The use of the insanity defense is clearly subject to sociological and societal factors, such as the statistically greater willingness to believe a man who kills his child is competent vs. A woman. However, the authors contend that this ignores the many cases where the defense and the prosecution both agree that the criminal in question was not competent and was operating upon a different schema of 'reality' that affected his or her ability to judge circumstances in the same fashion as a sane person. (It might be argued, in the specific example cited by the article, that men cannot suffer from hormonally caused imbalances like postpartum depression)
However, the problem remains that forensic psychiatry is not an exact science, although the public may wish "expert testimony" to be so. Diminished capacity in particular, where a person may have a mental illness but still knows right from wrong, can be difficult for laypersons to understand. Illnesses such as Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome may affect person's abilities to make judgments, and be the result of a variety of past stressors in the person's environment.
All theories of criminal guilt or lack of guilt are based in the presupposition that sane persons have the free will to act as they do, and that there are different gradations of sanity. A person with PTSD might hold a job, and be able to drive a car, but is more sensitive to trauma as a result of their past, and may react differently than someone who does not have PTSD. A person like Andrea Yates might commit a horrific action, but may be judged legally insane because of psychotic postpartum depression, as she believed he is 'saving' his/her child from Satan by drowning them in the bathtub. Even a person taking a sleeping pill on his doctor's order who and sleepwalks and drives a car into an embankment, and unintentionally causes harm to a fellow motorist is not operating at full mental capacity to form an intent. In both instances, a person does not will the consequences of his or her action and thus is legally insane or not responsible because they cannot form a criminal intent. Crime is about means and opportunity -- but also motivation, according to this assumption, and...
Anomie and Alienation Lost, With No Possibility of Being Found Running through the literature of classical late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century sociology are themes of isolation, of the poverty of life lived in isolated cells, of the fragility of a life in which we can almost never make authentic connections with other people, in which we are lost even to ourselves. We have -- and this "we" includes the entire population of
E. money and tangible acquisitions) but in unconventional, deviant, or criminal ways (Schmalleger, 2009). The other significant finding of the empirical literature is that racism also relates to Strain Theory in that social ostracism and oppression are noxious stimuli that contribute to the strain experienced by individuals (Agnew, 1992; Broidy, 2001). In that regard members of racial minority communities who are mistreated and subjected to negative messages from the predominant social
As in Durkheim's day, persons often come to cities, leaving family and home behind to seek their fortunes but only find loneliness. Also, one would also expect to see suicides more often in college students and young worker who traveled far from their original homes, and were unable to adapt to a new community. These persons are often forced to form social ties with strangers, and forced to create
Following from this is the assumption that ideological connections may be the precursor to more definite and practical interactions between these groups and organizations. In other words, terrorist groups, whether representing different nationalistic and ideological persuasions, can also be linked by shared concerns, objectives and perceptions. The increase in the ease of communications and the Internet has also accelerated the possibly of these connections. This has highlighted the threat of
Whereas, in the original thesis, the main contrast was between repressive and restitutive sanctions, in the later article the contrast involves a classification of crimes into those that are fundamentally religious in character -- offences against shared moral tenets that constitute the collective conscience -- and those that are "individual," in the sense of involving the essentially private interests of increasingly autonomous individuals. Penal sanctions also change in quantity
Wherever modern capitalism has begun its work of increasing the productivity of human labor by increasing its intensity, it has encountered the immensely stubborn resistance of this leading trait of pre-capitalistic labor" (Weber, 1908). Even if Marx and Weber were in a state of disagreement over the importance of ideals or material realities in propelling the injustices of capitalism, the idea that ideas could change the world, coupled with Freud's
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