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The immediate social environment is primarily responsible for criminality in our society, e.g., broken families, poor parenting, low quality educational experiences, delinquent peer relations, poverty, lack of equal economic opportunity, inadequate socialization to the values implicit in the American culture, etc.

Crime occurs when the forces that bind people to society are weakened or broken. When the social bonds that individuals have to parents, peers, and important social institutions like the school or the workplace are strong, they fear that their criminal activity may jeopardize their relative position in society and refuse to run the risk of losing meaningful social relationships, careers, etc. Generally, adolescents have weaker bonds to conventional society than adults.

An understanding of personal choice is commonly based in a conception of rationality or rational choice

he central points of this theory are: (1) The human being is a rational actor, (2) Rationality involves an end/means calculation, (3) People (freely) choose all behavior, both conforming and deviant, based on their rational calculations, (4) The central element of calculation involves a cost benefit analysis: Pleasure versus Pain, (5) Choice, with all other conditions equal, will be directed towards the maximization of individual pleasure, (6) Choice can be controlled through the perception and understanding of the potential pain or punishment that will follow an act judged to be in violation of the social good, the social contract, (7) The state is responsible for maintaining order and preserving the common good through a system of laws (this system is the embodiment of the social contract), (8) The Swiftness, Severity, and Certainty of punishment are the key elements in understanding a law's ability to control human behavior.

ruth be told, we human beings are very good at refusing to accept facts or scientific evidence we do not want to hear. There is a long history of our doing so. It is a history that continues to this day.

In the nineteenth century, the predominant theory of ignorance was grounded in the notion of information access. People were ignorant, went the belief, because they did not have access to information. They could not know what they needed to know. From that follows the natural supposition that simply by finding a way of providing access to information, ignorance will depart, and knowledge will emerge.

Though Ehrenreich still sees hope and a strong drive to succeed within this community, she fears a future uprising as people "are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption."

Many commentators have viewed the monster as Dr. Frankenstein's double, an example of the doppelgänger archetype. In a similar vein, critics have discussed Dr. Frankenstein and the monster as embodying Sigmund Freud's theory of id and ego.

"Smith, in his confusion, jealousy, anger, disappointment - and spite - reactively and instinctively thrust that hunting knife into Herbert Clutter's throat (Smith may also simultaneously have been displacing his anger onto the victim, thereby symbolically killing his feckless paramour).

be taken in by this obvious charlatan with his cockamamie racial origin theories and his sad parade of pregnant secretaries?

White people are not evil by nature, Malcolm now says, but become evil through social conditioning, which means that a white person can choose not to be evil.

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms

Taking rights and obligations to be intimately tied within a full human rights educational regime, I argue for the role of education in establishing and realizing freedom from poverty as a human right.

The real secret to Ehrenreich's book, though, is yuppie voyeurism. Nickel and Dimed is an interesting read. It approaches the working poor like a separate species -- and for most of Ehrenreich's readers, they are.

Ehrenreich's book does have historical precedent, but it's not Orwell. It's the illustrated guides to the London underworld so popular with the Victorians. Ehrenreich's official conclusion: It's difficult, if not impossible, to keep afloat on $7 an hour. Her implicit conclusion: The poor are different from you and me. They look different. They eat different foods. They live in places middle-class people rarely go. They smoke. They even think differently from the way we do. They distrust collective endeavors. They're not stupid, but they're not interested in politics or other abstractions. Above all, they instinctively dislike change, even when change might improve their lives.

And sooner or later, she will be invited to testify before Congress, probably about the effects of welfare reform and the subsequent growth of the service economy.