Overview Of Theories Applicable To Public Policy
Public policy is, basically, any principle of injury to the public — that is a good basis for denying any legality to a contract or any other type of transaction. There are multiple kinds of theories from this section that would fall under the possibility of public policy — cultural deviance theory, Cloward and Ohlin’s theory of differential opinion, and subculture of violence theory to name a few of them.
As from reading in our section, cultural deviance theory basically states that the crime rates would depend of the location — as in close to a city or not, and that the crime rates are in a transitional zone that are consistently the highest. This also means/states that the community would be more responsible for the crime, rather than the individual. Based on this theory and the definition of public policy — a system of laws, courses of action, regulatory measure and the funding of priorities that are concerning any given topic that deals with the governmental entity or its representatives — the cultural deviance theory could and should exist. Think about it, if we had a community that would be held responsible for things rather than the individuals — that would be crazy, however, how many people get upset over someone “breaking” into their car, when the door was left unlocked? It is absolutely crazy; however, I can see how this would be flawed in the year 2018.
The next type of theory from this section is Cloward and Ohlin’s theory of differential opinion. This theory states that crime would result in higher numbers of differential opportunities/opinion and that is not from the lack of legitimate opportunities. This theory piggybacks off of Merton’s strain theory that will help address the juvenile delinquency in the country in the 1960’s. With these theory being about children/juveniles and the missed opportunities, I would think that this could be a theory that would need help with the public policy — just because a child is in need of true help and understand, does not mean that the book should not be thrown at them for their wrong doings. I do understand that people/children do have hard lives and times, but wrong is wrong no matter what age you are and you should be held to some sort of punishment.
Lastly, subculture of violence theory was a theory in this section. Subcultural theory can be defined as the emerged work from the Chicago Schools on gangs and developments throughout the interactions with the schools that are set into theories of argument that specific group or other subcultures within a society have to values their attitudes that would be conducive to any kind of crime and/or violence. The primary focus in this field would be juvenile delinquency, since the theorists believe that if this pattern would be understood or controlled based on the facts of the teenage offender into a habitual criminal or not.
From this information, we can conclude that public policy could also work under this theory. If we hold people accountable for their actions at an early age, hopefully, they will learn from their mistakes and not do it again.
