The Socioeconomic Factors Effective on Crime and Approaches to Reduce them (Case study: Zahedan Correction Center)

Due to the relatively increasing process of crimes in the country, studying different aspects of crime commitment especially its economic and social aspect is very important. Considering the importance of crime in different countries, extensive studies have been recently conducted to identify and define the causes of their happening. One must admit that economic factors are basic elements in all social structures with considerable effects on individual activities especially committing crimes and this category has received large attention in our country during recent years. Therefore, the main goal of present paper is to answer to the question of what social and economic factors have been effective in committing crimes by prisoners at Zahedan Correction Center and what are the most effective preventive measures to eliminate those factors? The research study is a combination of literature review and field survey. In the field survey, 128 male prisoners were selected at random to form the statistics population of the research. The data was collected by the author-developed questionnaire and was analyzed and studied by SPSS software package. The findings of research showed relationship between socioeconomic factors and crime commitment; as, there was reverse and significant relationship between the variables (commitment to daily activities, broken families, frequency of crime and offence in family, degree of satisfaction in life, commitment to religious beliefs, social control, degree of family relations, socioeconomic status, residence place, economic situation). That is, as the variables mentioned above increase, the degree of crime commitment lowers and vise versa. In the same way, there was reverse and significant relationship between the variables (inflation and high living expenses, association with unfit friends and history of committing crimes) with offence and crime occurrence. That is, by increase in above-mentioned variables, the degree of crime occurrence frequency increase and vise versa.

Keywords:

Crime commitment , economic and social factors