Factors that Provoke People to Commit Crimes

The present jail and prison systems have two major functions for the treatment of crime, deterrence and rehabilitation. As deterrence, the purpose is to make prisoners scared of committing crimes by giving them punishment, like imprisonment, to reduce the possibilities of criminals commit crime again. Rehabilitation is like moral reform for the criminals, which is expected to change prisoners' mind and attitude toward crime, so future crime or recidivism can be prevented through this way. These two method are not going to completely solve the problems of recidivism or preventing crime.

Many researches have indicated that rehabilitation does not really work in terms of reducing recidivism (Smith 2007). In Sutherland's view, he might state that rehabilitation will not perfectly work because people committing crimes are not because of their "psychopathic and sociopathic conditions on poverty" (Sutherland 2), but there are many more factors contribute to it. For cases like fee-splitting cannot be explained by such understanding. Environmental stimuli can play an important role in causing crime too, such as social disorganization.

Also, prison is often not that effective working as deterrence. Some people might get used to this kind of deterrence and be immune to it. At this point, prison is not a deterrence to them anymore. Even though the prison system tries to function as deterrence and rehabilitation method, which focus mainly on changing people's mind and attitude, it still cannot prevent the environmental or social factors that might influence people to break the laws in the future. Sutherland has emphasized the importance of environmental and social factors, as described in the textbook, as "differential association." This theory indicates that it is not innate for someone to be a criminal, but it is largely depend on the environment which they can learn to be commit crime (Ritzer and Murphy 154).

Sutherland might suggest to shift the main focus of criminology not only on creating a "perfect" prison system, but also on the prevent the happening of social disorganization so that the overall social stability can be achieved. In order to prevent social disorganization, all types of crimes need to be paid equal attention to. White-collar crime has been neglected by the society nowadays, which usually receives much less attention compare to lower social class crime. However, both types of crimes need to be paid attention to, because they all can cause social disorganization, in different ways.

Criminology is aimed to focus on the criminal justice system(Ritzer and Murphy 156), but I don't think Sutherland will support the current prison system, because, first, United States are now facing serious economic problems due to an increasing number of people being sentenced, which has actually reduced the effectiveness of prison system through problems like overcrowding (Ritzer and Murphy 156). It not only makes prison less effective, but also bring up more problems through "criminogenic" effect (Ritzer and Murphy 158). "Criminogenic" effect will make the situation worse by providing prisoners an environment to keep them being criminals or even worse.

Environment is important, it is what Sutherland values, so this issues of prison system should be concerned. Second, though prison can change people's mind, but other social factor might also trigger the crime. The goal of criminology should not only be how to punish criminals or stop crime, but also thinking about how to make society more stable through the process of solving social disorganization. This can be bettered by treat all the crimes equal. There are "various loosely connected government agencies and the individuals who work in those agencies" involved in making official decisions for crimes (Ritzer and Murphy 156). Sutherland might be satisfied about this. However, the overall development of criminology today will not make Sutherland satisfied. In Sutherland's journal, he has mentioned that white-collar crime is usually treated differently from other types of crime.

In fact, white-collar crime can sometimes bring more harm to the society than other types of crimes, in terms of financial loss and social relations (Sutherland 5). The biased view toward lower class makes the society focus too much on lower class crimes but neglect the crime made by white collars. Criminologists should be able to tell the phenomenon and educate the society to clear the misunderstanding and misleading. There should be a better system developed for white-collar crime.

In addition, Parole and probation may be supported by Sutherland, though the cost is very high, but when it comes to deciding whose crime is less serious, more agencies should be involved in making decisions. Also, criminology has developed in a way that focuses mainly on how to punish criminals and reduce the numbers of recidivism, but it does a poor job on stopping the crime from happening. To prevent the crimes from happening, only changing ones' mind is not enough, because external factors matter too, such as environmental factors. Therefore, the core should be maintaining social stability in order to reduce the social disorganization, so the crime will be reduced. To achieve this goal, criminologists should be closely working together with people in other field, like sociology, to have a better understanding of various types of crimes, make fair judgement and develop an effective prison system.