NCJ Number
91454
Date Published
1983
Length
11 pages
Annotation
Contemporary social research provides much evidence for the importance of situational variables in explaining complex social behavior, including behavior in correctional settings.
Abstract
Our criminal justice system is obsessed with handling cases based on the moral analysis of offenders, whereby decisionmakers attempt to account for all criminal behavior in terms of the personal characteristics of those who engage in it. Individual responsibility is the basic operating assumption of the system. Further, moral and psychological assessments are made under conditions that virtually require simplistic, stereotyped thinking. Moral development theory, which attributes specific behavior to a person's being at some precisely defined stage of moral development, reinforces the view that all behavior can be attributed to an individual's personal characteristics. What distinguishes most criminals for the lawabiding, however, is not their deranged psyches, pathological personality traits, or stunted moral development, but the systematic exposure of these persons to criminogenic social conditions such as poverty and racism. The most criminogenic situtation to which a person can be exposed is that devised by the criminal justice system itself, i.e., imprisonment. Greater attention must be paid to the debilitating conditions that restrict the probability that lawabiding behaviors will emerge for persons consistently exposed to such conditions. Sixteen references are provided.