The problem of crime control criminology essay

Career CriminalAbraham EspinozaCourse number and titleInstructor’s nameUniversityDateThe problem of crime control is one of the most vital problems in our society. To date, there is no a common understanding of public danger of professional crime neither in science, nor in law. So, despite a certain quantity of past researches in the area of professional crime, there has been observed some reduction in attention to the problem nowadays. This is evident especially in insufficient researches on combating professional crime. Thus, taking into account the fact that professional crime still belongs to one of the least studied types of crime, we are going to explore a career criminal for the purpose to identify his specific psychological and personal characteristics, including the way of thinking. To begin, it is necessary to mention that professional crime is not simply a collection of criminal groups and a number of crimes committed by these groups. This is a living criminal organism, the viability of which depends not on the criminal-punitive practices, but on the social, economic, moral, spiritual, political, ideological, judicial and legal status of the society. Observing the term of professional crime, it is good to remember that it is the activities of a special type of criminals who have chosen crime as a major source of employment and income, and commit the same offense in a regular basis using special skills and knowledge. So, the study of criminal behavior is extremely necessary not only because it is part of the problem in the identity of the offender, but also as a source involved in the formation of such a person. The main category of the subject in the study of criminal behavior is a personality of the criminal. According to …, crime always has two roots, one is in the identity of the offender and weave of the features of the criminal’s constitution, and the other consists of external facts, which impelled the person to crime by their negative influence. None of the crimes can be explained solely by external factors, ignoring the particular person to commit them. In general, a fairly comprehensive is a definition of offender as an individual who committed the crime because of his inherent anti-social attitudes, negative attitude to the public interest and the choice of a socially dangerous way to implement his plan, or failure to exercise necessary activity in the prevention of a negative result. It is a truth that information about career criminals contributes the work of forensic psychologists in different ways. For instance, knowledge of the personal characteristics of professional criminals and their activities allows forensic professionals to build correctly different social programs for correction of the personality, to organize an effective fight against crime as well as the study of individual professional criminal helps to evaluate the effectiveness of crime prevention and the fight against criminals. Farrington (1992) added that ” it should be extremely useful for criminal justice decision-makers to know the likely future course of criminal careers for different categories of offenders, and to know how far these careers can be predicted.” According to Gavin & Hockey (2010), ” Criminal career is defined as the longitudinal sequence of offences committed by an individual offender and offences committed under the label of criminal career are usually amongst the most commonly occurring crimes – burglary, car theft, vandalism, and acts of violence.” In other words, professional criminal is a person who repeatedly commits a crime of the same type by the entrenched tendency to meet the own more or less frequently recurring need in such a criminal way. Of course, very often these symptoms are connected repeatedly with servitude and multiple convictions, but it is not necessarily signs of professional criminal, the person may not be a repeat offender, as well as a repeat offender may not be a career criminal. Often career criminal began his career at an early age, even in childhood, but this feature also not always is available in professional criminals. The central feature of professional criminal is a tendency to satisfy own needs through the crime, forming a kind of ” set” of his personality to a specific crime. The question about the necessity to commit a crime is not a question of moral judgment of this action to a career criminal, not even a question of the assessment of the criminal career from the point of view of the own interests because this career have been previously chosen by the person, it is only a so-called ‘ technical’ question, i. e. a matter of convenience or inconvenience of the crime under the circumstances, more or less risk of failure. It is generally known that professional criminals owned a special technique of crimes and often use the latest discoveries in their criminal activity, while they also develop practical special jargon of criminals (such as thieves’ cant). Analyzing the thinking of a career criminal, we need to mention that this person thinks quite differently that the non-criminal person and this is conditioned by many specific circumstances. Firstly, it is conditioned by the fact that identity of the perpetrator is a set of socially significant negative properties that have developed in the course of multiple and systematic interactions with other people. In studying the characteristics of the personality of professional criminal there must be borne in mind that most of career criminals came to crime at an early age. To a certain extent this fact determined their life in general because the constant crimes became a characteristic feature of their lifestyle. According to …, it was noted that those who associated themselves in criminal activity in their youth, becoming professionals in criminal sphere, commit the most serious crimes, while each time, they are less reluctant to fix and change their behavior. Usually, professional criminals are characterized by a focus on the possession of material resources as the most important value. Most of them have too high self-appraisal developed ambition, hostility towards others, the desire to maintain the authority in their environment at all costs. Many of them are confident in the own safety being involved in criminal activity, they believe in impunity of their deeds. Moreover, personal sense of professional criminal activity is that it is exercised by the person seeking to meet their material needs through different crimes. That is why criminal activity as a source of material existence is a mandatory attribute of criminal professionalism. In addition, career criminal is a recidivist that is understood as sustainable offender, a person familiar to the most dangerous form of social behavior in a psychological sense. A significant part of professional criminals are marked with mental disorders. However, professional criminals are usually organizers, active participants, and performers of their crimes. The leading features of the professional criminals are aggressiveness, violence, extremely daring, and contempt for those to whose material welfare they impinge. Moreover, leading criminal lifestyle in conditions of specific protection from the side of the own criminal group, idealizing and romanticizing a criminal world, the personality of career criminal come under greater social degradation. So, career criminals have deviant beliefs, attitudes and values in comparison to the normal person. It is very important to note in this paragraph that relapsing criminality is a demonstration of stable anti-social and socio-psychological characteristics of the individual, the image of his criminal behavior. The criminal recidivist’s behavior exhibits features of the interaction of his conscious and unconscious self-regulation mechanisms. Defects in self-regulation in combination with anti-social value orientations, situational-environmental relationship are the basic psychological characteristics of professional criminal who is a recidivist. Recidivist behavior often defies common sense, even to the one’s own interests. Often the goal is not correspond with means, while his decisions and behavior deprived of elementary prudence, and foresight of immediate consequences is weakened. To continue, career criminals represent the core of the underworld, they are the guardians of criminal subculture and developers of contrivances in crime and their camouflage. The highest percentage of special recurrence is in those kinds of crimes that require special skills of specialization, criminal intellectualism (fraud), and a special impudence and shamelessness (selfish and violent crimes). In conclusion, we have observed the personality of professional criminals from different sides, including their specific way of thinking and their indifference to the threat of punishment or stigmatization. We have also proved that exactly multiple repeat offenders and professional criminals make up the core of the criminal world, ” its the headquarters and the army,” with good reason considering that the state of crime depends on the core to a large extent.