Conceptual Clarification:

As written in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology by Jeff Ferrell, Cultural Criminology explores the ways in which cultural dynamics intertwine with the incidences of crime and practices of crime control in contemporary society. Having evolved around 1995 as a distinct notion on its own merit, Cultural Criminology looks at criminal incidences as an occurrence in the intersection of long-standing social issues, subculture coping mechanisms and a momentary trigger event. This wider cultural perception allows for understanding the influence of perceived threats of crimes, public efforts at crime control and the debatable politics of State control of criminal behaviour. With the rapid globalisation of the human community and visible effects of enmeshed cultural practices, the understanding of cultural criminology in devising effective crime control mechanisms become crucial.

By definition, a culture is a shared social custom usually native to a geographic location or ethnic community, and includes but is not limited to language, norms, belief, art, music, mythology, rituals, religion, literature, values, recreation and knowledge. A sub-culture is a self-organized, rather group-organized set of shared interests, lifestyle, beliefs, norms, styles and tastes.

Cultural transmission theory proposes that human behaviour, prosocial and antisocial, is transmitted from the exhibited traits of the society or culture surrounding a person. Behaviour can also evolve from the transmitted characteristics in childhood into different attributes in adulthood. Overall, from a social science perspective, cultural transmission is a means of imbibing behavioural information in a one-directional way.

Principle Characteristics:

The criminological version of cultural transmission theory is cultural deviance theory. In essence, cultural deviance theory argues that crime is caused by being in the presence of, and influenced by, deviant people, especially in the developmental phases of one’s life. Criminologists explain that even response to threats, response to economic distress, adherence to the legal code are included in the traits that are transmitted from the people that someone gets to witness on a regular basis. This may be family, neighbours, friends, local authority figures, and so on.

The cultural transmission theory of deviance is generally explained in two forms: direct transmission and indirect transmission.

1. The first form, called direct transmission, states that the behaviour is passed down through the direct actions of the parents or other authority figure to children in their developmental phase. For example, when a child is subjected to harsh criticisms and abuse regularly, they take on the similar perception towards others.
2. The second form, called indirect transmission states that the behaviour is passed down through the indirect actions of the parents or other authority figure to children. For example, when a child notices the parents mis-treating people from different economic or caste or gender groups than their own, the child learns the same non-tolerant behaviour towards different groups in the human community.

Despite the differences between the direct and indirect transmission theory of deviance, the cultural transmission theory of deviance states that certain behaviours, attitudes, and beliefs are passed down from one generation to the next through the actions and behaviours of parents, other authority figures and presumed role models.

---