Decline in Violent Crimes

(photo courtesy of newyorkshitty.com)

   Hey all! There's some good news for all of mankind: violent crime has gone down significantly! In fact, since 1994, violent crime has gone down a whopping two thirds (2/3). On this website here, it gives you a brief collection of data from various sources, and includes a few links of some graphs to prove that this is happening. Wondering why? Well, go to this website here. This article gives a hypothesis of 6 reasons that they believe that this is happening, and quite believable and research-able ones at that.

Everyone's a Deviant

"Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."
Hannah Arendt 
(courtesy of brainyquote.com)

    After years of my father telling me that there were only two groups of people in the world, deviants and non-deviants, I finally discovered that there was a difference between a deviant and a criminal. Everyone is a deviant in their own way; a criminal is someone who breaks laws that are established by government. A deviant is someone who acts differently compared to societies standards. For instance, I may not be a criminal, but I do not follow certain social norms when it comes to gender. I may like cooking, Paris, and sparkly things, however I do enjoy reading comics, worshiping Batman, and playing the occasional video game. Since these are things that are most commonly associated with the male gender, I am therefore a deviant. Anyone who says that they are in no way, shape, or form a deviant, obviously are kidding themselves.

My Father's Daughter

   Life has never been easy for me, as my father is a Crime Scene Investigator and a Police Officer. I've never been able to get away with the smallest of things; any lie or wrong doing was almost immediately caught by him. However difficult life may have seemed at the time, my father raised me to be a good, productive citizen. He taught me right from wrong, or what was considered deviance and what was considered to be socially acceptable behavior.

 

                                                      (Left to right: me, my step-mother, and my father)
      Going to college and joining a sorority has exposed me to almost all of the behavior that my father told me was "bad". It was quite a shock; I knew that things like this went on, I just didn't know that there was practically another culture built around deviant behavior. I chose this as my first topic as it has had a big impact on my life growing up, the present, and my future.

    Being a part of the Greek system, I figured that I would focus on the deviance that so plainly occurs within. I found an article from the University of Missouri discussing drinking within fraternities and sororities. However, they have discovered that this is something that most Greeks only experiment heavily with in their college years. It also shows that those who join the Greek system are more likely to be heavy drinkers than students outside of it. The article explains why this happens, and also the risks included with heavy drinking in the Greek system. You can follow a link to the article here.

                                                                (photo courtesy of reallychill.org)