normlessness that societies experience as a result of a breakdown in social cohesion.
What is Anomie?
Federal legislation that provides victims with legal rights in federal criminal cases.
What is Crime Victims’ Rights Act of 2004?
Method of research that looks at the changes that occur as a result of a policy to determine whether the policy is effective.
What is Outcome evaluation?
Latin term that refers to the theory that punishment should fit the crime. The concept derives from ancient law and is referenced in biblical texts as eye for an eye.
What is Lex Talionis?
Also known as index crimes under the Uniform Crime Reports. Includes eight specific crime categories: murder, aggravated assault, rape and sexual assault, robbery, burglary, motor vehicle theft, larceny-theft, and arson.
A circular structure placed at the center of a larger complex that is under surveillance, such as a prison. Allows an individual or small group of people to set up an observation point and watch over the larger surrounding area. Contribution of Jeremy Bentham to the field of criminology.
What is Panopticon?
Passed by Congress to provide fair treatment standards to crime victims and witnesses.
What is Victim and Witness Protection Act of 1982?
Method of research that looks at the progress of the policy development experience to determine how the policy is developing and being implemented.
What is Process evaluation?