Doctoral Dissertation Research: Criminal Deviance as Affect Control

亚利桑那州大学的琳达·莫尔姆·史蒂文·纳尔逊了解犯罪原因是犯罪学的基本使命。根据情感控制理论，人们的行为在很大程度上是为了维护他们基于文化的意义系统。通过分析图森附近的亚利桑那州惩教署设施中被判有罪的罪犯通常如何分配和控制与犯罪有关的情感意义，本研究希望识别和表征亚文化创造的象征视角，这些视角是支撑和产生习惯性犯罪行为的基础。由情绪控制理论预测得出的假设通过对囚犯在与图森市一站式工作中心非犯罪客户面对面访谈时创作的虚构犯罪故事的实证分析来检验。具体地说，这项研究考察了囚犯犯罪的视角是否在物品的标签或概念的公认定义中显示了导致犯罪的亚文化意义系统；这种亚文化意义系统是否以及以何种方式受到监狱联想的影响；对自我的负面意义是否发挥了作用；以及，一旦数据可用，它是否是未来犯罪活动的良好预测。这些假设包含了几个支撑著名犯罪学理论观点的基本假设，如文化偏差理论、差异联想理论和标签理论，因此本研究同时检验了重要犯罪理论的解释能力。然而，通过使用情感语义量表来衡量一种文化或亚文化的意义系统的内容，并根据实际生活事件中经验确定的规则对可能的行为进行数学预测，情感控制理论改进了这些重要思想的以前的提法。更广泛的影响。这项研究有助于对犯罪行为原因的学术讨论，探索文化、联想和行为之间的联系，并提出衡量文化信息的潜在有效方法。在犯罪学领域，这项研究如果成功，可以恢复对犯罪行为的文化解释，这些解释由于缺乏更好的方法来衡量和预测其概念而失宠，但包含了许多直观上有用的东西。对于揭示监狱内的文化偏差和社会学习过程的调查结果，有许多实际的政策含义。这项研究的意义可能会建议不同的囚犯治疗计划、机构改革和不同的早期干预策略，以预防犯罪。

SES-0526337Linda MolmSteven NelsonUniversity of ArizonaUnderstanding the causes of crime is the basic mission of criminology. According to affect control theory, people behave largely to maintain their culturally based meaning systems. By analyzing how convicted offenders in Arizona Department of Corrections facility near Tucson typically assign and control affective meanings relating to crime, this study hopes to identify and characterize the subculturally created symbolic perspectives underlying and producing habitual criminality. Hypotheses derived from affect control theory predictions are tested by empirical analyses of fictional crime stories created by inmates during face to face interviews with those of non-criminal clients of the One Stop Job Center in Tucson. Specifically, the study examines whether inmate crime perspectives display a criminogenic subcultural meaning system in the labeling of objects or in the accepted definitions of concepts; whether and in what manner this subcultural meaning system is affected by prison associations; whether negative meanings for the self play a role; and, once data is available, whether it is a good predictor of future criminal activity. These hypotheses incorporate several of the basic assumptions that underlie well-known criminological theoretical perspectives, such as cultural deviance theory, differential association theory, and labeling theory, so this study concomitantly tests the explanatory power of important theories of crime. Affect control theory improves upon previous formulations of these important ideas, however, by using affective semantic scales to measure the content of a culture's or subculture's meaning systems and by mathematically predicting likely behaviors based on the empirically determined rules for their combination in a real life event. Broader Impacts. This study contributes to the academic discussion on the causes of criminal behavior, probing the links between culture, association, and behavior, and suggesting potentially fruitful ways of measuring cultural information. In the field of criminology this study can, if successful, rehabilitate cultural explanations of criminality, which have fallen out of favor for want of a better method to measure and predict its concepts, but which contain much that is intuitively useful. There are many practical policy implications to findings that illuminate cultural deviance and social learning processes within the prison. Implications of this research could suggest different inmate treatment programs, institutional changes, and different early intervention tactics to prevent crime in the first place.