Prisoners take notes on crime shows to sharpen their criminal skills

Evidence

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

• CANDY: Forty percent of inmates report modeling crimes from TV; crime shows are literally ‘educational TV’ for prisoners who take notes.
• XREF: Connects to moral disengagement via observational learning/Social Cognitive Theory — the same mechanism that teaches prosocial behavior also teaches crime.