You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Most Influential Theories of Crime Causation. Your paper should be a minimum of 2000 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Most Influential Theories of Crime Causation. Your paper should be a minimum of 2000 words in length. Criminological theory not only refers to explanations of criminal behavior but also to explanations of police behavior and the behavior of attorneys, prosecutors, judges, correctional personnel, victims and other actors in the criminal justice system. After completing graduate studies he was employed at the University of Minnesota between 1926 and 1929 and solidified his reputation as one of the country’s leading criminologists. During this period, his focus was on Sociology as a scientific enterprise whose goal was the understanding and control of social problems, including crime (Gaylord, 1988:13). Later he moved to Indiana University and became the founder of the Bloomington school of Criminology at Indiana University. During that time, he published 3 books, including Twenty Thousand Homeless Men (1936), The Professional Thief (1937), and the third edition of Principles of Criminology (1939). In 1939 he was elected president of the American Sociological Society, and in 1940 was elected president of the Sociological Research Association. According to him, "Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding delinquency and crime as a social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the process of making laws, breaking laws, and of reacting toward the breaking of laws. These processes are three aspects of a somewhat unified sequence of interactions. The objective of Criminology is the development of a body of general and verified and principles and of other types of knowledge regarding this process of law, crime, and reaction to crime." (1974: 3) He was the first twentieth-century criminologist to forcefully argue that criminal behavior was learned. His theory of differential association, developed in 1934 and 1947, was that persons who become criminal do so because of contacts with criminal patterns and isolations from non-criminal patterns. Differential association theory was Sutherland's major sociological contribution to Criminology. similar in importance to strain theory and social control theory. These theories all explain deviance in terms of the individual's social relationships. Sutherland's theory departs from the pathological perspective and biological perspective by attributing the cause of crime to the social context of individuals. "He rejected biological determinism and the extreme individualism of psychiatry, as well as economic explanations of crime. His search for an alternative understanding of crime led to the development of differential association theory. In contrast to both classical and biological theories, differential association theory poses no obvious threats to the humane treatment of those identified as criminals." (Gaylord, 1988:1) Sutherland argued that the concept of differential association and differential social organization could be applied to the individual level and to aggregation (or group) level respectively. The first explicit statement of the theory of differential association appears in the 1939 edition of Principles of Criminology and in the fourth edition of it, he presented his final theory.