Do you know the difference between right and wrong?

Are you susceptible to committing a crime?

 

Have you ever asked yourself this question? Have you ever wondered why you haven’t committed a crime and stayed out of jail? The answers may be more complex than first assumed as your answers could reveal more about yourself than you are aware of in determining the real reasons for people to commit crimes.

One may simple answer the question that it was the way they grew up and having positive influences within their lives as they read and watch television show about crime fighters and superheroes.  It may also be influenced by strong family ties and staunch religious practices that kept you on the straight and narrow throughout your entire life. So if put simply as two words to describe your feelings about not committing a crime it comes down to honor and moral values.

But is there more to it than that? Is it more than character strengths and setting a strong set of values that keeps you from making bad decisions? Was it just those influences in your younger days from family friends and social contacts that taught you how to make better decisions? Strong parenting skills have a lot to do with this creation of values and development of the moral compass.

Role models are essentially the primary caregivers and care takers in your life that may without any coercion or direction channel your energy towards the positive side of being a law abiding citizen.  Certainly a big contributor to this concept would be your own experiences and involvement is social skill building that included sports, school plays and other social events that focused on working together as a team and creating equal importance to all that participated.

Whether you were an introvert or an extrovert didn’t matter as long as you were surrounded with people you could enjoy being around with and learn from each other the good things in life. Certainly, being a loner does not embrace such a concept thus it is important that you seek out socialization to a higher degree than solitude. Since solitude denies a child or youth outside influences there are no values to reinforce or replace the values that exists within the child at home or at school.

Then there are other factors that play into the development of a sound mind that sees obeying the law as a positive way to behave. Eliminating hypocrisy, lying and other deceptive practices allows better examples to be brought forward. Staying away for drugs, alcohol or other mind altering influences also strengthens the inner self to stay on a righteous path rather than think as a criminal would.

Seeing people go to jail or prison serves a good purpose of bringing awareness to the consequences of doing bad things in life. Accepting the positive values when you witness the results of negative values allows you to make better decisions about yourself and those around you.  However, it is plain to see that this does not impact everyone that is aware of the consequence of going to jail or prison for committing a crime.

Being raised by a solitary person or a “village” can make the difference and could make you realize there is more than one way to do something you are challenged with to overcome. This also applies to single parents and head of households that work their darnest to provide but often do not have the time to spend quality time to reinforce these positive values to their kids.

Emulation is a powerful tool. When you see your mother shoplift and plays it off as a minor event you can accept the behavior more readily than if your sister was caught shoplifting and your mother admonishes her for her misconduct and makes you realize that it was wrong.  Therefore siblings play a part of social developments as well.

Thus we are learning keywords such as parenting, discipline, rewards, acting appropriately, consistency in behaviors, love, support, and making mistakes. Each has its own reactionary reflex and must be done in such a manner where it either rewards the act or punishes the act. We are staying focused on being part of the solution and not the problem.

Last but not least is the way we perceive crime to be as a normative concept. We must in all reality admit there are many people who commit crimes who are never caught and fooling only themselves they are not criminals. Not being caught or detected does not exonerate you from guilt or being wrong about what you did. It is true that many youths have grown up believing there is a lesser degree of crime and accept that quickly but they will eventually graduate to a bigger crime and get caught.

Is it more than religion and good family skills or does nature impose its power on the morality of this question? Is it really about the concept of law and order or is it about acceptance of the traditional family values?

Do demographics play a part as well and do your region, neighborhood, poverty or rich influence your decisions? does living in a gang infested area determine your social values or will your family values survive or be compromised. The fact is that every person has different internal pressures to deal with and how they deal or react to these pressures determines their decision making to a rather straight up right or wrong decision to live with throughout their lives.

Do these factors play into the formula for positive-negative reinforcement actions or do they withstand such cultural influences. Have you considered any of the factors that played a major part in your life to keep you from being a criminal or a person with criminal habits? There are so many variances on this question as it plays into consideration individual weaknesses and strengths unlike the criminal that commit wrongful offenses but never really accept responsibility for what they do and are persistent in nature that they did not recognize what they did as doing wrong or why they did it in the first place.