Jose Carillo's Forum

TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR

This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.

The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.

Study suggests religious teaching may make convicts justify crime

In “New Study Suggests Religion May Help Criminals Justify Their Crimes,” an article in the March 8, 2013 issue of Slate.com, book author Justine Peters reports on recent research by the academic journal Theoretical Criminology suggesting that far from causing offenders to repent for their sins, religious instruction might actually encourage crime instead.

To determine what effect, if any, religion has on their behavior, the researchers surveyed 48 “hardcore street offenders” in and around Atlanta, Georgia. The vast majority of those surveyed—45 out of 48 people—claimed to be religious, but the researchers found that the interviewees “seemed to go out of their way to reconcile their belief in God with their serious predatory offending. They frequently employed elaborate and creative rationalizations in the process and actively exploit religious doctrine to justify their crimes.”

Peters concedes that the research study’s sample size might be too small for its findings to be conclusive, and that as the authors themselves acknowledge, criminals certainly aren’t the only ones who tend to misunderstand religious teachings or to contort them for their own benefit. Still, Peters says that it points to the need for more reliable evidence to support the prevailing belief that religion-based outreach rehabilitation programs for criminals really work.

Read Justine Peters’ “New Study Suggests Religion May Help Criminals Justify Their Crimes” in Slate.com now!

RELATED READINGS:
In “Sometimes It’s Good Not to Forgive,” an article that came out in the February 22, 2013 issue of The New York Times, Alina Turgend observes that lately, there has been a surge of tales of celebrities who have committed criminal or scandalous public offenses trying to work their way back into the public’s affection. She says that aside from perhaps making people more cynical when the mighty fall, these famous social offenders and their stories do raise questions about forgiveness and atonement that are important outside the world of the celebrity.

Read Alina Turgend’s “Sometimes It’s Good Not to Forgive” in The New York Times now!

In “Chicago Installed Thousands of Cameras on its Rail Platforms. Crime Jumped by 21 Percent,” an article he wrote for the February 26, 2013 issue of Slate.com, Justine Peters reports that to step up its efforts to fight crime on the city’s railway system, the Chicago Transit Authority recently installed high-definition surveillance cameras in 850 rail cars in addition to the more than 3,600 cameras already deployed throughout the rail stations and trains. But Peters says that as the Chicago Sun-Times reported, rail-station crime— mostly theft, drug use, vandalism, and fare evasion—actually jumped in 2012 by 21 per cent year over year since the cameras were installed. “Given those stats,” Peters asks, “should we consider the CTA’s camera program a crime-fighting success or a money-wasting failure?”

Read Justine Peters’ “Chicago Installed Thousands of Cameras on its Rail Platforms. Crime Jumped by 21 Percent” in Slate.com now!

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