Overview - Analog & Digital Crime Problem

This overview covers the following topics:

• What the course is about — its key concepts

• How you'll learn — read, discuss, and annotate books

• What to do after reading this overview

Key Concepts

This course is about crime and social control. Crime is an act prohibited by the government. Control is the defining of and responding to wrongdoing.

Two aspects of crime are offending and victimization. Offending is committing a crime. Examples are murdering, robbing, assaulting, burglarizing, stealing, defrauding, vandalizing, trespassing, and selling illicit goods or services. Victimization is subjection to a crime. Examples are being murdered, robbed, assaulted, burgled, stolen from, defrauded, or your property vandalized or trespassed on.

Crime may be distinguished as serious or disorderly. Serious crime is that which causes substantial harm. Examples are murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, larceny-theft, and arson. Disorder crime is uncivil or boorish behavior. Examples are drug use and distribution, prostitution, graffiti, and unlicensed vending.

Control may be preventive or reactive. Preventive control is trying to stop a wrongdoing before it occurs. Examples are keeping an eye out, locking doors, or using a password to protect electronic devices. Reactive control is the handling of a wrongdoing after it occurs. Examples are fines, imprisonment, breaking up with someone, and gossiping about them.

Control may be formal or informal. Formal control is the prevention and handling of crime by government representatives. Examples are legislation, policing, prosecution, and incarceration. Informal control is the prevention and handling of wrongdoing by anyone else (i.e., non-governmental actors). Examples are parents "grounding" their kids, lovers breaking up, neighbors complaining to each other, and drug dealers retaliating.

Crime and control are analog or digital to they extent they involve, respectively, continuous or discrete signals of data. For further details, see the Wikipedia articles on analog signals and digital signals. To best understand analog crime and control you should understand its digital forms, and vice versa. Therefore, this course is part of a two-part set, with one on the Analog Crime Problem and the other on the Digital Crime Problem.

Reading, Discussing, & Annotating Books

Everyone will read six books on crime and control. The books are on different topics, but all of them inform how, why, and to what effect people commit and are subjected to various forms of crime and control.

Reading is how (social scientific) ideas spread and develop. Ditto for other ideas, such as those in the humanities and religion. You can learn anything from reading: facts; myths; true stories; fictional ones; how to live your best life; what it is like to be someone else; and more. When done with college life, a lot of it disappears — but books remain. They are essential to a lifetime of learning.

You decide which books to read, from a set of options provided on the page for Books. This empowers you to pursue whatever interests you the most. We learn more when we are more interested, after all.

You will annotate and write a discussion post for each book. The value of these exercises are fully explained on the pages, My Annotation and My Discussion Posts. Those pages also describe how how exactly to do the assignments.

What Now?

Next, you should familiarize yourself with everything in the course. To be clear, that means click and review every webpage found on the homepage. That should be done no later than a couple days from now; it’ll take up two hours.

While reading, you will learn what to do after familiarizing yourself with the course. I am hoping for your success.