Human Behavior

"Resistance to abuse at work is a complex, dynamic process in which workers fight to have a voice and are often punished for their efforts. If and when organizational authorities finally intervene, many have already left the organization or suffered years of abuse. The human cost is staggering and workers’ stories heartbreaking. Neither is resistance straightforward; worker dissent is easily reframed as deviant behavior by those for whom the resistance is threatening. Nonetheless, workers faced with bullying at work say they have a moral imperative to act against the injustice and in some cases actually alter their situations. Furthermore, workers often collectively organize against abusers, even in the absence of formal unions. Organizations would be well-informed to heed these voices. Resistance and the emotional communication that springs from it are warning signs that "act as signaling devices when expected appropriate norms of communication are violated" (Waldron, 2000, p.72). These should not be ignored. Organizational authorities must learn to "read the traces" of resistance to bullying, diagnose the problem early, and construct effective interventions."

"In their book “Cultural Criminology” Ferel and Sanders (1995) argue that to make sense of crime, it is necessary to make sense of culture. The authors propose the development of a “cultural criminology” that recognizes criminality and criminalization as cultural enterprises that must be studies through a synthesis of divergent perspectives including social, feminist, and cultural theories. From this perspective, criminal behavior (and its control) is constructed, in part, through media, popular culture, and the “aesthetics” of authority that dictates what is beautiful,” decent,” clean,” and “appropriate” (p.15). Criminal identities are born and shaped within culture and within criminal subcultures0collective criminal aesthetic and style, symbolism, and meaning are important factors in understanding the criminality. Ferrell and Hamm (1998) suggest that “jailhouse criminology,” which has attempted to study crime through official sources, social science surveys, and traditional quantitative measures, has prohibited true understanding of crime or “criminological verstehen.” Criminologists have neglected findings produced through ethnographic studies that offer the insider perspective on crime and deviance. To truly understand criminal behavior, researchers must study crime with quantitative (surveys, available data) and qualitative (ethnographic) methods that together are able to tell the complete story of crime. For example, official statistics tell us things like what percentage of armed robbers are male, what percentage of known serial killers have been physically and sexually abused, the correlation between age and violence, and so on. However, this sort of information tells us little about the personal style and aesthetics of bank robbers, the nature of the communities and subcultures within which they spend their time, the specific ways in which girls and women learn that aggression is not a tool with which they are able to obtain resources, the process by which a serial killer comes to attach meaning to particular types of victims or crime scene trophies, or the complex nature of the collusion between youth culture, media and pop culture, alternative style and meaning, and crime."

"(3) Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority."

"(5) Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates a desire for emulation."

"(6) In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds."

"(7) Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay, physical agony, the gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated."

"If the church ... does not make God's liberation of the oppressed central in its mission and proclamation, how can it rest easy with a condemned criminal as the dominant symbol of its message?"

"Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good."

"The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind."

"But many a crime deemed innocent on earth Is registered in Heaven; and these no doubt Have each their record, with a curse annex'd."

"The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless."

"It is written ' Thou shalt not kill,' so because he has killed, are we to kill him? No, that's impossible."

"Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass."

"Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot."

"Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime."

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, no matter how justified, is not a crime."

"Plan harm for another and harm yourself most, the evil we hatch always comes home to roost."

"Almost all crime depends on the acquiescence of the victim. If the victim refuses his assigned role, the criminal is placed at a disadvantage, one so severe that it usually takes an understanding and compassionate judge to set things right. I had broken the rules; I had fought back."

"Nine-tenths of our crimes an' calamities are made possible by th' automobile. It has unleashed all th' pent-up criminal tendencies o' th' ages. It's th' central figure in murders, hold-ups, burglaries, accidents, elopements, failures an' abscondments. It has well nigh jimmed th' American home.... No girl is missin' that wuzn' last seen steppin' in a strange automobile.... An' ther hain't a day rolls by that somebuddy hain't sellin' ther sewin' machine, or ther home, or somethin' t' pay on an automobile.... Maybe th' jails an' workhouses are empty, but that's not because th' world is gittin' better. It's because all th' criminals escape in automobiles."

"My servant ... was numbered with the transgressors."

"When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, people's hearts are filled with schemes to do wrong."

"People try to excuse their brutality by saying that it is the custom; but a crime does not cease to be a crime because many commit it. Karma takes no account of custom; and the karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all... The fate of the cruel must fall also upon all who go out intentionally to kill God's creatures, and call it "sport"."

"The unpunished crime is never regretted. We weep over the consequence, not over the fault."

"Any time you think of a decent crime, there are fifty ways to fuck it up. If you can think of twenty-five, you're a genius."

"Why? What crime has he committed?" asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, "Crucify him!"

"The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you."

"The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over."

"“Sympathy with a person who sins”, is not the same as sympathy with the sin or crime of which he is guilty. We may feel sorry for the plight of the murderer or even understand the circumstances which led him to his crime; we may not feel sympathy with the wrong which he has done."

"(A) The presentation of crimes against the law, human or divine, is often necessary for the carrying out of the plot. But the presentation must not throw sympathy with the criminal as against the law, nor with the crime as against those who must punish it."

"The stinking puddle from which usury, thievery and robbery arises is our lords and princes. They make all creatures their property—the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plant in the earth must all be theirs. Then they proclaim God's commandments among the poor and say, "You shall not steal.""

"People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."

"Rursus prosperum ac felix scelus virtus vocatur; sontibus parent boni, ius est in armis, opprimit leges timor."

"Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes."

"If little faults, proceeding on distemper, Shall not be wink'd at, how shall we stretch our eye When capital crimes, chew'd, swallow'd, and digested, Appear before us?"

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream."

"Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damn'd, Hubert."

"Tremble, thou wretch, That has within thee undivulged crimes, Unwhipp'd of justice."

"There shall be done A deed of dreadful note."

"Theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft."

"We may isolate two ways in which these "sub-political" traditions affect the early working-class movement: the phenomena of riot and of the mob, and the popular notions of an Englishman's "birthright". For the first, we must realise that there have always persisted popular attitudes towards crime, amounting at times to an unwritten code, quite distinct from the laws of the land. Certain crimes were outlawed by both codes: a wife or child murderer would be pelted and execrated on the way to Tyburn. Highwaymen and pirates belonged to popular ballads, part heroic myth, part admonition to the young. But other crimes were actively condoned by whole communities—coining, poaching, the evasion of taxes (the window tax and tithes) or excise or the press-gang. Smuggling communities lived in a state of constant war with authority, whose unwritten rules were understood by both sides; the authorities might seize a ship or raid the village, and the smugglers might resist arrest—"but it was no part of the smuggling tactics to carry war farther than defence, or at times a rescue, because of the retaliatory measures that were sure to come... On the other hand, other crimes, which were easily committed and yet which struck at the livelihood of particular communities—sheep-stealing or stealing cloth off the tenters in the open field—excited popular condemnation"

"From a single crime know the nation."

"Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community."

"The sole means of ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom."

"My hope is that students, scholars, mental health and criminal justice practitioners, and others who read this book will come away reminded of several important things that can take us further toward preventing, controlling, and responding to crime. First, crime is a common everyday occurrence with very real and often tragic consequences we are all forced to deal with at some level in our everyday lives, whether we are offenders, victims, witnesses, citizens, jurors, or professionals in criminal justice, mental health, or social service. Second, feasible and effective solutions to the prevention and control of crime can come only from the conjoining of scientific and practical perspectives of different disciplines, keeping in mind that nothing about real crime will ever fall as neatly into place as the theories suggest and no empirical study can be so perfectly designed as to provide definitive answers. Third, crime types included in this text that are rarely covered in traditional criminology texts, such as political and copycat crimes, will hopefully inspire researchers to pursue otherwise untouched avenues of research."

"[C]riminal behavior is not a static phenomenon. Crime is a subcultural and cultural product-a human behavior that changes in form and meaning across time, place, culture, subculture, gender, and so on. The hope is that this book will inspire students, researchers, criminal justice professionals, and citizens to think creatively about crime, to work together across disciplines and arenas to make use of the best theories and practices, and to never forget that for every crime that is prevented, every offender who is (even slightly) reformed, every victim who is better supported, every citizen who is less afraid of crime, and every criminal justice professional who is given better tools with which to do his or her job, many lives and communities will be affected and improved."

"[C]rime is a social, interpersonal, and personal harm that, more often than not, has tragic and enduring consequences."

"If it were possible to produce a complete catalog of human criminal behavior over time and around the world, such a document would likely be one of the most fascinating reads of all time. <br. The popularity of TV crime shows like Law and Order, CSI, and the long-running NYPD Blue; films such as Taxi Driver, Silence of the Lambs, Natural Born Killers, and Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, and Ocean’s Thirteen; and classic literature such as In Cold Blood and Crime and Punishment suggests that most people are fascinated with the deviant and criminal side of human behavior. However, fictional accounts of crime (many of which are loosely or not-so-loosely based on real events) rarely compare to the reality of crime. Any law enforcement officer, medical examiner/death investigator, crime scene technician, criminal attorney, judge, juror, criminologist/researcher, or citizen who has been exposed to some or all aspects of real-life criminal events knows that real-life crime is just as fascinating as if not more so (and in some cases much more horrific) than what our imaginations can come up with."

"On the other hand, media focus on the most extreme variants of criminal behavior often makes people forget that most crime does not involve stranger abductions, sadistic torture, chopping off body parts, elaborate Internet schemes, or using commercial airliners as bombs. Although the real-life catalog of bizarre and extreme crimes is filled with horror, tragedy, and untold human harm and loss, it includes an even larger list of more benign offenses that most TV producers would have no interest in devoting a 1-hour prime time show to; and even if they did, most of us would probably rather do our laundry than watch."

"In some ways, crimes that fall on the more “normal” side of the continuum of criminal behavior are even more interesting because they involve regular people in usual settings making decisions (some spontaneous, some not) about violating the law. The nature and dynamics of these sorts of everyday crimes provide a great deal of information about the root of criminal behavior-in fact, probably more than the extreme forms of criminal behavior, which can often be explained in terms of severe psychopathology or social or political conflict."

"Crime exists only to the extent to which behavior is legally defined as criminal by the larger society and culture. In some contexts (e.g., war, executions in correctional contexts) it is not a crime to kill another human being. In some states (e.g., Nevada) it is not a crime to engage is prostitution. Until 2003 engaging in a homosexual act was a crime in many states in the United States, and it is currently illegal in some places around the world. (1) “Crime is not an entity in fact but an entity in law” (Radzinowicz, 1966, p. 22) and “technically speaking, there is no ‘crime’ without ‘criminal law’” (Shelden, 2002, p.23). “Criminal behavior is a special category of behavior that has been defined through socio-cultural-legal-political-economic processes as outside of the bounds of the law.” This is important in reviewing criminal behavior research because theoretical concepts central to understanding the mechanisms of criminal behavior such as “antisocial behavior”, “aggression”, “psychopathy”, or “deviance” are sometimes confounded with criminality in the research literature and popular discourse. For example studies on aggression are often conducted in laboratory settings with animals or humans who are engaged in some laboratory task. “Can research on aggression in rats be applied to human crime and violence? Are the processes that produce antisocial behavior, such as lying or cheating on a spouse, the same processes as are involved in violating the law? Can theories explaining how people develop deviant identities also explain how people develop criminal identities? Much of the current knowledge base on crime and criminal behavior draws from research focusing on these other concepts."