Abstract
The research paper aims to investigate the impact of race, crime, and gender on criminal behavior. In the criminal justice system, delinquency may be the result of biological excellence, for instance, excessive physical strength or aggressive, fighting motherhood. An arrangement of causal factors according to relative weight, manageability, and ambivalence must come later. Immediate problem is to determine the causes, regardless of their interrelation or ability to remove them without detriment to other vital social relations. It was found that race, crime, and gender cannot be considered as sole factors of delinquency but in connection with social and economic factors.
Introduction
The questions of race, gender, and age have been the most important factors of crime theories determining the main trends and approaches to crime. Today, criminal law clings to the pretense of free will. There is in reality only one cause of crime: ill will, malice. Only it was the wrong cause on which critics bestowed so much care and effort. It is not very different from the free will of the lawbreakers (Brownlee, 1998). The will belongs to the realm of natural phenomena, all of which follow the rules of cause and effect. Punishment may be a deterrent. It may be and often is submerged and neutralized in the turmoil of vehement impulses. It may affect stimulations and shrink inhibitions. To limit the reflection on human misconduct to that one simplified causality, the free and ill will must necessarily lead to an impasse. The theory disregards the powerful causative impetuses that strike upon the will from the outside and the complex structure of each willful act. The part causality of which legislations avail themselves can under the most favorable conditions produce but part results. To the criminologist, the behavior of every human being is conditioned. In attempting to bring some sort of order to the complexity of causes, he finds two main distinctions: The paper aims to analyze the problem of race, age, and gender in crime prevention and commitment.
Problem Identification
A theory of crime states that issues of age and gender are possible factors that influence delinquency and crime rates. The paper aims to investigate the problem of age, race, and crime in the criminal justice system and analyze current data on this topic. Critics found that many “causes” consist of slowly converging developments, which appear to drag the guilty man by degrees to the fatal outcome. It may be only vice or illegitimate business or lighter delinquency which may involve the victim as well as the perpetrator in crime (Bowling and Phillips 2002). Once the victim has participated in a shady transaction he has blocked his own retreat and cannot ask the police or the court for redress. Once a man is deeply involved in a racket his relations with other racketeers undergo a profound change. Neither can resort anymore to the ordinary mechanisms of legal adjustment. They revert to the self-assumed and self-taught methods of the underworld. If they do not use physical force they go out of business (Brownlee, 1998). This is still a crime, no doubt, but genetically it is warfare among competitive groups, criminal, semi-criminal, or illegitimate, who by their very pursuits of happiness are barred from asking for the arbitration of the state. The abolition of poverty would be more far-reaching than the suppression of alcoholism. For many people, religious instruction and training in self-control would be a total solution to the problem of crime. It appears, however, that the vaster and more all-embracing the program, the harder it is to realize. Some causalities are ambivalent. So is wealth, so it might, so is a success, even the monotony of good luck and prosperity (Fagin 2006). Some causes belong to the irremediable facts of life. Many perplexities are due to the fact that age and even sex sometimes are ambiguous conditions.
Gender Issues
Female Gender
The problem of gender is one of the most important in the criminal justice system. Davies et al (1998) underline that by when nature equipped the male with a powerful muscular apparatus she presented the female with a more resistant nervous system and greater inviolability. Being exploited organically by the generative process and the growing child, the female, in turn, exploits the concupiscence and the muscular acquisitive strength of the male. It is a perfect interlocking circle of compensatory aid ( Shils et al 2001). Sex, however, includes a sociological status. ‘Vital human activities, with few exceptions, are the monopoly of the man. Conditions are undergoing slow change navigation, aviation, law enforcement, traffic, industrial production have been male occupations. The female side is swelled by a large number of employed colored females. The diverse occupational groups have shown varying degrees of resistance to female invasion. In order to prove this assertion critics have to refer to the unemployment report. The incapacitated, the boys and girls in schools, the people confined to institutions are, in general, not able to increase the army of crime (Brownlee, 1998). From the reservoir of females occupied in home housework, however, any emergency may draw girls and young women into the realm of industrial work and competitive life. Larceny and fraud do not show an outspoken differentiation, as reflected in the gravest cases, those which reach the penitentiary. The male prison population is largely composed of robbers and burglars, the female of homicides and assaulters. In a lengthy and elaborate selective process, the prison receives the female types which are the least feminine and the least remote from the male characteristics (Levin and McDevitt 2001).
Sex as an Economic Factor
It is futile to make an exact statement on the numerical proportions of male and female crime. The underlying facts and the determinant rules are not comparable ( Shils et al 2001). The only thing critics can say is that the visible mass of female crime if put on a comparable basis does not amount to more than 10 to 30 percent of the male rate. However, since females often attain their criminal ends through the medium of male crime and since abandonment to immoral life may be a substitute for serious property delinquency, statistical figures, even if they have been registered at the beginning of the prosecution, are of little value. This conclusion certainly holds true as far as the criminal disposition of the female sex is concerned (Bowling and Phillips 2020).
In view of the fact that 70 to 80 percent of serious crimes are formally property offenses and that 85 percent can be regarded as economically determined, even the poorest female is less destitute than the male in distress. She has a potential capital left, her sex. Critics do not think primarily of the coarse methods of prostitution (Brownlee, 1998). To the police, prostitution means streetwalking and soliciting. From the sociological point of view, the phenomenon extends far beyond these narrow bonds. Indiscriminate sex relations for profit cannot be counted or ascertained by any statistical method. They are lost in the vast realm of sex escapades and fancies, without street publicity, without cash transactions, and without permanence. Genuine emotions may be involved, but an undertone of profit-making for the woman, or sometimes her male partner, is present. Countless situations revolving around the status of mistress, fiancée, even a wife are quasi-legal or legal forms of sexual surrender for profit. Arrest figures for prostitution and the data of prison admissions for the same offense do not reveal the real extent of even that small part of prostitution that comes to the attention of police and courts. When critics consider all sorts of institutions, workhouses, and probation cases from night courts, they arrive at the following high proportions. Another reflection is not out of place (Brownlee, 1998). It is surprising that some women still take the risk of committing property offenses. instead of instigating a male to commit them. It is a paradoxical, but correct assumption that their sexually higher moral standard drives them into serious delinquency. Instead of prostituting themselves, they steal (Cavadino and Dignan 2002).
Division of Labor
That division of labor which makes the male the breadwinner and renders the female the administrator of the bread won and the bearer of all the functions that have to do with health, recreation, and the bringing up of the new generation is faced with grave difficulties if the breadwinner disappears or oversteps his limits. In the first case, he dies or deserts the family group in which he has assumed a specific place, producing children and assigning his wife a position outside the economic process. His disappearance upsets the equilibrium and compels his wife, untrained and charged with the care of children, to enter a gainful occupation. In the second case, the breadwinner exploits the working power of the adolescent girl. She makes money but must give her earnings to her parents. This form of paternal capitalism grows socially more serious as, with the approach of puberty, the desire for adornment, “fun,” and companionship is awakened. The girl soon discovers that it cannot be satisfied without some money. Not infrequently running away is the normal and rescuing reaction of a frightened and overstrained animal. Often there is a slim margin between running away and being driven away, between being chased out of the house for being late or staying away or losing a job. It is interesting to note that some fathers combine material exploitation with distinct manifestations of jealousy. If the mother is living she may neutralize the father’s effort to isolate the girl under moral pretenses. If she is dead the father’s restrictive and tormenting methods are given free vent (Croall 2001).
Generation Gap
Nature has embedded in the basic personality of man another cyclically rounded course of development, the sex individuality. It is more short-lived than the body which carries it, out of which it grows and into which it is absorbed. The sex individuality is born much later than the child and it dies long before the second, final decease. This separate personality is mounted on an adult body. From the combination of youthful sexuality and grown-up organism, it derives its criminological significance. Since it develops later and departs earlier its tempo is accelerated. The evolutional, as well as the tendencies, are shortened and intensified. In the male, the process pursues a relatively even tenor of its wave. In contrast, in the female, the slowly rising and slowly declining curve is broken by separate reproductive revolutions, which appear in the shape of grave bodily and mental crises. Thus the female migratory worker was added to the female members of the fighting forces and new problems arose. From the sheltered life of farms and small towns, girls flocked to the war centers (Cullen and Newell 2002).
When a girl is sent from a lonesome farm to the state university, she is certain to find the sex ratio altered in her favor. Her matrimonial chances increase. Censuses give sex ratios, insofar as they are visible on specific days, in ten-year periods. Attention is focused on two points, ten years distant from one another. Tremendous changes may have occurred meanwhile; the numerical pendulum may have swept back while the effects of the intervening changes are still in operation. A war may start in 1941; it may long be over in 1950. The population structure will have been shaken profoundly between the Census of 1940 and that of 1950, but the picture at these two extremes of time may not differ radically (Dobash and Dobash 1998).
Postwar populations, if the fighting has been bloody and prolonged, show a plurality of females in those age groups that are socially most important. Some women are thereby deprived of the right to marry. It is characteristic of such men-deprived populations that competitive methods and attitudes enter the postwar mores. A situation prevails which is just the reverse of that artificially created debut scenery with 200 boys for 100 girls. In the twenties, when the United States had a considerable surplus of younger males because of immigration, the short and relatively unbloody war reestablished something like a sex equilibrium. But immigration has been curtailed and the casualties of the Second World War plus imported war brides will affect the sex ratio (Dobash and Dobash 1998). The surplus, still existing for all age groups in the prewar period, is already reversed in the groups of the military and industrial age. The colored race will be hit more severely because there is already a considerable scarcity of males between twenty and thirty-nine. Delinquency cannot remain unaffected. It will mainly be the criminality of the females fighting for a place in the heart and on the hearth of the scarce males (Davies et al 1998).
Social Impact on Gender Relations
A surplus of males creates an even more critical social situation. It may be produced by the most diverse causes: epidemics that decimate the female section of the population, the sex ratio of births, or migratory movements that bring about separation and dislocation of the equilibrium of the sexes. The industrial boomtown, especially in wartime, is a counterpart of the gold-rush communities. In boéstances, the visible criminality takes the form of offenses against the person and sex crimes. Boom means physical and nervous overstrain, money or hope of money, gambling, drinking, and mercenary women. Crimes of a mere economic origin, except fraud, are rare (Davies et al 1998). The successful remain; the failures vanish and carry their want and their methods of escaping their distress to other geographical sections and to distant criminal statistics.
There are a few self-chosen all-male and all-female groups, but most of them are imposed by society. Some educational institutions, such as convents, are all female. The prototype is the prison of women, yet the effects are for the time being intramural and reach outer life only after release. The far-reaching consequences of this seclusion are well known (Faulkner, 2001). There is no remedy as long as confinement means separation and mass locking up of females or males. War and hunting require the formation of short-lived all-male societies. The detrimental effects of the situation are counterbalanced by the dangerous, exhausting, and distracting nature of these activities. This used to hold true for the crew of a sailing ship; it is less true with a steamer. When in full operation, the criminal gang uses the techniques of commando raids directed against society. Women, being disruptive forces from the point of view of equality and discipline, are excluded from the work of the gang (Davies et al 1998).
Close Relations
All-male gangs breed a specific combatant’s morale. The antagonism to society and to other gangs is accepted as a basic and immutable fact. Here is a state of war. Moral values are only evolved when the cohesion of the gang is at stake. It is a counter moral, deeply rooted. The recognition for which the gang member, especially the juvenile, longs has nothing to do with control mechanisms of praise and humiliation. It is the approbation of the gang that counts and which he aspires to. The absence of the other sex in gold and lumber camps creates similar changes in mores and moral values, but here association is still voluntary and it is possible to escape the oppressive atmosphere, temporarily or for good. The all-male society of a prison is a compulsory composite of men. Here again, a fighting situation prevails and there is an ethical reversal because of this all-important fact (Hudson, 2003). Following Faulkner (2001) when prisoners were asked to enumerate the major traits of a leader in prison, their ideas were that he should be “right,” courageous, generous, modest, educated, have an interesting vocabulary, be a clever gambler, be able to fool the officials, have a reputation for holding liquor, have a large body of knowledge about crime techniques, and have strong attitudes against the judiciary, the prison administration, the parole board, and God. Sophistication in female companionship, as evidenced by suggestive letters, is highly valued. It would be worthwhile to learn how many of these ideas fade when the convict is released in case he does not return to criminal life (Faulkner, 2001).
The lack of female companies tends to produce strange changes in the sense of reality. The missing sex is subject to a process of canonization and one which accounts for the preferential treatment of women in fact and in law. In arriving at answers to these and other questions bearing on the question of possible release, parole boards use four aids, singly or in combination: the prepare investigation; institutional reports, and the personal interview with the inmate. No jurisdiction uses prediction tables exclusively; some do not have a prepare investigation made in the field; while others dispense with the personal interview (Faulkner, 2001). All four aids, however, when employed, may be considered part of the investigation process in parole. The facts mentioned above underline that gender can be considered as one of the possible factors of crime thus there is no different correlation between gender and criminal activity (Dobash and Dobash 1998).
Race
Historical Perspective
Race is another factor which influences decision in criminal justice system. It is known that minorities and Africa-American people are seen as potential criminals because of their race and ethnic identity. There were mob actions, directed against the Catholics in England, the Protestants in France, the Mormons in Illinois, the landowner and the capitalist in Eastern Europe. Wherever the world became too narrow, the weaker competitor was pushed aside; if racial or religious disinclinations or the mark of the alien helped justify persecution, it was welcome. Yet in truth during the last two or three hundred years it was a propaganda stunt. One can say that because there is now no vital racial complexity in Europe; Europe never tried to be a melting pot, racially or religiously (Dobash and Dobash 1998).
There is probably no criminological problem which should be approached with greater mastery of facts and with more interpretative acumen than the delinquency of the colored man. In spite of the most honest effort critics expect to arrive at only tentative results. Mortality is doubtless one of the main racial characteristics although the deleterious effect of surroundings should never be lost sight of. The death rate of the colored people differs fundamentally from that of the white race. There is a peak in the middle of the life, as seen by the following figures: The connection between delinquency and internal diseases, such as tuberculosis, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes has not been studied, although the relation between infection psychoses and resulting disorders of conduct are well known. Disease is not only an economic catastrophe but it changes the habitual reaction to stimulations of social and human milieu. In a Cincinnati investigation physical impairment among 1,000 Negro factory workers was studied (Dobash and Dobash 1998).
Suicide Rate
Examining other forms of aberrant behavior, suicide rate of the colored woman is similar to that of the colored man; this means certainly that the sex differentiation is carried farther in the white race. In addition, the suicide curve of the colored woman differs profoundly from that of the white female. A peak is reached in early adulthood; from then on the decline is steady. The young colored woman seems to be subject to a crisis during her twenties. Explosive reactions directed against her own life and the lives of other people are more frequent and more uninhibited. Her insanity curve rises and falls in the same rhythm. There has not been a statistical survey of insanity according to race, sex, and age groups (Hudson, 2003).
Economic Factors
The economic situation accounts easily for the higher property criminality. There is some discrimination in court, though less than toward the male Negro. A comparison is rendered unsafe because of the fact that the white woman enjoys exceptional favoritism in court. After female delinquents have left the male sphere of influence (police, district attorneys, jurors, judges, witnesses) they are startled to be discriminated against in prisons where superintendents and matrons are of their own unbiased sex. All the adverse conditions massed around the colored woman, the fight against a new climate, against the forces of urban life, against hostile or indifferent human surroundings, and against a crushing poverty are focused in one accusing fact: the heavy mortality at a time when life has not yet run its course. In this great battle of adaptation there are many ways of losing. Death is total defeat; crime when detected and punished is another form of defeat. Both failures culminate at the same time (Hudson, 2003).
The criminality of violence, it is true, has a different meaning, although much of it has its more remote roots in the losing struggle for life. The virtual impasses into which the minority group has been pushed by the machine age, superseding their last resort, muscular strength, and by practice of discrimination, contradictory to professed political credo, has added to the insolubility of the situation. While the white race turns mental strain more and more against itself, as evidenced by the increase of suicides and wars, the colored race has not reached the stage of introversion (Davies et al 1998).
Victim and Race
Who is the victim of colored delinquency? Above all, against whom are the outbursts of violence directed? Larceny, burglary, and robbery are likely to nip the “haves,” that is, the white race, although exact data are missing. Frauds, requiring personal contact, are almost exclusively directed against members of the same race. If police can believe Southern figures, colored people were killed in more than 80 per cent of the cases by colored people. This is the significant result of a study on homicide in the City of Memphis. Although the “unknown” introduce some uncertainty, it can be stated that the colored homicide delinquency is directed mainly against its own race. The criminality of the yellow race has not been carefully investigated for two reasons. First of all, the group is numerically rather small. The native Chinese and Japanese population has not increased in the last forty years. The total Chinese population has been stagnant in spite of immigration Davies et al 1998).
Indians as a Unique Group
The unlimited hospitality of the Indian, one of his noblest properties, can be explained by this contempt of possession. There is, of course, the exception of cattle and horse stealing. Police officers have quoted the opinions of competent observers that horse stealing cannot be judged by legal standards. Like the pilfering adventures of urban gangs of juveniles, it is a predatory realization of a spirit of rivalry, more a dangerous game of chance than the violation of a recognized taboo. Part of the contest was the skillful retaking of the booty. Murder issues are often psychologically complex. Manslaughter has a different meaning in the two cultural spheres. Alcohol addiction renders assaults rather frequent, but wise superintendents have their own interpretation of a “dangerous weapon” or the “intent to kill.” and pilot many cases into Indian courts. Overcrowding, the states of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and remembrances of polygamous mores explain the relatively high rate of adultery and fornication and the illegitimacy figures. Since the Indian woman is continually busy, the grandparents assume a dominant role in the educational process, an interesting sociological phenomenon that civilization exhibits only under exceptional conditions, in the case of an illegitimate or a crippled child, or in wartime when the father has been drafted and the mother has entered a war plant. The public-school system and the changed occupation of the father, who no longer goes to war or on regular hunting expeditions but remains about the home, have undermined the authority and the sociological function of the grandparents (Davies et al 1998). Behind its outward manifestations-rather trivial as they are, to judge by the few facts critics know-stands not only a physiological battle for survival but a profound moral ailment. In curing the spiritual malady police may even begin to render the Indian more resistant against the inroads of his microscopic: enemies, tuberculosis and syphilis, and his destructive craving for the oblivion-giving poison of alcohol. The moral issue was stated clearly eighty years ago under the Lincoln administration (Faulkner, 2001).
Age Factors
Age is also considered as a possible factor of crime. Social stability seems to be linked exclusively with sociability, conformity to mores and laws. Yet it is true that the proportions of the population play a considerable role in shaking or maintaining social equilibrium. Often police find a disarrayed sex ratio; sometimes the age ratio likewise is affected by a variety of reasons. It may result from methods of birth control, which create at least a transitory unbalance of age groups. Increased or reduced mortality is a further cause. Migrations may replenish or deplete specific age groups. Birth control continues to reduce the proportion of young people. At the other end of the population pyramid, successful medical science has increased the weight of older age groups. Numerical unbalance, entailing many social disorders, is bound to make its appearance (Faulkner, 2001). Statistical figures are deceptive; the middle group shows a higher percentage (which is a transitory phenomenon and necessarily will fade away) but this higher proportion reminds us of a strong rope dancer whose pole is differently loaded and whose whole strength is of no use to him. The decrease of children and the increase of old people do not square the account from the numerical point of view. Children used to be and still are in rural areas cheap and non-organized helpers. Old people are essentially liabilities.
Urban vs Rural Populations
This general trend is modified by other tendencies. The urban differs from the rural population in age distribution as it does in sex ratio. One is tempted to say that the city in vital age groups is adult and female and that the rural farm areas are essentially male, these males being either very young or very old. Other disorders of the age distribution result from vice booms or peace or wartime booms, which invite “pleasure seekers.” Some twenty years ago a violent discussion was going on between a noted insurance statistician and the city of Memphis. The statistician had given Memphis the priority in the homicide rate of the United States (Faulkner, 2001).
Young Age
Youth is the scene of two nay three great physical and mental crises. There is first the crisis of puberty. The well-known somatic changes are closely connected with psychic alterations. Contradictory states of mind dominate the mental picture. The violent urge of wanderlust is relieved by torturing homesickness. The instinct of self-preservation is today strangely obscured, tomorrow overstressed. There is the tendency for direct and total solutions of all problems: ardent loyalty to your friends, hate for your enemies without bounds. The established authorities, including society, church, and family, are rejected and doubted, but at the same time new and voluntary loyalties are offered to questionable leaders (Cullen and Newell 1999).
During this period many mental disturbances stealthily make their appearance. The figures for suicide and fatal accidents rise. Puberty seems to mobilize all bodily and mental weaknesses of the young creature to a dangerous trial. In many individuals puberty is protracted or persists in the shape of distinct infantilisms. Critics notice adults with baby faces and a boy’s mentality. Often puberty is not terminated before the mid-twenties (Brownlee, 1998). At times it persists with the mental traits of the eternal child in spite of a long beard or a respectable chronological age. It is not so much the intelligence quotient which points to adolescence as the emotional and volitional setup. The biological change has in some respects great social significance. With the coming of puberty dispersive impulses develop. They attack the cohesion of the family (Davies et al 1998). They seem to be implanted by nature itself in all young creatures, animals and men alike. But this profound aversion to germ kindred, to the danger of self-fertilization in plants and incestuous relations in animals, in human beings not only dismembers the family group but robs the young being of a powerful shelter and plunges him into social conflicts (Cullen and Newell 1999).
Strong and primitive instincts of this kind admit no exception or qualification. It is incidental to nature’s demands that this organic repulsion happens to turn the youthful individual against all established groupings, including the most imperious of them, society. The idea that genuine criminality may be closely connected with the organic aggressiveness of puberty and is essentially a symptom of the puberty crisis, can be maintained. The blind urge to dislike, to despise, and then to leave the “nest,” this family phobia and this tendency to build up new protective groupings are traits of pubescence. Looking at the idols of youth, Police officers see how naïve and simplified their imaginations are and how they cling to a past which police officers have left behind many hundred years ago (Brownlee, 1998). All human achievement is scorned except a few primary qualities. The highest reputation is earned by “toughness” in whatever form it may materialize, as gangster or as G-man, as “wolf” or as self-exalting saint (Davies et al 1998).
From one point of view critics (Davies et al 1998) regard crime as an expression of the vital severance that nature provides to make room in the emptied nest for new generations and to prevent incest. This process is succeeded by an ersatz tendency to herd together in new groupings for mutual protection. These wild associations, while giving some degree of protection, simultaneously plunge the young being into new dangers. To define the complex situation in a few words, human evolution pursues the path of increasing socialization. One of the main factors in society is the protective function of the intact family group.
Yet life during puberty demands something totally different. It asks for dispersion, for release from family guardianship. Far from replacing the parental custody, the substitutes engender new social perils. In this fated conflict youth is both battlefield and victim. Closely related to the disorders of puberty is the growth crisis of the young being. Critics (Davies et al 1998) have two exact standards here, stature and weight. But exactly as weight measurements betray the destructive processes that go on in a psychosis, these rough physical manifestations conceal the most complicated internal transformations. The biological problem of youth is not yet exhausted by pointing at the two great crises of puberty and growth. There is in addition a functional crisis. This third crisis dominates the actions of the youth and is therefore directly connected with his delinquency. Guidance switches from the family to the gang, the movies, and other cheap transmitters of practical wisdom. Yet these substitutes are poor helpers when real physical or social danger must be faced. And even if the family remains together with shaken moral foundations, it may happen that the father, by clinging to his standards, may drive the adolescent into delinquency. Age gives each group a specific economic value. The baby is a liability, as may be the grandfather. The male of the age group twenty to forty, if healthy and skilled, has the greatest economic worth; he is the last to be fired in periods of depression. The youngster is still in the unproductive phase of training or, if employed, is paid less than the adult, since he lacks the skill or the reliability for which people pay highly in an adult. This economic inferiority is in strange contrast to the number and the intensity of his desires. No wonder that instead of resigning or postponing the fulfillment of his wishes this age group resorts to criminal methods. There is factually no other alternative, since even by the most diligent work he is not able to arrive at a legal satisfaction of his urges. Economically handicapped, the choice lies between foregoing or delinquency. Many youngsters, although making some money, either have to give it up to their parents or feel compelled to assist their family, perhaps a widowed mother who is unable to provide alone for half a dozen children (Davies et al 1998). The section of the population fifty years and older is incessantly increasing in relative magnitude. An obsolescence of the population structure affects group life, economics, and in the long run even philosophy. It is not correct to study that period of life when the aged individual is completely impaired in locomotion and muscular reactions, let us say the age of seventy and more. It is important to include the time of transition, when the first slight changes are felt but the body is still able to follow the impulses of the aging brain. It is probable that the very old and decrepit men are not easily reported and that their cases are frequently dismissed, since it is felt that punishment is not the right sort of treatment in these extreme cases. Looking, however, at fifty years of age and over, certain tendencies can be watched and certain conclusions can be drawn (Fagin 2006).
Older Age
The criminality of the older man resembles in many ways that of the woman. He is the instigator, or he commits crimes in which craftiness or the use of physical or chemical forces plays a role. At the same time, feeling that the normal methods of defeating a competitor are not any longer at his disposal, the older man falls back on primitive means of violence. Even the weak can use force if he chooses a weaker object, a woman or a child, or if he turns to strength-saving devices, weapons, poison, and deceit. Arson is one of the crimes with a high old-age rate. The prison sex criminal, therefore, is not “the” sex criminal, but a rather insignificant residual after simple discharges, suspended sentences, fine, or jail sentence have done their eliminating work. The prison sex criminal, therefore, is not “the” sex criminal, but a rather insignificant residual after simple discharges, suspended sentences, fine, or jail sentence have done their eliminating work (Fagin 2006).
The reason for the increased rate of sex crimes in older individuals is purely biological, but little studied in this country. Contributory factors are poor housing conditions and an irregular structure of the population by sexes and by age groups. One of the main protective mechanisms, spatial distance, is often reduced in family life or in crowded housing conditions with roomers who represent pseudo family members and economic forces (Fagin 2006). The significance of old age in other respects can only be indicated. Old age fills the ranks of the victim in many criminal activities just as youth does. Old men and women, because of their venerable appearance and their deficient memory for recent events, are dangerous and dubious witnesses. Old-age criminality is instructive from another point of view. By presenting sex criminals who were honest and decent men all their earlier life and by presenting a reforming process without reformer, it allows us a profound insight into the origin of crime. The numerical weight of the older age group is increasing; criminological interest must keep pace with this biological phenomenon (Shils et al 2001).
Conclusion
The research shows that gender, age and race have only particle impact on crime. Social and economic issues are more important factors of social disobedience and crime. By criminal justice system, crowd influence must be considered in determining whether The crowd influence need not be gang loyalty or group cohesion, it may be simply friendship, or love, or urge for recognition. Group life, like many other things, is double-actioned in social value. It is a tremendous socializing force, a form of banding together, offensively and defensively. That this protective device has its dark side is obvious. It is a multiplier of the leader’s qualities; a sound instrument of survival for the weaker as long as the group leader is equal to the task of common preservation, a deadly contrivance when following the leader means following him into extinction.
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