Thursday 30th October 2008

Today I had to be in at 9 for 102CRM Controlling Crime with Graham. We were looking at theories of under-control. A theory of under-control is “A group of theories that attempt to explain why some people break the rules of social conduct that others must accept and conform to”. We looked at 3 different theories.
• Social disorganisation theory – social and urban change sweep away the processes that normally regulate offending behaviour
• Neutralisation theory – most people learn the norms and values of society but also learn to rationalise (neutralise) their violation
• Control theory – some people feel less constrained by the norms and values of society and so feel more free to deviate from them
(Copied from the slides)

We also looked at some of Durkheim’s work on integration and regulation.
Summary of the lecture:
• Under-control is based on the assumption that everyone is in agreement on right and wrong
• Assumes unanimity of norms and values in society
• Some aspects of under-control have value in explaining some crime and criminality


After the lecture, we had a few hour break before we had Tim Turner for our first proper workshop on out self study module. I have decided to try and see if people with schizophrenia are more likely to commit crime. Tim said that this was too wider topic and it would be better to concentrate on a specific crime so I have decided to look at the link between schizophrenia and violent crime especially homicide. It was good to finally get to talk to Tim about the unit and we have to have a 200 word abstract of our final assessment done for our next workshop which is on 27th November (mummy’s birthday)!!!!!

We had a seminar straight after Tim’s workshop for the lecture this morning. It’s getting silly now. I think people are turning up to different seminars than they first signed up for and the group is getting bigger every week. ½ the class had to sit on the floor!
The first half of the seminar was good because we looked at an example of a reflective log and what makes it good, and what makes it bad. The log is quite different to mine. It had references to support his/her argument. I did think that some of it was incredibly opinionated which is not so much a bad thing in a reflective log but they were so one sided and would not even consider the other side of the argument which is a bit silly considering how serious the topic was (the death penalty.)
The second half of the seminar was meant to be for looking through our own logs and deciding what sort of grade they would get but we could not do this because ½ of the class did not bring theres or had not done it. This was really annoying for those of us who had done the work because I wanted to know what I need to do differently so I can get a good mark on it. I will email Graham and see if he will go through it for me.