Criminal behavior is learned. This means that criminal behavior is not inherited, as such; also, the person who is not already trained in crime does not invent criminal behavior.
· Criminal behavior is learned in interaction with other persons in a process of communication. This communication is verbal in many cases but includes gestures.
· The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups. Negatively, this means that impersonal communication, such as movies or newspaper, play a relatively unimportant part in committing criminal behavior.
· When criminal behavior is learned, the learning includes (a) techniques of committing the crime, which are sometimes very simple; (b) the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes.
· The specific direction of the motives and drives is learned from definitions of the legal codes as favorable or unfavorable. This different context of the situation is usually found in the US, where cultural conflict in relation to the legal code exists.
· A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law. This is the principle of differential association. When people become criminals, they do so not only because of contact with criminal patterns but also because of isolation from anticriminal patterns. Negatively, this means that associations that are neutral so far as crime is concerned have little or no effect on the genesis of criminal behavior.
· Differential associations may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity. Priority seems to be important principally through its selective influence, and intensity has to do with such things as the prestige of the source of a criminal or anticriminal pattern and with emotional reactions related to the association. These modalities would be rated in quantitative form and mathematical ratio, but the development of a formula in this sense has not been developed and would be very difficult.
· The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns involve all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning. Negatively, this means that the learning of criminal behavior is not restricted to the process of imitation. A person who is seduced, for instance, learns criminal behavior by association, but this would not be ordinarily described as imitation.
· While criminal behavior is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explained by those general needs and values since non-criminal behavior is an expression of the same needs and values
The GPI is designed to take fuller account of the well-being of a nation, only a part of which pertains to the size of the nation’s economy, by incorporating environmental and social factors which are not measured by GDP.
The centre hole of the model depicts the proportion of people that lack access to life’s essentials (healthcare, education, equity and so on) while the crust represents the ecological ceilings (planetary boundaries) that life depends on and must not be overshot.
