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Crime opportunity theory suggests that offenders make rational choices and thus choose targets that offer a high reward with little effort and risk. The occurrence of a crime depends on two things: the presence of at least one motivated offender who is ready and willing to engage in a crime, and the conditions of the environment in which that offender is situated, to wit, opportunities for crime.
The medicalization of deviance, the transformation of moral and legal deviance into a medical condition, is an important shift that has transformed the way society views deviance. [ 3 ] : 204 The labelling theory helps to explain this shift, as behavior that used to be judged morally are now being transformed into an objective clinical diagnosis.
This theory emphasizes the environment that these crimes occur in. There are three major components of this theory. [1]Nodes; Paths; Edges; Nodes refers to the places people travel to and from and the crime generated in specific areas, for example bars, malls, parks, where people work, and the neighborhoods in which people live. [1]
Opportunism is regarded as unhealthy, as a disorder or as a character deficiency, if selfishly pursuing an opportunity is blatantly anti-social (involves disregard for the needs, wishes and interests of others). However, behavior can also be regarded as "opportunist" by scholars without any particular moral evaluation being made or implied ...
Illegitimate opportunity theory holds that individuals commit crimes not when the chances of being caught are low but from readily available illegitimate opportunities. The theory was first formalized by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin in 1960. [1] It is closely related to strain theory (developed by Merton, an influential figure in ...
Merton's theory on deviance stems from his 1938 analysis of the relationship between culture, structure and anomie. Merton argued that deviance is most likely to occur when there is a discrepancy between culturally prescribed goals and the legitimate means of obtaining them. [ 18 ]
Just as gender acts as an organizing principle in society, race and class also shape opportunity structures and social positions. [ 24 ] [ 26 ] A suburban upper-class, white woman, for instance, will likely encounter different forms of victimization in her lifetime than a lower-income, African American woman who lives in a crime-ridden ...
It is this lack of integration between what the culture calls for and what the structure permits that causes deviant behavior. Deviance then is a symptom of the social structure. Taylor et al. intend a combination of Interactionism and Marxism as a radical alternative to previous theories to formulate a "fully social theory of deviance".