Negligent Homicide Case: Devalon Armstrong

• Devalon Armstrong, 13, was babysitting his younger half-sister, Viloude Louis, in New Orleans on June 16, 2013.
• Viloude complained about a stomach ache, and when she did not return from brushing her teeth, Devalon found her on the bathroom floor.
• He helped her lie on the couch.
• Viloude stopped breathing, and paramedics declared her dead at the hospital.
• Autopsy revealed she suffered broken ribs, a lacerated liver, and internal bleeding from blunt force trauma.
• Armstrong confessed to performing wrestling moves on his sister, who was little more than one-third of his size.
• He punched her in the stomach, performed elbow drops, and body slammed her onto the bed.
• Armstrong pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and was sentenced to three years in juvenile detention.
• Armstrong stated that he only stopped wrestling his sister because the phone rang.
• The wrestling moves that killed Viloude Louis were learned by her half-brother.

Introduction to Learning

• Learning is a change in behavioral repertoire due to experience, the principal means of acquiring behavior.
• Learning theories assume that no one starts inherently good or evil, but as a blank slate.
• Behavior simply stems from what someone learn in life.
• Learning theories of crime assert that differing learning experiences create different criminal behaviors.
• Observational learning occurs by watching others, like Armstrong learning wrestling moves from TV.
• Learning occurs through association when two events are reliably connected, known as conditioning in psychology.
• Conditioning is divided it into two types, classical and operant.
• Classical conditioning involves associations between two events that precede a behavior.
• When car taillights illuminate in the dark, one applies the brakes because of the association with deceleration.
• Operant conditioning involves associations between a behavior and its consequence.
• One presses the remote's power button because experience has shown the TV will turn on.
• There are three types of learning; review explains how each may contribute to offending behavior.

Classical Conditioning

• Classical conditioning is a learning process where two stimuli are repeatedly paired.
• The result is that a neutral stimulus can evoke the response originally evoked by the other unconditioned stimulus.
• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS) in classical conditioning evokes a natural response without learning.
• Pavlov first confirmed learning through classical conditioning while studying the digestive system in the 20th century.
• Pavlov discovered the process accidentally.
• Pavlov's digesrtive system research involved placing meat powder in a dog's mouth to observe salivation.
• Dogs began to salivate before receiving food.
• Pavlov noted dogs salivated at the sight and/or the sound of the person feeding it.
• Pavlov started sounding a tone, then presenting food to the dog.
• Initially, the tone had no effect, but after repeated pairings, the dog associated tone with food, salivating to the sound alone.
• The food is identified as the unconditioned stimulus (UCS).
• Salivation is the unlearned response elicited by the presence of food and is labelled the unconditioned response (UCR).
• The tone is a conditioned stimulus (CS) because its ability to stimulate salivation depends on the dog learning the association.
• The salivation produced as a learned response to the tone is a conditioned response (CR).
• Salivation is both the UCR and CR depending on whether it is elicited by the unconditioned or conditioned stimulus.
• In classical conditioning, learning associates events that occur prior to the response.
• A person or organism plays a passive role, with the environment acting on them and eliciting an automatic reflexive response with little control.

Classical Conditioning and Criminal Behavior

• Past deviant acts in the presence of stimuli or environmental cues could evoke feelings and motivate new offenses.
• Drug addicts, like those in settings associated with past drug use, often feel a renewed desire to relapse.
• Deviant sexual preferences for animals/inanimate objects, develop from early sexual arousal experiences with theseitems.
• Research has successfully conditioned male participants to become sexually aroused to previously neutral objects.

Richard Ramirez

• Richard Ramirez, aka "The Night Stalker", terrorized southern California during the spring and summer of 1985.
• Ramirez entered victims' homes through unlocked doors/windows and killed adult males with a single gunshot to the head.
• Women were bound, beaten, and raped, with the pain and terror seeming to excite him further.
• Ramirez ransacked homes and sometimes had victims swear allegiance to Satan (pentagram).
• Ramirez was caught and convicted of 13 murders, 5 attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries.
• Ramirez was sentenced to death and said “Big deal, death always went with the territory”.
• Ramirez born in El Paso, Texas, in 1960 and died at 53 awaiting execution.
• He grew up with three older brothers and an older sister, with a father who was railway track layer with who was away a lot.
• Ramirez had a kindly mother, she worked full-timem and was raised mostly by his sister.
• Ramirez was described as a happy boy with satisfactory grades up until the seventh grade.
• Around seventh grade Ramirez's cousin Miguel returned from Vietnam War.
• Miguel influenced Ramirez and spent more time with him.
• Ramirez began to smoke marijuana with Miguel and listened to his war stories about women.
• Miguel showed Ramirez photos depicting sadistic acts, which Ramirez found sexually arousing.
• Miguel taught Ramirez the ways of war and how to move with stealth and kill.
• At 13, Ramirez witnessed Miguel murder his wife, and Ramirez began breaking into homes.
• Ramirez took stolen items over to Miguel to be sold.
• After Miguel's arrest, Ramirez spent time with his brother Ruben who was a heroin addict.
• Ruben supported himself by stealing cars and burglarizing homes with Ramirez.
• Ramirez returned to El Paso no longer interested in school failing every subject except physical education.
• At 15, Ramirez landed a job at a hotel, stole from guest's room, and attempted to sexually assault the female guest.
• Later, Ramirez returned to the Los Angeles area coming to believe that Satan was his protector committing burglaries.

Classical Conditioning and Conscience

• Classical conditioning can explain why people obey the law, explaining conscience.
• Punishment for misbehavior causes pain, fear, or uncomfortable feelings.
• Punishment is the UCS, and the unpleasant feeling is the UCR.
• Hitting others (CS), when consistently punished (UCS), leads to the association of hitting with feelings of discomfort (CR).
• Eysenck believed conditioned anxiety and fear from the thought of misbehaving deters people from offending.
• Guilt is the distress associated with doing wrong.
• Conditioned reflexes extend to other activities through stimulus generalization.
• Parents labeling conduct as "bad" lumps behaviors together, strengthening the connection between them.
• Absence of conscience is when antisocial behavior is not repeatedly paired with punishment or conditionability.

Stimulus Generalization

• Stimulus generalization is when stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus evoke the same conditioned response.

Conditionability

• Society's growing permissiveness and failure to consistently punish misbehaviour limits opportunities for conditioning.
• Eysenck hypothesized some people are inherently more conditionable.
• Highly conditionable individuals with consistent discipline are expected to be law-abiding.
• Those with poor classical conditioning responses are more likely to behave badly even with good parenting.

Operant Conditioning

• In operant conditioning, people learn to associate behavior with consequences.
• B.F. Skinner believed that the goal of operant condition was to repeat behaviors with desirable outcomes.
• It can be distinguished from classical conditioning by timing and voluntary behavior associations.
• Operant conditioning has three basic elements: The discriminative stimulus, a response, and the consequence of the response.
• A discriminative stimulus is a specific context/environmental cue indicating whether a response is likely to be reinforced.
• Reinforcement is the fundamental principle of operant conditioning.
• Consequences that increase the likelihood of a response is reinforcement.
• Positive reinforcement increases a behavioural response by presenting something pleasant.
• Negative reinforcement strengthens a behavioral response by removing something unpleasant or painful.
• Key to all reinforcement is that it encourages a particular response.
• Research reveals animals respond better when reinforcement follows immediately or shortly after target behavior decreases learning if delayed.

Reinforcement Factors

• Lengthy delays may allow an increased likehihood of intervening events taking place making it difficut to for connection to form.

Extinction and Schedules of Reinforcement

• A behavior will be repeated as long as it continues to be reinforced and a reinforcement stops.
• If reinforcement stops, the repetition tends to taper off until it disappears, a process known as extinction.
• Resistance to extinction governs how enduring desirable behavioural responses will be.
• It reveals how easy/difficult it will be to extinguish undesirable behaviours by eliminating all.
• Reinforcement schedules govern the delivery of reinforcement and is classified as continuous or intermittent.
• Continuous schedules deliver the reinforcer every time the appropriate response is made.
• Intermittent reinforcement schedules deliver the reinforcer after only some appropriate responses.
• Reason that extinction is impacted by the type of reinforcement schedule is continuous reinforcement schedules means immediatedly obviously to someone.
• Intermittent reinforcement creates hope/predictability, causing continued response absent reinforcement.

Punishment

• Within operant conditioning, punishment is anything that decreases the likelihood of response.
• Positive punishment involves the application of an unpleasant or aversive stimulus.
• Negative punishment involves the removal of a rewarding or pleasant stimulus.
• When performed properly, punishment can reduce problem behaviors, by intensity, timing, and consistency .
• Reduce problem behaviors even mild punishments occasionally have no negative effect or lead to reinforcement.
• In terms of timing, punishment should follow the unwanted behavior as closely/soon as possible.
• Punishment is ideally administered every time the unwanted behavior appears.
• Infrequent or inconsistent delivery weakens the punishment's inhibitory effect.
• Punishment suppresses targeted behavior rather than substituting it.
• Combine with reinforcement for alternative to enhance effectiveness.

Operant Conditioning and Crime

• Skinner did not research operant conditioning in order to explain crime.
• Jeffrey outlined crim behaviour due to operant conditioning.
• Criminal behaviour in Jeffery's view is the product of reinforcement for committing crime.
• Jeffrey emphasized the role of nonsocial reinforcement including material goods and physiological/emotional state to reinforce behavior.
• Violent behavior provides reinforcement.
• Negative reinforcement removes the need to eliminate threats/assualts that of a rival drug dealer.
• Nonsocial reinforcement does not depend on social interaction but increases the likelihood of an event reoccurring to influence emotional state.
• Differential reinforcement is the net effect of all reinforcement and punishment received for respond to a certain response.

Crime and Reinforcment

• Crime is reinforcing, would-be offenders sometimes fail, punished so key is differential reinforcement.
• People repeat criminal acts when the net effect of past reinforcement exceeds the suppressing effect of any punishments.
• Criminal conduct that pay off only occasionally is on an intermittent.
• Jeffery acknowledged people influence the decision of whether they may break the law.
• People act as indicators rather than sources of reinforcement.
• Jeffery added the concepts of satiation and deprivation which influence the rate of offending.
• Current access to a reinforcer determines its strength .
• There will inevitably behaviors that won't have the same influence with the individual.
• Every individual has a reinforcement and punishmenm tconditioning history.

Why Criminal Justice System Punishments Fail

• Punishment flouts everything for effectiveness.
• There are shortcomings for crimial practice
• The justce system imposes mild punishments on first-time offenders while gradually increasing the severity for subsequent.
• The justic system is debalyed meaning the punishment is most effective when delivered imediately.
• Inconsistent punishment is a criminal justic system defect.
• A low perentagge of crime gets reported.
• Offending behaviors not replaced witg acceptable alternatives.
• The operation centres on the process to punish unwanted behavior while ignoring other factors.

Observational Learning

• One acquires a new behavior after someone else has already been seen perform a behavior .
• Some expect passengers to operate the oxygen mask and inflatable life vest even if they have never seen before.
• People learn by whatching and imitating others
• Those who model give supply of behavioral exmples that one learns from
• Modeling is the main influence on behavior.

Observational Learning Processes

• Acquistion is an attending to and memorizing an observed behavior.
• Imitation is replicating an observed behavior.
• Positive or negative influence the way that we behave.

Reinforcement and Observational Learning

• Personaly experience reinforcement
• Others are infuenced by reinfoecment
• Seeing one child getting reward for their acts encourgaes others and their siiblings.
• Important to make sure that behavior matters.
• Classial and operant need to influence behavior.
• Attention retention are how new behavor are formed.

Observing/Imitating Offending Behaviour

• Observational learning can be for prososical people that pick antisocial behavior.
• Modeling can be felt at any age and parents pay attentino most.
• They can inadently be doing somthing illegal can affect their children.
• Children can model what they see the children more likely ot engage.
• Actions can speaker more than words children will continue what adults are still persisently doing.

The Bobo Doll Experiment

• Series of classic studies.
• They seperated and sat one at each table where they wer given acitivties to do.
• He or she wen to set of mallets
• Five foot bob popualr back then with wheighty bottom kept it upright.
• The adults the spoke agresovley and non aggresivley.
• Chidl left to pkay and watched through mirror and count agerssivley.
• Aggreovely eihibited more aggresions
• How can the movie has affect on the children
• Film rocky was actib viloetn and it was postivw on the children
• It can be bad by the narrator saying that the acitvity will get punished.

Effects Of Violent Media

• People that watch TV, electronic media influences a lot.
• People appear to simple imitiate viloence when on tv.
• Exposre can cahnge thoights an beleifs one has.

TV Volencee

• Bull media violence addresses tv cause tech had exist long time and have 2 methodolgies
• Exprimental, Quasi expriemtal
• Studies compare ppl wach viokence progrsmming then a gropu that dosent
• Inaproaprtiate aggressoin and viokencer where rcordfed durign the gamr. The saw viokence and aggression in the game.
• Major concewrn for short rerm behavoriak effects in suruations that generlize
• The toown without tv with no reception. Then after a transmmitter was allsoed for TV wuth wide range variable in elementary school.
• The control froups, the resraches concluded maturation do not expalin the aggessive

The Effects Of Violence

• It can be the individual will act vilonetry
• Can be characteritics anbd identifies
• Viole act and see them fail then unplsan consequences.
• They must be far fetched

Devalon Armstrong, 13, pled guilty to negligent homicide after performing wrestling moves on his younger half-sister, Viloude Louis, leading to her death. The autopsy revealed severe internal injuries from blunt force trauma. Armstrong was sentenced to three years in juvenile detention for the tragic incident.