Crime television shows function as instructional media teaching viewers criminal techniques

Evidence

To increase authentic-ity, crime shows convey a lot of useful information about criminal techniques, security systems, and police procedures. A study of inmates in a maximum-security prison revealed that they improve their criminal skills by watching crime programs (Hendricks, 1977). Forty percent of the inmates reported that they modeled crimes they saw on television. For inmates, crime shows are educational TV. They take notes. They learn how to break into homes, how to hot-wire cars, and how to pull off scams. They also learn how the police work in apprehending transgressors and how alarm systems operate. Crime shows also bring them up to date on modern police procedures. Novel strategies modeled after televised programs, such as using an ambulance to break through a roadblock, were verified independently through checks of police records. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 741

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the vault’s media-and-modeling claims under the moral disengagement mechanism umbrella — observational learning of harmful strategies.
• CANDY: Forty percent of maximum-security inmates modeled crimes seen on TV — a startling, conversational stat.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 741