Assignment

  

SOCW 6135: Criminal Behavior Final Project Guidelines For your Final Project, you will examine three case scenarios from the e-book provided for this course, in which each case scenario represents a different type of offender (i.e., mentally disordered offender, sex offender, violent offender, family violence offender, female offender, white-collar criminal, cyber criminal, or terrorist). You will apply a specific theoretical approach to the criminal behaviors displayed in each case. You also will analyze the degree to which developmental risk factors and correlates of criminal behavior influence the criminal behavior that the offender exhibits. Finally, you will evaluate whether or not the offender in each case scenario is a criminal. Note: Although assessment is an integral step in the tasks you complete in this Final Project, for the purposes of this course and Final Project, you will not assess the offenders in the case scenarios you select. Your Final Project shall be presented as follows: • A 10- to 12-page (not including references, title page, or abstract), double-spaced, APA-formatted paper that is submitted to the Week 10 Assignment Turnitin link. The Final Project must include the following: • A minimum of seven references (in addition to any course readings that you may wish to reference). Be aware that user-created websites such as Wikipedia will not be accepted as scholarly references. (Please consult the Walden University Library’s instructions for evaluating research resources, which includes a link to criteria for evaluating resources.) • A brief description of each of the three case scenarios you selected • A description of each of the criminal behaviors exhibited by the offender in each case scenario • An analysis of how you might apply a specific biological, psychological, or sociological theory or approach to understanding and explaining each of the criminal behaviors. Be sure to select a different theory or approach for each behavior you discuss. • A description of the correlates and developmental risk factors that influence the specific criminal behaviors • An analysis of how each correlate and developmental risk factor influences the specific criminal behaviors • An answer to the question “Is this person a criminal?” with an analysis of why or why not © 2014 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 1 of 2 SOCW 6135: Criminal Behavior Final Project Guidelines Your Final Project will be graded on a 20-point scale and is worth 4% of your final grade. Although the Final Project is not due until Day 7 of Week 10, you should become familiar with the project requirements and have them in mind as you proceed through the course. The Final Project will be evaluated according to all four indicators in the Assignment and Final Project Writing Rubric, which is located in the Course Information area in the navigation menu. Be sure that the Final Project is written using APA format. Information on scholarly writing may be found in the APA Publication Manual (6th ed.) and at the Walden Writing Center website. Also see “Policies on Academic Honesty” in Walden University Policies and Information, in the Syllabus area in the navigation menu. The Final Project is due on Day 7 of Week 10. See the Week 10 Final Project area for submission details.

Attach book studies 985184b9db7d1f802742f061ae0e983d

PART ONE

Introduction — The

Explanation of Crime

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.
— Cesare Beccaria¡

Criminology is not yet a science; but it has hopes of becoming

one.

— Edwin Sutherland2

¡

Setting the Stage

The Explanation of Crime

What makes bad people bad? There is a long procession of answers

to this ancient question, each contingent in the parade passing in review

before us with its own body of argument and supporting evidence, and

accompanied by its own cadre of passionate advocates, each one claiming

possession of objective truth. The marching order for this parade of expla-

nations would include poverty, genes, gangs, climate, the full moon, brain

waves, peer pressure, racism, head injury, body type, mental illness, unem-

ployment, childhood trauma, class struggle, role models, moral insanity,

vitamin deficiency, learning disabilities, poor parenting, illiteracy, sub-

stance abuse, low self control, social alienation, biological inferiority, the

prison system, the shape of the skull, low self esteem, rejection, boredom,

lead poisoning, labeling, neurotic guilt, TV, IQ, and the devil, or some

combination of the foregoing. All of these have been candidates for the

explanation of crime. Even the victims of crimes have been proposed as

causes. And this is not an exhaustive list.

Among the contingents in this parade of explanations, some are cur-

rent in criminology, some are absurd, others are merely out of fashion and

will undoubtedly make a comeback . Body type, for example, has been in

and out of fashion several times. It is currently out, but a new edition is

not inconceivable. Only a few of the theories in our parade have been dis-

proved by careful research; the shape of the skull, for instance. But with

such a cavalcade of explanations and with such critical decisions waiting

to be made, on what can the serious person rely?

Can criminologists help us? The situation here is somewhat better,

though still far from clear. There are nearly as many approaches to the study

of crime as there are explanations. A partial list of available criminologies

would include structural criminology, realist criminology, chaos criminol-

ogy, clinical criminology, feminist criminology, integrative criminology,

9

10 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

postmodern criminology, constitutive criminology, classical criminology,

and positivist criminology. There is also environmental criminology, rad-

ical criminology, consumerist criminology, life course criminology, and the

new European criminology. There is even psychic criminology and street-

wise criminology. And there are more. It appears that we are going to have

to think for ourselves.

Our journey down the path of academic criminology in search of the

cause of crime has been replete with tra‡c jams, detours, wrong turns,

potholes, and dead ends. This path at times has led us into a tangled wil-

derness of technical and inconclusive debate, distracting us from e›ective

crime prevention and realistic criminal rehabilitation. This journey has

sometimes confused rather than enlightened us and has often diverted us

from the earnest implementation of knowledge that we already possess in

the name of uncovering the root cause of crime, with the supposition that

the root cause can then be treated and eradicated like an infectious dis-

ease. We need only invest enough in scientific research.

But scientific research on the causes of crime is an extraordinarily ter-

ritorial enterprise. Psychologists have psychological definitions of crime and

look for its causes in the individual person. Sociologists have sociological

definitions of crime and look for its causes in the social structure and in social

forces. Biologists look for the causes of crime in genes or in neurological

dysfunction; economists have economic definitions and study crime as a

rational economic deci

sion.

Rarely do any of these groups communicate or

collaborate with each other in any meaningful or productive way. Each group

prefers its own body of knowledge, which is vigorously defended from

encroachment by any other body of knowledge. Each discipline claims that

the others have little to contribute to our understanding of crime and each

profits very little from the reasoning and the discoveries of the others. After

surveying this situation in detail, criminologists Gottfredson and Hirschi

write, “We conclude that these explanations [of crime] survive more from

their value to the disciplines than from their value as explanations for crim-

inal behavior.”¡ The state of our modern criminology leads the psychologist

Adrian Raine to write that “it is an unfortunate reality of current academic

research into criminal behavior that the majority of investigators pursue

their own independent specialty lines of research, turn their backs on devel-

opments in other relevant disciplines, and closely guard their own turf.”2

I propose that we chart our own course through these troubled waters,

taking care to avoid the twin hazards of hubris and despair, taking in along

the way those things that help us on our journey, and passing by those des-

tinations that seem false, unreliable, or unhelpful. We shall try to illumi-

nate the lessons learned from the history of criminology.

11 1. Setting the Stage

There are three basic issues that are crucial to consider. These three

can serve to orient us for our journey through the causes of crime :

(¡) the issue of free will, or choice, versus determinism, an issue to

which I refer as the mighty opposites, mighty because both points of view

have such strength, appeal, and endurance.

(2) the issue of a single, all encompassing root cause of crime, a sin-

gle explanation versus many causes of crime, or a multicausal model of

explanation, an issue to which I refer as the one and the many.

(3) the study of crime versus the study of criminality: are we explain-

ing the crimes or the criminals? Do we focus on the o›enses or on the

o›enders? The aggregate rates of crime or the individuals who commit

them? Must we do both? I refer to this issue as the acts and the actors.

Once oriented in these three dimensions, we can begin to understand

where we are, and to assess the characteristics and relative merits of the-

ories, explanations, claims, and declarations about the causes of

crime.

From this starting point, we will examine the progress of the study of

crime.

The Word “Criminology”

The French anthropologist Paul Topinard is often given the credit

for the term criminology, though he gives the credit to Baron Ra›aele Garo-

falo for his ¡885 book Criminologia.3 Prior to that, various terms were

employed to describe what was then a new and developing science, includ-

ing moral statistics and criminal science. Cesare Lombroso, whom some

call the father of criminology, referred to his work as criminal anthropol-

ogy, adopting the French fashion. Penology was the usual term in the nine-

teenth century, when the focus was on law and punishment rather than on

the application of scientific methods to the causes of crime. In this book,

I am using the word criminology in a more specific sense than usual, to

mean the study of the causes of crime. The academic discipline of criminol-

ogy is much larger than this. The respected criminologist C. Ray Je›rey

wrote that criminology addresses three major issues: (¡) the problem of

detecting the law breaker, (2) the problem of custody and treatment of the

law breaker, and (3) the problem of defining and explaining criminal

behavior.4 Edwin Sutherland said that the sequence of events: law mak-

ing — law breaking — reaction to law breaking, is the proper study of crim-

inology.5 Sue Titus Reid writes in a recent text that criminology is the

scientific study of crime, criminals, and criminal behavior — and their

12 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

interaction with the criminal law.6 Thus criminology includes large areas

of which the study of the causes of crime is only one branch. So I am using

the word criminology in a specific, more restricted sense than is usually

the case. I have chosen to do this because it is simple and convenient and

less awkward than using other words or phrases.

I also intend to include in the category “criminologists” more peo-

ple than those who are by training and orientation strictly criminologists.

Scientists closely involved with the study of the causes of crime include

biologists, economists, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, anthro-

pologists, and political scientists, among others. In fact, one of the fasci-

nating things about our subject is how many people become involved in

trying to explain crime and criminal behavior. It is testimony to the appeal

and pressing nature of our subject, but it is also evidence of the confusion

and uncertainty that su›uses its study. In using the word criminologist, I

mean to include all those scientific workers seriously involved in study-

ing the causes of crime irrespective of their specific academic discipline.

There is probably no subject in higher education that blurs the borders of

academic disciplines more than does the study of crime and criminal

behavior.

A Collection of Crimes

I collect definitions of crime like archaeologists collect old bones.

This may seem like an odd pursuit, but, if we are to engage in a study of

the causes of crime, it is best to consider, at the beginning, what we are

attempting to explain. I am interested in how serious students of crime

negotiate the problems that arise from defining crime in such a way that

explanations for it can be found. This is not as simple a task as it might

appear at first. On the other hand, it is not so complicated as some pro-

fessional theorists would have us believe. For example, here is a definition

proposed by Ullman and Krassner; “Criminal behavior refers to antiso-

cial acts that place the actor at risk of becoming a focus of attention of crim-

inal and juvenile justice professionals.”7 Why should this be so awkward?

How about “criminal behavior is arrestable behavior,” an act for which you

could be arrested. Susan Walklate, in a model of simplicity, defines crime

as “law breaking behavior.”8 Every one knows that a crime is a violation

of the law. A simple and straightforward legal definition of crime is the

one favored by the classical school of criminology as represented by Cesare

Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. The classicists were not much interested

in explaining why individuals committed crimes. They assumed that per-

sons possessed free will and reason and made rational choices in terms of

13 1. Setting the Stage

self interest, to gain pleasure and avoid pain. They believed in nullen crimen

sine lege, no crime without a law. They were mainly interested in reform-

ing the criminal law in order to make punishment both more humane and

more e›ective. Here is an excellent example of a legal definition, one of

the best specimens in the collection: “A crime is an act committed in vio-

lation of a law prohibiting it or omitted in violation of a law ordering it.”9

I appreciate the clarity and balance of this solid legal definition. It has

the virtue of simplicity and it has an appealing symmetry. It seems unas-

sailable. But, as a basis for the study of the causes of crime, this appar-

ently strong foundation, a strictly legal definition of crime, has unexpected

ambivalence. Despite its precision I am not happy with this starting point

for the study of crime because it would make criminals of both Jesus and

Socrates. Dietrich Bonhoe›er, Frederick Douglass, Galileo, and Martin

Luther King, Jr., would all be criminals from this point of view. Dr. King

in particular would be a repeat o›ender and would inflate crime statistics.

Those colonists who protested the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax would be

criminals, the operators of the Underground Railroad during the Ameri-

can Civil War would be criminals, and so would the freedom riders of the

¡960s. All of these groups would be the subjects of criminology. But I do

not accept these persons as criminals; their acts are not the acts that we all

want to prevent, and I know that they were the victims of unjust political

and religious prejudices. Civil disobedience and acts of conscience are not

essentially the same as rape, robbery, and murder, and the same behav-

ioral explanation can not apply to all of these actions.

The legal definition of crime, as a starting point for scientific expla-

nation and concerted social action, includes more types of behavior than

we intend to address. In addition to those engaged in acts of conscience,

civil disobedience, and political protest, we would also have to include

harried citizens who accumulate parking tickets, procrastinators who delay

renewing their licenses, campers who possess alcohol in a public park, and

young men who fail to register for the draft. However necessary these ordi-

nances may be, the violators of such laws are not the proper subjects of

criminology. These are not o›enses that “bring terror in the night” or

“sorrow in the morning” and they are not deserving of our focused and

intensive scientific e›orts.

We must also address the problem of cultural relativity. If crime is

any violation of the law, then the subject matter of criminology is di›erent

from time to time and from place to place. The history of the laws regulat-

ing mood altering substances is an especially good example of this cultural

relativity. Future students and citizens will read of our twentieth century

statutes on mood altering substances and wonder at our self contradictions

14 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

no less than our present generation wonders at the contradictions of slav-

ery within a democracy in nineteenth century America. Standards of sex-

ual conduct are also a good example. Oral sex is still a crime almost

everywhere in the U.S. Are those persons who engage in it the proper sub-

jects of criminologists? The emergence of laws against dueling in the nine-

teenth century shows that a capital o›ense in one time and place is an

a›air of honor in another time and place. Sellin reports a horrific practice

among the Khabyles of Algeria, in which the killing of an adulterous wife

is a ritual committed by the father or the brother of the wife. The father

or the brother has the right and the duty to kill her in order to cleanse by

her blood the honor of her relatives.¡0 How do these examples compare to

the armed robber who kills a bank guard? Could the same behavioral expla-

nation serve all these instances? It is superficial and false to ignore the

influence of context on the definition

of crime.

If a strictly legal definition of crime includes too much, fails to account

for cross-cultural di›erences, and ignores context, and we decide to aban-

don it, what remains? Unhappily, what remains is Pandora’s Box . “There

is no agreement among criminologists as to the meaning of the term

‘crime,’” concludes Je›rey.¡¡ Je›rey has fired a warning shot, for if we are

not careful, we will disappear without a trace into that tangled wilderness

of technical and inconclusive debate that so absorbs some academic writ-

ers and is so fruitless for public policy.

“Crime is a social fact,” asserts the great French sociologist Emile

Durkheim. “Crime is present not only in the majority of societies of one

particular species but in all societies of all types. There is no society that

is not confronted by the problem of criminality.”¡2 Crime is what we are

all against. Durkheim asserted that “crime consists of an act that o›ends

certain very strong collective sentiments.” But these “very strong collec-

tive sentiments” change and evolve. He argued that the criminal plays a

definite role in social life by contributing to the development and evolu-

tion of morality and law in a society. Writing in ¡893, Durkheim reasons

that crime is normal because a society exempt from it is utterly impossi-

ble. It is impossible because such a society would consist entirely of per-

fect human beings incapable of acting against the values of the community.

Any society, in order to grow and evolve, and thereby survive, must allow

individual originality, including deviation from cultural norms. Thus the

originality, or deviation from the norm, of the criminal must also be pos-

sible.¡3

The criminologist Thorsten Sellin carried this line of thought a step

further by declaring crime to be the violation of any cultural norm. This

stance allows us to avoid the problem of cross-cultural di›erences by having

15 1. Setting the Stage

us study the process of deviating from the norm, any norm. Thus crimi-

nology is the study of deviant behavior; anything abnormal or against cul-

tural norms whether legally a crime or not. Every culture or society, no

matter what its laws and customs, has persons who violate its norms.

According to Sellin, these are the persons who are the proper subjects for

criminology. Crime is undesirable social behavior, whether it is a viola-

tion of specific statutes or not. But this position has consequences, too,

since mental illness, social alienation, adolescent rebellion, social change,

political dissent, religious movements, dress codes, and sexual mores would

all become the subjects of criminology.¡4

“Crime is conduct which o›ends pity or probity.” Ra›aele Garofalo,

a proponent of the positivist school of criminology and a renowned col-

league of Lombroso, proposed that we depart from legal definitions of

crime and address our e›orts towards explaining “natural crime.” Natural

crime consists of conduct that o›ends the moral sentiments of pity and

probity. By o›ending the moral sentiment of pity he meant our revulsion

against the infliction of su›ering on other people. By probity, he meant

honesty, and was referring to respect for the property rights of others. A

criminal is a person who lacks the moral sentiments of pity and probity.

Here, Garofalo is following Durkheim’s lead, but does not go as far as

Sellin, since he does not propose to study all cultural deviation.¡5

“Crimes are acts of force and fraud undertaken in the pursuit of self

interest.” Gottfredson and Hirschi have o›ered us one more distillation

of the essence of crime. It includes both more and less than legal definitions

of crime. This definition focuses on those antisocial behaviors for which

there is strong cultural consensus and on those behaviors that we are really

concerned about, crimes like rape, robbery, theft, and murder, while allow-

ing us to eliminate those acts of civil disobedience and conscience which

involve neither force nor fraud nor self interest alone. Still we cannot elim-

inate all ambiguity from our pursuit of crime, even with this excellent

e›ort, since, for example, defending oneself from attack is an act of force

in pursuit of self interest, but no one would consider it a crime.¡6

“Crime is a reaction to the life conditions of a person’s social class,”

writes the radical criminologist, William Chambliss.¡7 To him, criminal

behavior is a result of the oppressive e›orts of the ruling class to control

the lower classes, to maintain their economic advantages, and to prevent

nonconformity and revolutionary change. It would be unthinking to label

this point of view as Marxist and summarily dismiss it. I have spent more

than 25 years inside prisons of all sorts and it is indeed a very rare event

to find a prison inmate from “the ruling classes.” Does this mean that the

upper classes are of such high moral character that criminal behavior does

16 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

not occur among them except rarely? No one thinks so. Sutherland, in

developing his ideas about white collar crime, reminds us of Colonel Van-

derbilt’s rhetorical question, “You don’t suppose that you can run a rail-

road according to the statutes, do you?”¡8 But I do not think that crime is

explained by class struggle. The prosecution and punishment of criminals

is without doubt class oriented, but it has never been demonstrated that

the occurrence of crime is a class phenomenon. Therefore there is a proper

place for Chambliss’s point of view in the wider world of criminology, but

it does not explain crime.

“Crime is a disorder,” proposes Adrian Raine. “…[M]any instances

of repeated criminal behavior, including theft and burglary, may repre-

sent a disorder or psychopathology in much the same way that depression,

schizophrenia, or other conditions currently recognized as mental disor-

ders represent psychopathologies.”¡9 This is the approach of many psy-

chologists and psychiatrists and is based on their observations that

criminals, especially repeat o›enders, di›er from ordinary people in impor-

tant ways. It is also based on the conclusion of many average citizens that

a person has got to be sick to do some of those things. Raine concludes

that we need to increase our research and clinical e›orts to understand

and treat crime. The idea that crime is a disorder that can be treated is yet

another specimen in our collection.

“Criminality is generally the result of a basic deficiency in conscience,

a failure to internalize elementary inhibitions.”20 This view is proposed

by the famous researchers William and Joan McCord. This e›ort is really

only a short step away from “crime is an o›ense against morality.” I once

heard an Islamic prison chaplain respond to the question of what causes

crime. His laconic reply, instantly delivered, was, “bad morals.”

The study of crime cannot be “freed from subjective moral judgment”

because that is precisely what it is. The behavior itself is neither criminal

nor noncriminal; it is our judgment about the behavior that makes it one

or the other. Je›rey argues, “The reason we have crime, however, is not

because individuals behave in the way they do, but because others think

they ought not to behave in that way and have it in their power to judge

their behavior.”2¡ This is one of the reasons that the study of crime is so

interesting and also so di‡cult. It is an intersection where science crosses

moral values. Most criminologists would like to stay on the road of sci-

ence, but we cannot ignore the intersection. The argument about whether

a science of crime is possible at all is an old one, and if there is “free will,”

science cannot account for this factor.

“Crimes are acts that may be rewarding to the actor but that inflict

pain or loss on others; that is, criminal behavior is antisocial behavior,”

17 1. Setting the Stage

write the Canadian psychologists Don Andrews and James Bonta.22 This

is a refinement of our common sense criminology. This point of view

focuses us on what we are really concerned about; antisocial acts for which

there is large and widespread condemnation, historically and cross-

culturally, while allowing us to take out of consideration, without getting

confused, certain acts that are violations of the law in a certain time and

place, but that most persons would not consider crimes; for example, acts

of civil disobedience, expressions of religious freedom, and petty viola-

tions of local ordinances. Despite an abundance of variation in specific pro-

hibitions, there is a core cultural consensus, from time to time, and from

place to place, on issues of antisocial behavior such as theft, fraud, assault,

rape, robbery, and murder. Sanctions against these forms of behavior are

cross-cultural and the similarities are stronger and more striking than the

di›erences.

“Crime is that behavior condemned by society,” write Wilson and

Herrnstein; “it occurs despite the rewards and punishments that we have

devised to enforce that condemnation.”23 With this definition, the profes-

sors intend to open the door to economic and psychological explanations

of crime. Stanton Samenow, author of The Criminal Personality, suggests

that a crime is a violation of the rights of other people, and that a crimi-

nal is a person who consistently violates the rights of others.24 This

definition has the simplicity that I admire, and I think that it focuses us

on the proper subjects of criminology, but what are the rights of other

people?

The foregoing are only some samples from the collection, but for now,

let’s put up the old bones, close the lid on Pandora’s Box, and consider

where we are. Undaunted by academic disputes, I believe that we can refine

our thinking, respect the discovery of new facts, and retain our moral val-

ues at the same time. I can decline to be confused by sweeping statements

about human behavior that are not relevant to the crimes that concern the

vast majority of us and the crimes to which we are almost universally

opposed. I can agree with Je›rey, who argues that a general theory of

human behavior cannot explain crime because a theory of human behav-

ior cannot tell you why the behavior is criminal.25 I can acknowledge areas

of ambiguity without abandoning moral principles altogether. I can respect

data without acquiescing to the demand that a complete suspension of

moral judgment is necessary in order to accurately perceive reality. Indeed,

in the study of crime, I cannot suspend moral judgment.

The best course to follow is to think for ourselves. I will hold in the

back of my mind that definitions of crime can fall into illegal, immoral,

unconventional, and antisocial categories and that, whichever category

http:criminal.25

http:others.24

http:Bonta.22

18 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

you pick, objections will be raised by someone. I will fully acknowledge

the problems that emerge from an intensive study of crime, including

the criminologists’ complaint, as Gottfredson and Hirschi have said it,

that we do not control our own dependent variable.26 The definition of

crime is not a scientific definition, but is inevitably a moral and political

one.

I will remember the legal distinction called mala in se, a crime which

is “evil in itself,” as opposed to crimes that are mala prohibita, prohibited

within a particular cultural and historical context. I will agree with

Andrews and Bonta that “[a] major task for philosophers, historians and

social and behavioral scientists in criminology is to more fully understand

the definitional problems associated with crime,” but I will not retire from

the debate in confusion.27 When an itinerant worker robs and kills a fam-

ily of five, I am sure that this is a crime. And I “mightily desire to know”

what the cause of it is.

If we cannot agree on what crime is, how can we then know who is a

criminal?

Who Is a Criminal?

Even criminals are against crime. Ray was a 29-year-old inmate who

is a member of my treatment group at a medium security prison. I asked

Ray what he would do if someone broke into his locker in the dormitory

and took his belongings.

“I would stab him,” replied Ray, with an angry edge to his voice. “I

wouldn’t let anyone do that to me. It’s wrong. You can’t live in here and

let people do that to you.”

Ray is serving his second prison sentence for breaking and entering.

By his own count, he has committed 46 Breaking and Enterings (he may

be bragging a little), but he has been convicted of only five of them. He is

not aware of any irony in our conversation.

In the first session of a new group, I routinely ask each of the men to

answer the question “Are you a criminal?” It is predictable that each one

of them will say that he is not a criminal, even though the eight men in

this group have a total of 54 convictions on record and have been sentenced

collectively to nearly ¡00 years in prison. It happens again in this group,

as expected, each man answering that he is not a criminal. The only excep-

tion is Charles, a 52-year-old thief who describes himself, while smiling

broadly, as a “retired criminal.” The next question in my routine is “Do

you know anyone who is a criminal?” They report that they all know other

men who are criminals and that, in fact, most of the other inmates in this

http:confusion.27

http:variable.26

19 1. Setting the Stage

prison are criminals. I disguise my amusement at this report and go on to

my next question, “Who is a criminal?”

Ray answers, “Someone who does something really serious, like killing

someone.”

Tommy, a 20-year-old bank robber, says, “Someone who does a lot

of crimes, like all the time.”

Larry, a 4¡-year-old sex o›ender, replies, “A criminal is someone who

rips o› other

people.”

Charles, the 52-year-old “retired criminal,” says, “I used to be a crim-

inal because I just didn’t care, but I do care now. I’m di›erent now.”

Frank, 35 years old, convicted of second degree murder, states, “A

criminal would be, if you came to prison and got out, and then you came

back to prison again, then you would be a criminal.”

Maurice, a 25-year-old, convicted of assault, answers, “Someone who

doesn’t give a shit about anything.”

Hinton, a 28-year-old drug dealer, o›ers, “Someone who hurts other

people.”

Mike, a 30-year-old convicted of assault, says, “Somebody who does

something more than once.”

As I expect from experience, each man defines “a criminal” in such

a way that it does not apply to him but does apply to others at the same

prison unit. This is because, as any of them will tell you, they are against

crime. I next tell them that most people in society would consider them

all to be criminals who should be in prison. They become visibly agitated

at this declaration and the discussion becomes lively and heated. Every-

one participates except for Maurice, who is silent and bristling with hos-

tility. The session is tough, though not without its humorous moments,

usually provided by Charles, who is more articulate than the others and

is very pleased with his self appointed status as “retired criminal.” Thus

does the gritty work of treatment in prison begin again.

This group did produce the usual answers that are provided by most

people, in or out of prison, to the question “Who is a criminal?” A crim-

inal is someone who commits serious crimes, someone who commits many

crimes, someone who is a prison recidivist, someone who has criminal

attitudes and values, or someone whose livelihood is crime. One researcher

suggests that a criminal is a person whose patterns of thinking have led to

arrestable behavior.28 These definitions seem straightforward enough, and

the average citizen does not appear confused when asked “who is a crim-

inal?” But there are some problems lurking here for the study of the causes

of crime.

In a strictly legal sense, a criminal is anyone who has been convicted

http:behavior.28

20 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

of a crime, any crime. But, like the legal definition of crime, the legal

meaning of criminal will prove to include both too much and too little.

To begin with, is a person who commits crimes and is not caught, and

therefore has never been convicted of anything, a criminal? Large national

surveys have consistently shown that there is a significant amount of crime

not reported to the police, another large group of crimes that are reported

but that do not result in an arrest, and another group that results in arrest

but not in conviction. Someone once quipped that criminology is the study

of the caught. Is it reasonable to assume that many criminals are not caught

and that there might be something systematically di›erent about crimi-

nals who are not apprehended as opposed to criminals who are? Certainly

it is reasonable to think along these lines. We must be aware that the fact

of getting caught is central to our present knowledge of the criminal.

Criminologists have wrestled with this problem, and some attempts to

develop a method for studying “uncaught” criminals have been made,

most notably by Sutherland, who was very concerned about the problem

of the nonadjudicated criminal, and by Widom.29 These attempts have not

solved the problem, however, and we should not forget about this bias

when reviewing our knowledge of the criminal.

What about the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped? If they

commit a crime, do we include them as criminals? Is our explanation for

their criminal behavior the same as for those o›enders with normal intel-

ligence and without any sign of mental disorder? Our fixation on reduc-

ing recidivism has led us to focus on repeat o›enders. Is a first o›ender a

criminal? In prison work, first o›ender typically refers to someone in prison

for the first time. But this person usually has prior arrests and convictions

that did not result in incarceration. Is he a criminal, even though techni-

cally a first o›ender? Do we mean to exclude from our understanding of

“criminal” the 30–40 percent of o›enders who are incarcerated only once

and do not return to prison again? This is the group of o›enders that

might teach us the most about preventing recidivism, but this group is

rarely the object of study. What about age? Can a ¡0-year-old be a crimi-

nal? At what age is a person a criminal? In order to study criminality, we

must decide who is a criminal, and we will have as much trouble with that

decision as we had with the definition of crime.

The Mighty Opposites: Choice and Causation

I prefer to use, as a learning aid, and not with any claim that it depicts

the true nature of reality, a continuum of choice. This continuum of choice

has fate on one of its ends and choice on the other. These are the mighty

http:Widom.29

1. Setting the Stage 21

opposites, choice and fate, free will and determinism. They are mighty

because each has powerful arguments on its behalf, and because we have

investigated and debated their respective contributions to criminal behav-

ior, indeed, to all of human behavior, with much passion and for a long

time.

Aristotle thought that a science of human behavior was not possible

because such a science could never account for the unpredictability of free

will. Herbert Spencer, a nineteenth century philosopher who is credited

with extending evolutionary theory into the realm of human social behav-

ior, argued that no free will is possible if human behavior conforms to sci-

entific laws.30 Stephen Hawking , the famous contemporary physicist,

suggests that we say that people have free will whenever we cannot pre-

dict what they will do.3¡ But, perhaps, choice is not such a sharp dichotomy

and is more like a dimension. I prefer a middle path between these two

extremes: that no science of human behavior is possible or that no free

will exists. The continuum of choice is a visualization of this middle path;

it portrays the concept that choice and causation may coexist in a single

action.

Any behavior of an individual may be understood as falling at some

point along this continuum, though for our purposes, we are thinking of

criminal behavior. The advantage of conceiving behavior in this way is

that a person’s behavior may be seen as having some element of choice and

some element that is not entirely under the person’s control. For what

behaviors are so freely chosen that there are no determining factors at all?

Any behavior can be analyzed as a chain of cause and e›ect leading back-

wards through a person’s life until some element not under his control is

encountered, though it may be, perhaps, only a very small influence on

the behavior under analysis. On the other side, what behaviors are so com-

pletely determined that there is no choice at all? There are some behav-

iors that we understand as completely determined, muscle reflexes for

example, but it certainly has not been demonstrated that any criminal

22 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

behaviors would fall in this category. Though a case might be made for

some types of human behavior to fall into either extreme, complete choice

or complete determination, the preponderance of criminal behavior would

not fall in either extreme. Even if I could imagine a criminal act that would

be an exception to this point of view, it would not destroy the usefulness

of the continuum as a way of organizing our thinking about the causes of

crime.

Here are two cases that illustrate the dilemma posed by the mighty

opposites in ordinary lives, the twin scenarios of Gary G. and Gary F.

Gary G. is the oldest child of two wedded parents. His father, 34 years

old at the time of Gary’s birth, is a successful accountant. His mother, 3¡

when Gary is born, is an accomplished musician who has chosen to stay

at home and raise a family. There is no history of alcoholism or convic-

tion for crimes on either side of the family as far as anyone knows. The

parents receive excellent prenatal care, including night classes on birthing

and parenting. Gary has a normal delivery and is the healthy baby boy of

proud parents.

Until the age of four, Gary G. is raised at home with the daily care

and attention of his mother and father. Upon reaching age five, Gary G.

is placed in a select half-day preschool program that is sta›ed by experi-

enced and dedicated teachers. At age six, he enters the best public school

in the city. Throughout elementary school, he is an A student in most sub-

jects. His mother encourages his musical interests and he plays the trum-

pet in the school orchestra. His father encourages his athletic interests and

coaches the junior soccer team on which Gary G. is a player. His family

are members of a local church and Gary G. attends church camp each year.

The camp stresses moral standards of behavior.

Through middle school and high school, Gary G. maintains his above

average academic standing. His parents remain happily married and are

financially prosperous. Gary G. continues with his interests in soccer and

the trumpet. Since his parents and his friends do not smoke, Gary G. has

decided that he does not like cigarettes and he does not smoke. His par-

ents are moderate drinkers and Gary G. does try alcohol, primarily beer,

while in high school. He drinks occasionally with his friends at parties.

He has tried both marijuana and Ecstasy and enjoyed their e›ects, but he

limits his drug use to occasionally on weekends. His attitude toward drug

use is, “I don’t want to mess up my life getting high all the time.” Gary G.

has had no contact at all with the police except for the driver’s license

examiner who gave him his driving test. He passed.

Both of Gary G.’s parents are college graduates and Gary G. also plans

to attend. He is accepted at a good university and goes there after gradu-

23 1. Setting the Stage

ating from high school. He studies hard and makes above average grades.

In the more permissive college environment, he continues to experiment

with drugs, alcohol, and sex . He eventually rejects illegal drugs as too dan-

gerous, drinks moderately, and spends most of his time with a steady girl-

friend. His social science courses strike an interest in him and he begins

to concentrate his courses in those areas.

His introductory sociology class includes a tour of a local prison,

which impresses Gary G. He is reminded of some young men he knew in

high school who were engaged in delinquent behavior. He begins to read

about crime and criminals. He sees several excellent movies in which a

criminal is the principal character. He takes a criminology course, which

fascinates him. The course is taught by a dynamic and personable profes-

sor who influences and encourages him. Gary G. decides to become a crim-

inologist and applies to graduate school in his senior year of college. His

parents are very approving of his plans and o›er him financial support.

He is accepted by a criminology graduate program. He decides that in

order to maintain his credibility and integrity as a professional criminol-

ogist, he must obey the law himself, so he does not engage in any illegal

behavior, even minor drug violations. Af ter five years of study, he is

awarded a Ph.D. His dissertation is titled “Criminals from Birth: The

Genetics of Crime.” He is o›ered a full time position as a professor at one

of the smaller campuses of the state university. He is 26 years old. Why

did Gary G. become a criminologist and not a criminal?

Gary F. is born to an unwed mother who is ¡6 years old at the time

of his birth and who has already dropped out of high school. His mater-

nal grandfather is an alcoholic and he has two uncles who have served time

in prison. Gary F.’s father, aged 24, is in prison serving his second sen-

tence for larceny. Gary F.’s mother briefly considered an abortion until she

received a letter from Gary F.’s father in prison. He wrote to her, “If you

kill my baby, I’ll never forget it.” He is never involved in Gary F.’s life at

any point. His mother received no prenatal care at all. The delivery is

di‡cult and the nurses in attendance note that the mother seems less than

thrilled with the baby.

Gary F.’s childhood is chaotic. His mother has a succession of live-in

boyfriends, some of whom are alcoholic and some of whom are batterers.

His mother frequently leaves him for days at a time with relatives or oblig-

ing neighbors. Once, when Gary F. is five years old, she leaves him in a

parked car, forgetting to pull down the emergency brake. The car eventu-

ally rolls down hill and smashes into another car. Gary F., who does not

have on a seat belt, is thrown against the dashboard and receives a severe

concussion requiring hospitalization.

24 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

He receives no preschool education. His grandfather gives him his first

taste of beer at age six . When, at the age of seven, he enters one of the

poorest schools in the city, he is restless and disruptive in class, and has

many absences from school. An especially dedicated third grade teacher

thinks that he may have a learning disability, but this suggestion is never

followed up by the overworked school sta›. By middle school, he has been

suspended several times for fighting and for disrupting class. Even though

he has above average intelligence, he reads below the expected grade level.

He does not participate in sports, having been kicked o› the football team

for arguing with the coach and for breaking training rules. He does not

participate in any extracurricular activities. He does not attend church.

After school, he associates with boys several years older who are already

involved in delinquent and gang activities. He begins smoking cigarettes

every day at age ¡3. At this age, he also has sexual intercourse for the first

time, being initiated by an older girl in the neighborhood, well known for

her promiscuous behavior. He is arrested for the first time at age ¡4 for

stealing a six-pack of beer from the grocery store. He is rude and sarcas-

tic to the police who then treat him roughly. He is released to the custody

of his mother. At the end of the year, he is socially promoted to high school.

By now, his mother’s drinking problem has reached alcoholic pro-

portions. Gary F. skips school and stays away from home for days at a

time. By age ¡5, Gary F. drinks beer every day and smokes marijuana on

most days. He is sexually promiscuous, mostly with prostitutes or with

girls several years younger than he is. When he reaches the age of ¡6, he

drops out of school. He decides to make money by selling marijuana,

chiefly to high school students that he knows. He lives the street life until

age ¡8, when he is robbed of a recently acquired stash of expensive high

quality marijuana given to him on credit to sell on the street. This puts

him in the dangerous position of owing money to a big time drug dealer.

To get out of this quandary, he decides to rob a convenience store. He is

filmed robbing the store by the store’s video camera. He is identified,

arrested, and convicted of armed robbery. He serves eight years in the

state prison and is released on parole. He has a job at minimum wage at

a fast food restaurant. His total assets are several hundred dollars he man-

aged to save while in prison. He is living in a rented apartment with his

mother in the poorest section of the city. At this point, his risk for con-

tinuing criminal behavior is sky high. He is 26 years old, the same age at

which Gary G. receives his Ph.D. and teaching position. Why did Gary F.

become a criminal and not a criminologist?

These two case examples are hypothetical, but they are wholly plau-

sible. Both choice and fate were involved in each of the two cases, but the

25 1. Setting the Stage

weight of determining factors in both cases is heav y. Gary F. could have

chosen to stay in school and he could have chosen to make money by get-

ting a job rather than by selling marijuana or robbing a store. Gary G.

could have chosen to abuse drugs and to pay for them by committing

crimes. The choices that each one made were crucial in the unfolding of

their lives, yet the choices that each made were not unpredictable and were

not made in a vacuum empty of powerful influences. In fact, they both

seemed to have been propelled in opposite directions by biological and

social forces not of their choosing. So the question is not choice or fate,

but how much choice and how much fate? How much freely chosen and

how much predetermined? This is the reason that the continuum of choice

is a more useful guide to our thinking about crime and criminals than is

a simple dichotomy.

There is yet another factor that has its influence over the outcome :

randomness. Suppose that Gary G.’s first criminology professor had hap-

pened to be a poor teacher, dull, arrogant and unsympathetic, and Gary

G. decides that criminology is not for him. He stops going to his crimi-

nology class altogether and then fails the final exam. Making a F ruins his

grade average, and he feels that his grades are beyond repair. He becomes

discouraged, then restless and rebellious. His grades decline and he decides

to leave college. He begins to hang out with other college dropouts, some

of whom are dealing drugs to make a living. They remind him of the

movies that he has seen that depicted criminals as heroes, and the street

life begins to look glamorous to him. He moves gradually from the mar-

gins of the street life into the middle of the drug culture. But he is not

streetwise, and soon he is snared by a police sting operation. He receives

a five-year sentence in prison from an exceptionally harsh judge who was

running for reelection that year on a get-tough-with-criminals platform.

Gary G. is now a criminal instead of a criminologist.

On the other hand, consider again the case of Gary F., who had

decided to rob a convenience store in order to be able to repay a drug

dealer to whom he owed money. Suppose that when he arrives at the store

for the big moment he finds a police squad car parked in front of the store,

with one o‡cer in the car and a second o‡cer inside the store, buying a

cup of co›ee. Gary F. hesitates, loiters a few minutes, and then walks

swiftly away down the street. The incident terrifies him. He decides that

the street life is not for him. He throws his pistol in a dumpster along the

street and feels great relief. He resolves to change his way of life and walks

to a half way house he passed by in the neighborhood. He goes right in

and asks for help. A sympathetic and savv y counselor helps him to start a

new life, including employment and night college classes. He is so

26 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

impressed by his counselor that he decides to finish college and get a job

like his counselor, working with down and out criminals. His first crim-

inology class is excellent and he feels genuine excitement about it. Since

he actually has no criminal record at this point (except a juvenile record),

he sees no obstacle to achieving his goals. He persists through to gradua-

tion. Gary F. is now a criminologist instead of a criminal.

So to choice and fate we must add chance. It is not realistic to dis-

miss the influence that chance factors can have over human decisions and

outcomes; yet, unlike some philosophers, I am not willing to concede that

chaos is king. Criminals themselves often prefer chance explanations of

their behavior (“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time”) and I have

spent an entire career combating this explanation for criminality, one

inmate at a time, all the while knowing that chance is a indeed a factor,

though not the crucial one. For our continuum of choice, chance is sub-

sumed on the fate end. Chance is not the same as predetermination, but

it is not chosen. Thus, the end of our continuum opposite to choice, or

free will, might also be called “not chosen,” including factors which are

predetermining and factors which are attributable to chance. The crucial

factor is choice, since choice is all that the person can add to the equation.

Admittedly, in some circumstances, there is very little choice, but, even in

those situations, there is some, and that is a crucial ingredient.

To be sure, using the continuum of choice as a way of organizing our

thinking does not solve all of our problems. It raises some di‡cult ques-

tions of its own. Are quantitative judgments of observed behavior, such

as the percentages on our continuum, really possible? It is common prac-

tice in the social sciences to make quantitative judgments about all kinds

of behavior. For example, in a typical study of attitude changes, a numer-

ical value is assigned to degrees of liking, such as Not Like At All = ¡, Like

Somewhat = 3, and Like Very Much = 5. These quantitative assignments

enable us to apply the mathematics of probability to the results and thus

justif y our claim to having produced scientific evidence. If this kind of

experiment is basically meaningless, then much of social science research

is meaningless and we are back where we started with Aristotle’s doubt.

Is a science of criminology possible?

Another problem is brought out by this question: Where on this con-

tinuum does criminal culpability begin? Even if we accept this way of

understanding criminal behavior, we are still left with value judgments to

make. Where on the continuum must the behavior fall in order for the

person to be held responsible for his crime? Jurors struggle with this kind

of judgment, though they may not be thinking of it in exactly the same

way as I have outlined it here. With respect to criminal behavior, there is

1. Setting the Stage 27

no escape from moral judgment. And this really is to the point. “There is

nothing either good or bad, but our thinking makes it so,” says Horatio

in Hamlet. A general theory of choice still cannot tell you why the behav-

ior is criminal or where on the continuum personal responsibility begins

or ends.

The continuum of choice may also be used on another level; to organ-

ize causal theories of crime. Theories of the causes of criminal behavior can

be placed along this continuum according to the degree to which the the-

ory attributes behavior to free will and choice, or to fate and determin-

ism. On the predetermined end of our continuum will be found

predispositions of all types, including biological (heredity, constitution),

psychological (personality traits, learning), and sociological (social forces).

On the chosen end of our continuum will be found enlightened self inter-

est, rational calculation, moral judgment, and sin.

Those theories, or explanations, for criminal behavior that lend

significant weight to free will and choice are generally termed as being of

the classical school. Those tending strongly towards destiny and determin-

ism are thought of as belonging to the positivist school. Some theories

attempt to give significant weight to both and thus fall towards the middle

28 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

range of our continuum. Such theories are sometimes called neoclassical

or are said to represent a soft determinism. (Some social scientists would

argue that social forces may operate as inevitably as biological traits and

therefore should be depicted on the determined end of our continuum

rather than toward the middle, as I have done in the illustration above.

Without rejecting this point, I have let the illustration remain as it is for

the sake of simplicity.)

Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal, for example, fell at the far

end of the positivist dimension. However, in response to many criticisms

of his theory, Lombroso gave considerable weight to social factors in his

later work, moving his explanation of crime towards the center of our con-

tinuum.

Leaning to one side or the other does have consequences. A positivist

point of view certainly implies that the criminal is not at fault and that

his behavior can be changed using scientific methods. It also suggests that

we should be focusing our e›orts and resources on the discovery of new

facts, and new cause and e›ect relationships. It suggests that crime is both

preventable and curable, though the methods for doing so remain to be

discovered. This is a grand hope, not supported by our experience so far.

As Hawking writes, we have not been very good at predicting human

behavior from mathematical equations.32

For those who lean to the choice, or free will side of our continuum,

there are di›erent implications. Crime is not completely preventable, for

there will be some crime for as long as there is some choice. The criminal

is believed to be responsible for his behavior and held accountable for it.

Change is thought possible but not without the willing cooperation of the

person. Moral judgment cannot be isolated from our understanding of the

http:equations.32

29 1. Setting the Stage

behavior, for we must admit that the reason we are so concerned about

this behavior is because it is criminal, that is, as Samenow puts it, it is a

violation of the rights of other people.

With the continuum of choice, we have not settled the debate between

the mighty opposites, but we can organize our thinking about them, eval-

uate theories of crime, and support our own views. We can place new

announcements about the causes of crime in perspective and we can appre-

hend where they are leading us. Finally, we can see and appreciate expla-

nations of crime that allow for choice and causation to coexist in a single

act.

I propose no final resolution to the timeless debate between the

mighty opposites; wiser heads than ours have addressed these issues with

logic, wit, and eloquence, but without carrying the day for either side. I

expect the debate to continue into the forseeable future, even beyond the

discovery of a gene for criminality. Even if such a discovery should be

made, it would not settle this argument once and for all, because even

genetic predispositions do not produce certainties in behavior. For our

present purposes, I recommend a healthy respect for each end of the con-

tinuum, a quick suspicion of anyone who clings too tightly to either side,

and a keen sense of anticipation in the unfolding of this great debate. For

my own part, I am only suggesting , in accordance with the advice of

Sutherland, that we organize our thinking about the causes of crime. With

the continuum of choice, we have some help in accomplishing that pur-

pose.

The One and the Many: Models of Causation

As we have already said, the classicists were not much concerned with

discovering the cause of crime as they assumed that it was a calculated

choice and did not inquire further. The positivists, however, believed that

criminal behavior is determined or caused by something. It is the search

for this thing that causes crime that has produced the long list presented

at the beginning of this chapter, but the search so far has not led to a sin-

gle destination.

A profusion of problems have emerged. One of these, already dis-

cussed in an earlier section, is the definition of crime. If we are not sure

what it is that we are trying to explain, it will obviously be hard to satis-

factorily explain it. Another di‡culty is the application of scientific method

to the problem of crime. The strongest and most convincing experimen-

tal method is to randomly assign subjects to treatment conditions and then

compare the e›ects of the various treatments on the subject of interest.

30 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

This true experimental design is the basic language of proof in the scientific

sense. This experimental design, with su‡cient replication, satisfies the

three criteria of causation: (¡) there must be a demonstrated association

or connection between the cause and the e›ect, (2) it must be established

that the cause preceded the e›ect, and (3) the connection between the

cause and the e›ect must not disappear when the influences of other vari-

ables are taken into account. This means that when two variables are asso-

ciated, it is possible that the preceding variable, the variable that occurs

first, may not be causal. There could be a third variable, which precedes

both of them, that is the real causal agent. In graduate school, we learned

to refer to this possibility as “suspicion of a lurking third variable.” Thus

any causal inferences made from the discovery of the association between

the two variables may well be spurious, that is, false or misleading.

Let’s try a simple example. How would we prove the e›ectiveness of

a medication for allergies? Is medication A more e›ective than no treat-

ment at all in relieving allergic symptoms? Or, to state it somewhat

di›erently, is medication A the cause of the relief of the allergic symp-

toms? The first task is to define allergic symptoms and concomitantly to

define relief of those symptoms. The second task is to identif y a group of

subjects who have these symptoms. The next task is to assign subjects at

random to one of two groups: the experimental group that receives med-

ication A or the control group that receives no treatment at all. Then the

medication is administered to the experimental group and a placebo is

administered to the control group. Thus we know that the cause (med-

ication A) preceded the e›ect (relief of allergic symptoms). Then we

observe the results by measuring the relief of allergic symptoms for each

of the subjects in each group. If the number of subjects in the experimen-

tal group (the group that received medication A) who experienced relief

of the allergic symptoms is significantly higher than in the group that

received no treatment at all, then medication A is the cause of the relief

of the allergic symptoms. Note that this association or connection need

not be perfect and hardly ever is. Some subjects in the experimental group

(who received medication A) may not experience relief of allergic symp-

toms and conversely, some subjects in the control group (who got the

placebo) might experience relief of allergic symptoms. But the e›ect is

established if there is a significant di›erence between the two groups in

the expected direction. What protects against lurking third variables is

the random assignment of subjects to groups (assuming there was no pre-

selection bias). Then this experiment is replicated, which means that it

is repeated exactly, with di›erent subjects randomly assigned to groups,

and with the same results obtained. Thus there is scientific proof that

31 1. Setting the Stage

medication A is e›ective for (is the cause of ) the relief of allergic symp-

toms.

Now, how do we obtain scientific proof of the cause of crime? The

thoughtful reader will already begin to see the di‡culties. Let’s take, for

example, the popular proposition that crime is caused by broken homes.

Why can’t we obtain scientific proof beyond dispute regarding the truth

or falsity of this proposition? Because it is quite impracticable. The first

task is to define crime and we have already seen how that is not as simple

as it appears at first. Especially we must keep in mind the di›erence

between crime and criminality, between the acts and the actors. However,

the definitional problem is not insurmountable, so long as we remember

that whatever results we obtain are applicable strictly to crime as we chose

to define it in this experiment and not to any other concept of what crime

is. The reader will immediately perceive that that leaves plenty of room

for argument about the results of the experiment. Next we would identif y

a group of subjects and randomly assign them to a broken home or a sta-

ble home. There’s the di‡culty. How do you assign subjects randomly to

a broken home? You cannot. The best that you can do is to select subjects

who came from a broken home and subjects who came from a stable home

and compare them. But this opens the door wide for lurking third vari-

ables! You might be able to show that there is an association between bro-

ken homes and crime, as indeed some social scientists have, but you cannot

feel confident that there is not a third variable that precedes them both

and is the true cause of crime. In fact, there is good reason to suspect that

this is the case, because of the large number of people who come from bro-

ken homes but who are not criminals. Therefore you cannot furnish sci-

entific proof that broken homes cause crime. This is why Sutherland wrote

that criminology is not yet a science but has hopes of becoming one.33

So what do you do? Some social scientists will argue that there are

acceptable ways around these problems, but that point is precisely where

we descend into that “tangled wilderness of technical and inconclusive

debate.” If it were really that easy to circumvent these problems and still

obtain scientific proof beyond reasonable dispute, then we would know a

lot more about the causes of crime than we know now. What we have

instead are various proposals for getting around these problems, includ-

ing quasiexperimental designs, nonexperimental designs, and such like.

The use of these research designs results in numerous heated arguments

about their validity and relevance in discovering the cause of crime in the

scientific sense of proof.

There is an additional complication in identif ying the cause of crime,

namely, that there may be more than one. In thinking about crime, or any

32 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

human behavior for that matter, there is often a strong tendency to over-

simplif y, to seek a single underlying principle or explanation. This is the

problem of the one and the many: is there a single cause of crime or are

there multiple causes of crime? And if there are multiple causes of crime

rather than a single cause of crime, what is to be our method of discov-

ery?

It is my inclination to argue against a root cause of crime. I admit

that this bias is the result of my own personal experience with crime and

criminals as well as my reading of the data. There have been some good

e›orts at a single theory of crime, most notably Sutherland’s theory of

di›erential association, mainly of historical significance now, and Got-

tfredson and Hirschi’s self control theory, a valiant attempt at a general

principle, which I admire and which has much to recommend it. Each of

these theories is discussed in detail in later sections. And there have been

other e›orts as well. But I must admit that I am not inclined in that direc-

tion. Sutherland says, “Just as the germ theory of disease does not explain

all diseases, so it is possible that no one theory of criminal behavior will

explain all criminal behavior. In that case, it will be desirable to define the

area to which the theory applies, so that the several theories are coordi-

nate and, when taken together, explain all criminal behavior.”34 So we have

added another level of complexity to our search — but then no one said it

would be easy!

Consider this example. Suppose that we have five cases of homicide.

In the first case, John L., who is a paranoid schizophrenic with a long his-

tory of treatment, shoots and kills one of his neighbors. During the shoot-

ing, John L. experiences extreme anxiety and paranoia, and hears command

hallucinations in which insistent voices were telling him to kill or be killed.

In the second case, Judy Y. shoots and kills her drunken and abusive hus-

band af ter he had beaten her up (one of numerous beatings) and had

threatened to do it again “tomorrow.” In the third case, Jimmy G. gets into

a fight in a local bar with another customer. Both men are intoxicated.

Jimmy G. pulls out a knife and slashes his opponent a total of ¡6 times,

and the victim dies on the way to the hospital. In the fourth case, Marvin

T. accepts a contract of $50,000 to kill a potential witness in a drug tra‡ck-

ing case and he completes the contract. Marvin is caught when an associ-

ate is arrested on unrelated charges and “gives him up.” In the fifth case,

Richard D. robs a convenience store with a handgun in order to get cash

to pay a drug dealer. The store clerk reaches under the counter to push a

police alert button and Richard D. shoots and kills him.

Is there a single theory of crime to explain all of these behaviors? They

are all crimes. They would all be included in crime statistics of all sorts:

33 1. Setting the Stage

arrest rates, conviction rates, violent crime rates, murder rates, incarcera-

tion rates. Yet it seems improbable that the same behavioral explanation

would be satisfactory in each case. Still we might choose to search for the

single cause of crime. Committed scientists certainly desire to discover uni-

versal laws. A unified theory of the universe is the grand challenge of physics,

but who can name the Isaac Newton, the Max Planck, or the Albert Einstein

of criminology? It may be that we cannot so name anyone because crim-

inology is such a young science, but it may also be because proof in the

scientific sense is not applicable to many of the problems in criminology.

We might accept that there are many causes of crime and start to

make divisions in our investigations. If we take this approach, we can

choose to focus on the o›enses or we can choose to study the o›enders.

Some criminologists approach this problem by saying that we are not try-

ing to explain all of these crimes with a general theory of crime. John L.

is clearly mentally ill and needn’t be included in our study. Judy Y. is guilty

only of self defense and shouldn’t be included as she is not really a killer

or a menace to society. Jimmy G. has substance abuse problems, was in a

fit of passion, and was maybe only defending himself. Only Marvin T. is

a calculating, premeditating first degree murderer. And actually, a con-

victed contract killer is not all that common among murderers in prison.

Marvin T. would be an exception in a group of incarcerated killers, and a

criminologist might say we are not trying to explain the exceptions. The

crime of Richard D., called a felony murder, is a more common form of

homicide and, some would argue, we should be concerned only with

explaining the more common forms. That’s one approach to the problem:

categorize the o›enses in such a way as to eliminate the ones that are prob-

lematic for a single theory of crime. In other words, we could define and

redefine the dependent variable, crime.

Another approach is to categorize the o›enders rather than the

o›enses. Categorizing o›enders is such a popular pastime that a good deal

of the criminological literature is taken up with it. There are reasons for

categorizing o›enders other than explaining crime. For example, o›enders

might be placed into like groups in order to make prison management

more e‡cient or in order to deliver treatment services more e›ectively.

For now, however, it su‡ces to note that sometimes this is a way of organ-

izing multiple explanations for crime. To apply our examples, we might

say that Marvin T. and Richard D. are the true criminals, Judy Y. is a case

of domestic abuse, Jimmy G. is a case of substance abuse, and John L. has

a diagnosable mental illness. So there is a di›erent explanation for each

group. Also perhaps there is still room for some choices made by the

o›enders in all of these cases.

34 One : Introduction — The Explanation of Crime

I am not suggesting that scientific investigations of the causes of crime

are useless enterprises. Indeed, I believe that it is worthwhile to struggle

with these problems and I believe that there are useful discoveries to be

made. But I am trying to point out fundamental di‡culties with which

the experts struggle, to suggest some limitations that apply to the science

of crime, and to help the reader to sharpen his own judgment about the

current state of our knowledge of the causes of crime. I especially wish to

inculcate in him a healthy skepticism concerning dramatic discoveries of

the causes of crime, not to mention public policies that are based upon

them. If we wait for science to discover the root cause of crime before we

act decisively, later generations, who will be struggling with crime and

studying its history, may very well depict our generation as sitting pen-

sively by the roadside, as crime proliferates, turning over in our hands Dr.

Lombroso’s famous skull.

The Acts and the Actors: Crime and Criminality

It is important to know that crime and criminality are not the same

thing and that our knowledge of the causes of crime can appear quite con-

fused without understanding the di›erence. Criminality is the propensity

of an individual person to commit crimes. Thus the study of criminality

focuses on the individual o›ender, while the study of crime focuses on the

o›enses, such as aggregated crime rates. Having this distinction clearly in

mind helps in understanding and evaluating explanations of crime, many

of which are really explanations of criminality. Studying why crime

increased during Prohibition and why it increased more in Chicago than

in other cities results in a di›erent kind of explanation, and suggests

di›erent courses of action, than does studying why certain individuals

became bootleggers during the years of Prohibition. The first is a study of

crime (crime rates) and the second is a study of criminality (the tendency

of individuals to commit crimes). Lombroso is generally credited with

having changed the focus of criminology from crime to the criminal, which

Piers Bierne refers to as “the rise of homo criminalis,” but neither kind of

study is entirely satisfactory in isolation from the other.35

For example, Chaiken and Chaiken suggest the following : If a city has

3,000 burglars per ¡00,000 population, and on average each committed

two burglaries a year, the city’s burglary rate would be 6,000 per ¡00,000

population. Alternatively, if a city has 300 burglars per ¡00,000 population

and each committed an average of 20 burglaries per year, the burglary rate

would also be 6,000 per ¡00,000 population. In this example, at the level of

aggregate crime rates, the two cities are nearly identical. However, this study

http:other.35

35 1. Setting the Stage

would miss a significant di›erence in criminality at the level of individual

analysis; criminality among the o›enders in the two hypothetical cities is

quite di›erent and could very well suggest di›erent courses of corrective

action.36

Studying criminality in isolation from other factors is also insu‡cient.

Hirschi and Gottfredson call this isolation “the fundamental mistake of

modern theory.” As an example, they summarize a theory of crime pro-

posed by Cohen and Felson. The theory is that the commission of a crime

requires (¡) a motivated o›ender, (2) the absence of a capable guardian,

and (3) a suitable target.37 A study of the motivated o›ender, which would

be a study of criminality, is not su‡cient in itself to explain the burglary

rate. We must attend to contextual and situational factors as well, such as

suitability of the target and absence of a capable guardian. On the other

hand, leaving out the study of the motivated o›ender would also lead to

an insu‡cient understanding of the crime of burglary. “Crime and crim-

inal behavior are confused,” writes Je›rey.38 Are we explaining the acts or

the actors? As we have seen, the classical school tended to focus on the acts

and the positivist school tended to focus on the actors. To refine our think-

ing about the causes of crime, we must be alert to this particular confu-

sion.

http:Je�rey.38

http:target.37

http:action.36

• Structure Bookmarks

PART ONE.
PART ONE.
Introduction—The. Explanation of Crime.
It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.
— Cesare Beccaria
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Criminology is not yet a science; but it has hopes of becoming one. —Edwin Sutherland
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Figure
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Setting the Stage.
Setting the Stage.
The Explanation of Crime.
The Explanation of Crime.
What makes bad people bad? There is a long procession of answers to this ancient question, each contingent in the parade passing in review before us with its own body of argument and supporting evidence, and accompanied by its own cadre of passionate advocates, each one claiming possession of objective truth. The marching order for this parade of explanations would include poverty, genes, gangs, climate, the full moon, brain waves, peer pressure, racism, head injury, body type, mental illness, unemployment,
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Among the contingents in this parade of explanations, some are current in criminology, some are absurd, others are merely out of fashion and will undoubtedly make a comeback. Body type, for example, has been in and out of fashion several times. It is currently out, but a new edition is not inconceivable. Only a few of the theories in our parade have been disproved by careful research; the shape of the skull, for instance. But with such a cavalcade of explanations and with such critical decisions waiting to
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Can criminologists help us? The situation here is somewhat better, though still far from clear. There are nearly as many approaches to the study of crime as there are explanations. A partial list of available criminologies would include structural criminology, realist criminology, chaos criminology, clinical criminology, feminist criminology, integrative criminology,
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postmodern criminology, constitutive criminology, classical criminology, and positivist criminology. There is also environmental criminology, radical criminology, consumerist criminology, life course criminology, and the new European criminology. There is even psychic criminology and streetwise criminology. And there are more. It appears that we are going to have to think for ourselves.
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Our journey down the path of academic criminology in search of the cause of crime has been replete with tra‡c jams, detours, wrong turns, potholes, and dead ends. This path at times has led us into a tangled wilderness of technical and inconclusive debate, distracting us from e›ective crime prevention and realistic criminal rehabilitation. This journey has sometimes confused rather than enlightened us and has often diverted us from the earnest implementation of knowledge that we already possess in the name
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But scientific research on the causes of crime is an extraordinarily territorial enterprise. Psychologists have psychological definitions of crime and look for its causes in the individual person. Sociologists have sociological definitions of crime and look for its causes in the social structure and in social forces. Biologists look for the causes of crime in genes or in neurological dysfunction; economists have economic definitions and study crime as a rational economic decision. Rarely do any of these groups
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I propose that we chart our own course through these troubled waters, taking care to avoid the twin hazards of hubris and despair, taking in along the way those things that help us on our journey, and passing by those destinations that seem false, unreliable, or unhelpful. We shall try to illuminate the lessons learned from the history of criminology.
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1. Setting the Stage
There are three basic issues that are crucial to consider. These three can serve to orient us for our journey through the causes of crime:
(¡) the issue of free will, or choice, versus determinism, an issue to which I refer as the mighty opposites, mighty because both points of view have such strength, appeal, and endurance.
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the issue of a single, all encompassing root cause of crime, a single explanation versus many causes of crime, or a multicausal model of explanation, an issue to which I refer as the one and the many.
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(3)
(3)
the study of crime versus the study of criminality: are we explaining the crimes or the criminals? Do we focus on the o›enses or on the o›enders? The aggregate rates of crime or the individuals who commit them? Must we do both? I refer to this issue as the acts and the actors.
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Once oriented in these three dimensions, we can begin to understand where we are, and to assess the characteristics and relative merits of theories, explanations, claims, and declarations about the causes of crime. From this starting point, we will examine the progress of the study of crime.
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The Word “Criminology”
The Word “Criminology”
The French anthropologist Paul Topinard is often given the credit for the term criminology, though he gives the credit to Baron Ra›aele Garofalo for his ¡885 book Criminologia.Prior to that, various terms were employed to describe what was then a new and developing science, including moral statistics and criminal science. Cesare Lombroso, whom some call the father of criminology, referred to his work as criminal anthropology, adopting the French fashion. Penology was the usual term in the nineteenth century
The French anthropologist Paul Topinard is often given the credit for the term criminology, though he gives the credit to Baron Ra›aele Garofalo for his ¡885 book Criminologia.Prior to that, various terms were employed to describe what was then a new and developing science, including moral statistics and criminal science. Cesare Lombroso, whom some call the father of criminology, referred to his work as criminal anthropology, adopting the French fashion. Penology was the usual term in the nineteenth century
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interaction with the criminal law.Thus criminology includes large areas of which the study of the causes of crime is only one branch. So I am using the word criminology in a specific, more restricted sense than is usually the case. I have chosen to do this because it is simple and convenient and less awkward than using other words or phrases.
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I also intend to include in the category “criminologists” more people than those who are by training and orientation strictly criminologists. Scientists closely involved with the study of the causes of crime include biologists, economists, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, among others. In fact, one of the fascinating things about our subject is how many people become involved in trying to explain crime and criminal behavior. It is testimony to the appeal
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A Collection of Crimes
A Collection of Crimes
I collect definitions of crime like archaeologists collect old bones. This may seem like an odd pursuit, but, if we are to engage in a study of the causes of crime, it is best to consider, at the beginning, what we are attempting to explain. I am interested in how serious students of crime negotiate the problems that arise from defining crime in such a way that explanations for it can be found. This is not as simple a task as it might appear at first. On the other hand, it is not so complicated as some profess
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1. Setting the Stage
self interest, to gain pleasure and avoid pain. They believed in nullen crimen sine lege, no crime without a law. They were mainly interested in reforming the criminal law in order to make punishment both more humane and more e›ective. Here is an excellent example of a legal definition, one of the best specimens in the collection: “A crime is an act committed in violation of a law prohibiting it or omitted in violation of a law ordering it.”
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I appreciate the clarity and balance of this solid legal definition. It has the virtue of simplicity and it has an appealing symmetry. It seems unassailable. But, as a basis for the study of the causes of crime, this apparently strong foundation, a strictly legal definition of crime, has unexpected ambivalence. Despite its precision I am not happy with this starting point for the study of crime because it would make criminals of both Jesus and Socrates. Dietrich Bonhoe›er, Frederick Douglass, Galileo, and Mar
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The legal definition of crime, as a starting point for scientific explanation and concerted social action, includes more types of behavior than we intend to address. In addition to those engaged in acts of conscience, civil disobedience, and political protest, we would also have to include harried citizens who accumulate parking tickets, procrastinators who delay renewing their licenses, campers who possess alcohol in a public park, and young men who fail to register for the draft. However necessary these ord
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We must also address the problem of cultural relativity. If crime is any violation of the law, then the subject matter of criminology is di›erent from time to time and from place to place. The history of the laws regulating mood altering substances is an especially good example of this cultural relativity. Future students and citizens will read of our twentieth century statutes on mood altering substances and wonder at our self contradictions
We must also address the problem of cultural relativity. If crime is any violation of the law, then the subject matter of criminology is di›erent from time to time and from place to place. The history of the laws regulating mood altering substances is an especially good example of this cultural relativity. Future students and citizens will read of our twentieth century statutes on mood altering substances and wonder at our self contradictions
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no less than our present generation wonders at the contradictions of slavery within a democracy in nineteenth century America. Standards of sexual conduct are also a good example. Oral sex is still a crime almost everywhere in the U.S. Are those persons who engage in it the proper subjects of criminologists? The emergence of laws against dueling in the nineteenth century shows that a capital o›ense in one time and place is an a›air of honor in another time and place. Sellin reports a horrific practice among
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If a strictly legal definition of crime includes too much, fails to account for cross-cultural di›erences, and ignores context, and we decide to abandon it, what remains? Unhappily, what remains is Pandora’s Box. “There is no agreement among criminologists as to the meaning of the term ‘crime,’” concludes Je›rey.Je›rey has fired a warning shot, for if we are not careful, we will disappear without a trace into that tangled wilderness of technical and inconclusive debate that so absorbs some academic writers an
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“Crime is a social fact,” asserts the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim. “Crime is present not only in the majority of societies of one particular species but in all societies of all types. There is no society that is not confronted by the problem of criminality.”Crime is what we are all against. Durkheim asserted that “crime consists of an act that o›ends certain very strong collective sentiments.” But these “very strong collective sentiments” change and evolve. He argued that the criminal plays a de
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The criminologist Thorsten Sellin carried this line of thought a step further by declaring crime to be the violation of any cultural norm. This stance allows us to avoid the problem of cross-cultural di›erences by having
1. Setting the Stage
us study the process of deviating from the norm, any norm. Thus criminology is the study of deviant behavior; anything abnormal or against cultural norms whether legally a crime or not. Every culture or society, no matter what its laws and customs, has persons who violate its norms. According to Sellin, these are the persons who are the proper subjects for criminology. Crime is undesirable social behavior, whether it is a violation of specific statutes or not. But this position has consequences, too, since m
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“Crime is conduct which o›ends pity or probity.” Ra›aele Garofalo, a proponent of the positivist school of criminology and a renowned colleague of Lombroso, proposed that we depart from legal definitions of crime and address our e›orts towards explaining “natural crime.” Natural crime consists of conduct that o›ends the moral sentiments of pity and probity. By o›ending the moral sentiment of pity he meant our revulsion against the infliction of su›ering on other people. By probity, he meant honesty, and was r
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“Crimes are acts of force and fraud undertaken in the pursuit of self interest.” Gottfredson and Hirschi have o›ered us one more distillation of the essence of crime. It includes both more and less than legal definitions of crime. This definition focuses on those antisocial behaviors for which there is strong cultural consensus and on those behaviors that we are really concerned about, crimes like rape, robbery, theft, and murder, while allowing us to eliminate those acts of civil disobedience and conscience
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“Crime is a reaction to the life conditions of a person’s social class,” writes the radical criminologist, William Chambliss.To him, criminal behavior is a result of the oppressive e›orts of the ruling class to control the lower classes, to maintain their economic advantages, and to prevent nonconformity and revolutionary change. It would be unthinking to label this point of view as Marxist and summarily dismiss it. I have spent more than 25 years inside prisons of all sorts and it is indeed a very rare eve
“Crime is a reaction to the life conditions of a person’s social class,” writes the radical criminologist, William Chambliss.To him, criminal behavior is a result of the oppressive e›orts of the ruling class to control the lower classes, to maintain their economic advantages, and to prevent nonconformity and revolutionary change. It would be unthinking to label this point of view as Marxist and summarily dismiss it. I have spent more than 25 years inside prisons of all sorts and it is indeed a very rare eve
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not occur among them except rarely? No one thinks so. Sutherland, in developing his ideas about white collar crime, reminds us of Colonel Vanderbilt’s rhetorical question, “You don’t suppose that you can run a railroad according to the statutes, do you?”But I do not think that crime is explained by class struggle. The prosecution and punishment of criminals is without doubt class oriented, but it has never been demonstrated that the occurrence of crime is a class phenomenon. Therefore there is a proper plac
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“Crime is a disorder,” proposes Adrian Raine. “…[M]any instances of repeated criminal behavior, including theft and burglary, may represent a disorder or psychopathology in much the same way that depression, schizophrenia, or other conditions currently recognized as mental disorders represent psychopathologies.”This is the approach of many psychologists and psychiatrists and is based on their observations that criminals, especially repeat o›enders, di›er from ordinary people in important ways. It is also
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“Criminality is generally the result of a basic deficiency in conscience, a failure to internalize elementary inhibitions.”This view is proposed by the famous researchers William and Joan McCord. This e›ort is really only a short step away from “crime is an o›ense against morality.” I once heard an Islamic prison chaplain respond to the question of what causes crime. His laconic reply, instantly delivered, was, “bad morals.”
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The study of crime cannot be “freed from subjective moral judgment” because that is precisely what it is. The behavior itself is neither criminal nor noncriminal; it is our judgment about the behavior that makes it one or the other. Je›rey argues, “The reason we have crime, however, is not because individuals behave in the way they do, but because others think they ought not to behave in that way and have it in their power to judge their behavior.”This is one of the reasons that the study of crime is so int
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“Crimes are acts that may be rewarding to the actor but that inflict pain or loss on others; that is, criminal behavior is antisocial behavior,”
1. Setting the Stage
write the Canadian psychologists Don Andrews and James This is a refinement of our common sense criminology. This point of view focuses us on what we are really concerned about; antisocial acts for which there is large and widespread condemnation, historically and cross-culturally, while allowing us to take out of consideration, without getting confused, certain acts that are violations of the law in a certain time and place, but that most persons would not consider crimes; for example, acts of civil disobed
Bonta.
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“Crime is that behavior condemned by society,” write Wilson and Herrnstein; “it occurs despite the rewards and punishments that we have devised to enforce that condemnation.”With this definition, the professors intend to open the door to economic and psychological explanations of crime. Stanton Samenow, author of The Criminal Personality, suggests that a crime is a violation of the rights of other people, and that a crimiThis definition has the simplicity that I admire, and I think that it focuses us on the p
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nal is a person who consistently violates the rights of others.
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The foregoing are only some samples from the collection, but for now, let’s put up the old bones, close the lid on Pandora’s Box, and consider where we are. Undaunted by academic disputes, I believe that we can refine our thinking, respect the discovery of new facts, and retain our moral values at the same time. I can decline to be confused by sweeping statements about human behavior that are not relevant to the crimes that concern the vast majority of us and the crimes to which we are almost universally opp
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ior cannot tell you why the behavior is criminal.
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The best course to follow is to think for ourselves. I will hold in the back of my mind that definitions of crime can fall into illegal, immoral, unconventional, and antisocial categories and that, whichever category
The best course to follow is to think for ourselves. I will hold in the back of my mind that definitions of crime can fall into illegal, immoral, unconventional, and antisocial categories and that, whichever category
you pick, objections will be raised by someone. I will fully acknowledge the problems that emerge from an intensive study of crime, including the criminologists’ complaint, as Gottfredson and Hirschi have said it, that we do not control our own dependent The definition of crime is not a scientific definition, but is inevitably a moral and political one.
variable.
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I will remember the legal distinction called mala in se, a crime which is “evil in itself,” as opposed to crimes that are mala prohibita, prohibited within a particular cultural and historical context. I will agree with Andrews and Bonta that “[a] major task for philosophers, historians and social and behavioral scientists in criminology is to more fully understand the definitional problems associated with crime,” but I will not retire from When an itinerant worker robs and kills a family of five, I am sure t
the debate in confusion.
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If we cannot agree on what crime is, how can we then know who is a criminal?
Who Is a Criminal?
Who Is a Criminal?
Even criminals are against crime. Ray was a 29-year-old inmate who is a member of my treatment group at a medium security prison. I asked Ray what he would do if someone broke into his locker in the dormitory and took his belongings.
“I would stab him,” replied Ray, with an angry edge to his voice. “I wouldn’t let anyone do that to me. It’s wrong. You can’t live in here and let people do that to you.”
Ray is serving his second prison sentence for breaking and entering. By his own count, he has committed 46 Breaking and Enterings (he may be bragging a little), but he has been convicted of only five of them. He is not aware of any irony in our conversation.
In the first session of a new group, I routinely ask each of the men to answer the question “Are you a criminal?” It is predictable that each one of them will say that he is not a criminal, even though the eight men in this group have a total of 54 convictions on record and have been sentenced collectively to nearly ¡00 years in prison. It happens again in this group, as expected, each man answering that he is not a criminal. The only exception is Charles, a 52-year-old thief who describes himself, while smi
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1. Setting the Stage
prison are criminals. I disguise my amusement at this report and go on to my next question, “Who is a criminal?”
Ray answers, “Someone who does something really serious, like killing someone.”
Tommy, a 20-year-old bank robber, says, “Someone who does a lot of crimes, like all the time.”
Larry, a 4¡-year-old sex o›ender, replies, “A criminal is someone who rips o› other people.”
Charles, the 52-year-old “retired criminal,” says, “I used to be a criminal because I just didn’t care, but I do care now. I’m di›erent now.”
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Frank, 35 years old, convicted of second degree murder, states, “A criminal would be, if you came to prison and got out, and then you came back to prison again, then you would be a criminal.”
Maurice, a 25-year-old, convicted of assault, answers, “Someone who doesn’t give a shit about anything.”
Hinton, a 28-year-old drug dealer, o›ers, “Someone who hurts other people.”
Mike, a 30-year-old convicted of assault, says, “Somebody who does something more than once.”
As I expect from experience, each man defines “a criminal” in such a way that it does not apply to him but does apply to others at the same prison unit. This is because, as any of them will tell you, they are against crime. I next tell them that most people in society would consider them all to be criminals who should be in prison. They become visibly agitated at this declaration and the discussion becomes lively and heated. Everyone participates except for Maurice, who is silent and bristling with hostility
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This group did produce the usual answers that are provided by most people, in or out of prison, to the question “Who is a criminal?” A criminal is someone who commits serious crimes, someone who commits many crimes, someone who is a prison recidivist, someone who has criminal attitudes and values, or someone whose livelihood is crime. One researcher suggests that a criminal is a person whose patterns of thinking have led to arrestable These definitions seem straightforward enough, and the average citizen doe
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behavior.
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In a strictly legal sense, a criminal is anyone who has been convicted
In a strictly legal sense, a criminal is anyone who has been convicted
of a crime, any crime. But, like the legal definition of crime, the legal meaning of criminal will prove to include both too much and too little. To begin with, is a person who commits crimes and is not caught, and therefore has never been convicted of anything, a criminal? Large national surveys have consistently shown that there is a significant amount of crime not reported to the police, another large group of crimes that are reported but that do not result in an arrest, and another group that results in a
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of the nonadjudicated criminal, and by Widom.
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What about the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped? If they commit a crime, do we include them as criminals? Is our explanation for their criminal behavior the same as for those o›enders with normal intelligence and without any sign of mental disorder? Our fixation on reducing recidivism has led us to focus on repeat o›enders. Is a first o›ender a criminal? In prison work, first o›ender typically refers to someone in prison for the first time. But this person usually has prior arrests and convictions that
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The Mighty Opposites: Choice and Causation
The Mighty Opposites: Choice and Causation
I prefer to use, as a learning aid, and not with any claim that it depicts the true nature of reality, a continuum of choice. This continuum of choice has fate on one of its ends and choice on the other. These are the mighty
1. Setting the Stage
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opposites, choice and fate, free will and determinism. They are mighty because each has powerful arguments on its behalf, and because we have investigated and debated their respective contributions to criminal behavior, indeed, to all of human behavior, with much passion and for a long time.
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Aristotle thought that a science of human behavior was not possible because such a science could never account for the unpredictability of free will. Herbert Spencer, a nineteenth century philosopher who is credited with extending evolutionary theory into the realm of human social behavior, argued that no free will is possible if human behavior conforms to scientific laws.Stephen Hawking, the famous contemporary physicist, suggests that we say that people have free will whenever we cannot predict what they w
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Any behavior of an individual may be understood as falling at some point along this continuum, though for our purposes, we are thinking of criminal behavior. The advantage of conceiving behavior in this way is that a person’s behavior may be seen as having some element of choice and some element that is not entirely under the person’s control. For what behaviors are so freely chosen that there are no determining factors at all? Any behavior can be analyzed as a chain of cause and e›ect leading backwards thr
Any behavior of an individual may be understood as falling at some point along this continuum, though for our purposes, we are thinking of criminal behavior. The advantage of conceiving behavior in this way is that a person’s behavior may be seen as having some element of choice and some element that is not entirely under the person’s control. For what behaviors are so freely chosen that there are no determining factors at all? Any behavior can be analyzed as a chain of cause and e›ect leading backwards thr
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behaviors would fall in this category. Though a case might be made for some types of human behavior to fall into either extreme, complete choice or complete determination, the preponderance of criminal behavior would not fall in either extreme. Even if I could imagine a criminal act that would be an exception to this point of view, it would not destroy the usefulness of the continuum as a way of organizing our thinking about the causes of crime.
Figure
Here are two cases that illustrate the dilemma posed by the mighty opposites in ordinary lives, the twin scenarios of Gary G. and Gary F.
Gary G. is the oldest child of two wedded parents. His father, 34 years old at the time of Gary’s birth, is a successful accountant. His mother, 3¡ when Gary is born, is an accomplished musician who has chosen to stay at home and raise a family. There is no history of alcoholism or conviction for crimes on either side of the family as far as anyone knows. The parents receive excellent prenatal care, including night classes on birthing and parenting. Gary has a normal delivery and is the healthy baby boy of
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Until the age of four, Gary G. is raised at home with the daily care and attention of his mother and father. Upon reaching age five, Gary G. is placed in a select half-day preschool program that is sta›ed by experienced and dedicated teachers. At age six, he enters the best public school in the city. Throughout elementary school, he is an A student in most subjects. His mother encourages his musical interests and he plays the trumpet in the school orchestra. His father encourages his athletic interests and c
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Through middle school and high school, Gary G. maintains his above average academic standing. His parents remain happily married and are financially prosperous. Gary G. continues with his interests in soccer and the trumpet. Since his parents and his friends do not smoke, Gary G. has decided that he does not like cigarettes and he does not smoke. His parents are moderate drinkers and Gary G. does try alcohol, primarily beer, while in high school. He drinks occasionally with his friends at parties. He has tri
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Both of Gary G.’s parents are college graduates and Gary G. also plans to attend. He is accepted at a good university and goes there after gradu
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1. Setting the Stage
ating from high school. He studies hard and makes above average grades. In the more permissive college environment, he continues to experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex. He eventually rejects illegal drugs as too dangerous, drinks moderately, and spends most of his time with a steady girlfriend. His social science courses strike an interest in him and he begins to concentrate his courses in those areas.
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His introductory sociology class includes a tour of a local prison, which impresses Gary G. He is reminded of some young men he knew in high school who were engaged in delinquent behavior. He begins to read about crime and criminals. He sees several excellent movies in which a criminal is the principal character. He takes a criminology course, which fascinates him. The course is taught by a dynamic and personable professor who influences and encourages him. Gary G. decides to become a criminologist and appli
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Gary F. is born to an unwed mother who is ¡6 years old at the time of his birth and who has already dropped out of high school. His maternal grandfather is an alcoholic and he has two uncles who have served time in prison. Gary F.’s father, aged 24, is in prison serving his second sentence for larceny. Gary F.’s mother briefly considered an abortion until she received a letter from Gary F.’s father in prison. He wrote to her, “If you kill my baby, I’ll never forget it.” He is never involved in Gary F.’s life
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Gary F.’s childhood is chaotic. His mother has a succession of live-in boyfriends, some of whom are alcoholic and some of whom are batterers. His mother frequently leaves him for days at a time with relatives or obliging neighbors. Once, when Gary F. is five years old, she leaves him in a parked car, forgetting to pull down the emergency brake. The car eventually rolls down hill and smashes into another car. Gary F., who does not have on a seat belt, is thrown against the dashboard and receives a severe conc
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He receives no preschool education. His grandfather gives him his first taste of beer at age six. When, at the age of seven, he enters one of the poorest schools in the city, he is restless and disruptive in class, and has many absences from school. An especially dedicated third grade teacher thinks that he may have a learning disability, but this suggestion is never followed up by the overworked school sta›. By middle school, he has been suspended several times for fighting and for disrupting class. Even tho
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By now, his mother’s drinking problem has reached alcoholic proportions. Gary F. skips school and stays away from home for days at a time. By age ¡5, Gary F. drinks beer every day and smokes marijuana on most days. He is sexually promiscuous, mostly with prostitutes or with girls several years younger than he is. When he reaches the age of ¡6, he drops out of school. He decides to make money by selling marijuana, chiefly to high school students that he knows. He lives the street life until age ¡8, when he is
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These two case examples are hypothetical, but they are wholly plausible. Both choice and fate were involved in each of the two cases, but the
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1. Setting the Stage
weight of determining factors in both cases is heavy. Gary F. could have chosen to stay in school and he could have chosen to make money by getting a job rather than by selling marijuana or robbing a store. Gary G. could have chosen to abuse drugs and to pay for them by committing crimes. The choices that each one made were crucial in the unfolding of their lives, yet the choices that each made were not unpredictable and were not made in a vacuum empty of powerful influences. In fact, they both seemed to hav
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There is yet another factor that has its influence over the outcome: randomness. Suppose that Gary G.’s first criminology professor had happened to be a poor teacher, dull, arrogant and unsympathetic, and Gary
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G. decides that criminology is not for him. He stops going to his criminology class altogether and then fails the final exam. Making a F ruins his grade average, and he feels that his grades are beyond repair. He becomes discouraged, then restless and rebellious. His grades decline and he decides to leave college. He begins to hang out with other college dropouts, some of whom are dealing drugs to make a living. They remind him of the movies that he has seen that depicted criminals as heroes, and the street
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On the other hand, consider again the case of Gary F., who had decided to rob a convenience store in order to be able to repay a drug dealer to whom he owed money. Suppose that when he arrives at the store for the big moment he finds a police squad car parked in front of the store, with one o‡cer in the car and a second o‡cer inside the store, buying a cup of co›ee. Gary F. hesitates, loiters a few minutes, and then walks swiftly away down the street. The incident terrifies him. He decides that the street lif
On the other hand, consider again the case of Gary F., who had decided to rob a convenience store in order to be able to repay a drug dealer to whom he owed money. Suppose that when he arrives at the store for the big moment he finds a police squad car parked in front of the store, with one o‡cer in the car and a second o‡cer inside the store, buying a cup of co›ee. Gary F. hesitates, loiters a few minutes, and then walks swiftly away down the street. The incident terrifies him. He decides that the street lif
impressed by his counselor that he decides to finish college and get a job like his counselor, working with down and out criminals. His first criminology class is excellent and he feels genuine excitement about it. Since he actually has no criminal record at this point (except a juvenile record), he sees no obstacle to achieving his goals. He persists through to graduation. Gary F. is now a criminologist instead of a criminal.
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So to choice and fate we must add chance. It is not realistic to dismiss the influence that chance factors can have over human decisions and outcomes; yet, unlike some philosophers, I am not willing to concede that chaos is king. Criminals themselves often prefer chance explanations of their behavior (“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time”) and I have spent an entire career combating this explanation for criminality, one inmate at a time, all the while knowing that chance is a indeed a factor, though n
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To be sure, using the continuum of choice as a way of organizing our thinking does not solve all of our problems. It raises some di‡cult questions of its own. Are quantitative judgments of observed behavior, such as the percentages on our continuum, really possible? It is common practice in the social sciences to make quantitative judgments about all kinds of behavior. For example, in a typical study of attitude changes, a numerical value is assigned to degrees of liking, such as Not Like At All = ¡, Like S
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Another problem is brought out by this question: Where on this continuum does criminal culpability begin? Even if we accept this way of understanding criminal behavior, we are still left with value judgments to make. Where on the continuum must the behavior fall in order for the person to be held responsible for his crime? Jurors struggle with this kind of judgment, though they may not be thinking of it in exactly the same way as I have outlined it here. With respect to criminal behavior, there is
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1. Setting the Stage
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no escape from moral judgment. And this really is to the point. “There is nothing either good or bad, but our thinking makes it so,” says Horatio in Hamlet. A general theory of choice still cannot tell you why the behavior is criminal or where on the continuum personal responsibility begins or ends.
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The continuum of choice may also be used on another level; to organize causal theories of crime. Theories of the causes of criminal behavior can be placed along this continuum according to the degree to which the theory attributes behavior to free will and choice, or to fate and determinism. On the predetermined end of our continuum will be found predispositions of all types, including biological (heredity, constitution), psychological (personality traits, learning), and sociological (social forces). On the
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Figure
Those theories, or explanations, for criminal behavior that lend significant weight to free will and choice are generally termed as being of the classical school. Those tending strongly towards destiny and determinism are thought of as belonging to the positivist school. Some theories attempt to give significant weight to both and thus fall towards the middle
Those theories, or explanations, for criminal behavior that lend significant weight to free will and choice are generally termed as being of the classical school. Those tending strongly towards destiny and determinism are thought of as belonging to the positivist school. Some theories attempt to give significant weight to both and thus fall towards the middle
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range of our continuum. Such theories are sometimes called neoclassical or are said to represent a soft determinism. (Some social scientists would argue that social forces may operate as inevitably as biological traits and therefore should be depicted on the determined end of our continuum rather than toward the middle, as I have done in the illustration above. Without rejecting this point, I have let the illustration remain as it is for the sake of simplicity.)
Figure
Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal, for example, fell at the far end of the positivist dimension. However, in response to many criticisms of his theory, Lombroso gave considerable weight to social factors in his later work, moving his explanation of crime towards the center of our continuum.
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Figure
Leaning to one side or the other does have consequences. A positivist point of view certainly implies that the criminal is not at fault and that his behavior can be changed using scientific methods. It also suggests that we should be focusing our e›orts and resources on the discovery of new facts, and new cause and e›ect relationships. It suggests that crime is both preventable and curable, though the methods for doing so remain to be discovered. This is a grand hope, not supported by our experience so far.
behavior from mathematical equations.
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For those who lean to the choice, or free will side of our continuum, there are di›erent implications. Crime is not completely preventable, for there will be some crime for as long as there is some choice. The criminal is believed to be responsible for his behavior and held accountable for it. Change is thought possible but not without the willing cooperation of the person. Moral judgment cannot be isolated from our understanding of the
1. Setting the Stage
behavior, for we must admit that the reason we are so concerned about this behavior is because it is criminal, that is, as Samenow puts it, it is a violation of the rights of other people.
With the continuum of choice, we have not settled the debate between the mighty opposites, but we can organize our thinking about them, evaluate theories of crime, and support our own views. We can place new announcements about the causes of crime in perspective and we can apprehend where they are leading us. Finally, we can see and appreciate explanations of crime that allow for choice and causation to coexist in a single act.
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I propose no final resolution to the timeless debate between the mighty opposites; wiser heads than ours have addressed these issues with logic, wit, and eloquence, but without carrying the day for either side. I expect the debate to continue into the forseeable future, even beyond the discovery of a gene for criminality. Even if such a discovery should be made, it would not settle this argument once and for all, because even genetic predispositions do not produce certainties in behavior. For our present pur
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The One and the Many: Models of Causation
The One and the Many: Models of Causation
As we have already said, the classicists were not much concerned with discovering the cause of crime as they assumed that it was a calculated choice and did not inquire further. The positivists, however, believed that criminal behavior is determined or caused by something. It is the search for this thing that causes crime that has produced the long list presented at the beginning of this chapter, but the search so far has not led to a single destination.
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A profusion of problems have emerged. One of these, already discussed in an earlier section, is the definition of crime. If we are not sure what it is that we are trying to explain, it will obviously be hard to satisfactorily explain it. Another di‡culty is the application of scientific method to the problem of crime. The strongest and most convincing experimental method is to randomly assign subjects to treatment conditions and then compare the e›ects of the various treatments on the subject of interest.
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This true experimental design is the basic language of proof in the scientific sense. This experimental design, with su‡cient replication, satisfies the three criteria of causation: (¡) there must be a demonstrated association or connection between the cause and the e›ect, (2) it must be established that the cause preceded the e›ect, and (3) the connection between the cause and the e›ect must not disappear when the influences of other variables are taken into account. This means that when two variables are ass
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Let’s try a simple example. How would we prove the e›ectiveness of a medication for allergies? Is medication A more e›ective than no treatment at all in relieving allergic symptoms? Or, to state it somewhat di›erently, is medication A the cause of the relief of the allergic symptoms? The first task is to define allergic symptoms and concomitantly to define relief of those symptoms. The second task is to identify a group of subjects who have these symptoms. The next task is to assign subjects at random to one o
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1. Setting the Stage
medication A is e›ective for (is the cause of ) the relief of allergic symptoms.
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Now, how do we obtain scientific proof of the cause of crime? The thoughtful reader will already begin to see the di‡culties. Let’s take, for example, the popular proposition that crime is caused by broken homes. Why can’t we obtain scientific proof beyond dispute regarding the truth or falsity of this proposition? Because it is quite impracticable. The first task is to define crime and we have already seen how that is not as simple as it appears at first. Especially we must keep in mind the di›erence between cr
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So what do you do? Some social scientists will argue that there are acceptable ways around these problems, but that point is precisely where we descend into that “tangled wilderness of technical and inconclusive debate.” If it were really that easy to circumvent these problems and still obtain scientific proof beyond reasonable dispute, then we would know a lot more about the causes of crime than we know now. What we have instead are various proposals for getting around these problems, including quasiexperim
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There is an additional complication in identifying the cause of crime, namely, that there may be more than one. In thinking about crime, or any
There is an additional complication in identifying the cause of crime, namely, that there may be more than one. In thinking about crime, or any
human behavior for that matter, there is often a strong tendency to oversimplify, to seek a single underlying principle or explanation. This is the problem of the one and the many: is there a single cause of crime or are there multiple causes of crime? And if there are multiple causes of crime rather than a single cause of crime, what is to be our method of discovery?
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It is my inclination to argue against a root cause of crime. I admit that this bias is the result of my own personal experience with crime and criminals as well as my reading of the data. There have been some good e›orts at a single theory of crime, most notably Sutherland’s theory of di›erential association, mainly of historical significance now, and Gottfredson and Hirschi’s self control theory, a valiant attempt at a general principle, which I admire and which has much to recommend it. Each of these theor
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Consider this example. Suppose that we have five cases of homicide. In the first case, John L., who is a paranoid schizophrenic with a long history of treatment, shoots and kills one of his neighbors. During the shooting, John L. experiences extreme anxiety and paranoia, and hears command hallucinations in which insistent voices were telling him to kill or be killed. In the second case, Judy Y. shoots and kills her drunken and abusive husband after he had beaten her up (one of numerous beatings) and had threa
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T. accepts a contract of $50,000 to kill a potential witness in a drug tra‡cking case and he completes the contract. Marvin is caught when an associate is arrested on unrelated charges and “gives him up.” In the fifth case, Richard D. robs a convenience store with a handgun in order to get cash to pay a drug dealer. The store clerk reaches under the counter to push a police alert button and Richard D. shoots and kills him.
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Is there a single theory of crime to explain all of these behaviors? They are all crimes. They would all be included in crime statistics of all sorts:
1. Setting the Stage
arrest rates, conviction rates, violent crime rates, murder rates, incarceration rates. Yet it seems improbable that the same behavioral explanation would be satisfactory in each case. Still we might choose to search for the single cause of crime. Committed scientists certainly desire to discover universal laws. A unified theory of the universe is the grand challenge of physics, but who can name the Isaac Newton, the Max Planck, or the Albert Einstein of criminology? It may be that we cannot so name anyone b
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We might accept that there are many causes of crime and start to make divisions in our investigations. If we take this approach, we can choose to focus on the o›enses or we can choose to study the o›enders. Some criminologists approach this problem by saying that we are not trying to explain all of these crimes with a general theory of crime. John L. is clearly mentally ill and needn’t be included in our study. Judy Y. is guilty only of self defense and shouldn’t be included as she is not really a killer or
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Another approach is to categorize the o›enders rather than the o›enses. Categorizing o›enders is such a popular pastime that a good deal of the criminological literature is taken up with it. There are reasons for categorizing o›enders other than explaining crime. For example, o›enders might be placed into like groups in order to make prison management more e‡cient or in order to deliver treatment services more e›ectively. For now, however, it su‡ces to note that sometimes this is a way of organizing multipl
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I am not suggesting that scientific investigations of the causes of crime are useless enterprises. Indeed, I believe that it is worthwhile to struggle with these problems and I believe that there are useful discoveries to be made. But I am trying to point out fundamental di‡culties with which the experts struggle, to suggest some limitations that apply to the science of crime, and to help the reader to sharpen his own judgment about the current state of our knowledge of the causes of crime. I especially wish
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The Acts and the Actors: Crime and Criminality
The Acts and the Actors: Crime and Criminality
It is important to know that crime and criminality are not the same thing and that our knowledge of the causes of crime can appear quite confused without understanding the di›erence. Criminality is the propensity of an individual person to commit crimes. Thus the study of criminality focuses on the individual o›ender, while the study of crime focuses on the o›enses, such as aggregated crime rates. Having this distinction clearly in mind helps in understanding and evaluating explanations of crime, many of wh
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study is entirely satisfactory in isolation from the other.
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For example, Chaiken and Chaiken suggest the following: If a city has 3,000 burglars per ¡00,000 population, and on average each committed two burglaries a year, the city’s burglary rate would be 6,000 per ¡00,000 population. Alternatively, if a city has 300 burglars per ¡00,000 population and each committed an average of 20 burglaries per year, the burglary rate would also be 6,000 per ¡00,000 population. In this example, at the level of aggregate crime rates, the two cities are nearly identical. However,
1. Setting the Stage
would miss a significant di›erence in criminality at the level of individual analysis; criminality among the o›enders in the two hypothetical cities is quite di›erent and could very well suggest di›erent courses of corrective
action.
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Studying criminality in isolation from other factors is also insu‡cient. Hirschi and Gottfredson call this isolation “the fundamental mistake of modern theory.” As an example, they summarize a theory of crime proposed by Cohen and Felson. The theory is that the commission of a crime requires (¡) a motivated o›ender, (2) the absence of a capable guardian, and (3) a suitable A study of the motivated o›ender, which would be a study of criminality, is not su‡cient in itself to explain the burglary rate. We must
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inal behavior are confused,” writes Je›rey.
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2.

Schools of Criminology.
Schools of Criminology.
Classical Criminology.
Classical Criminology.
The proponents of the classical school of criminology believed that human beings are moral agents possessed of free will and reason, and that people make their decisions based on a rational calculation of gain and loss. The two principal founders of this school were both eighteenth century students of law, the Englishman Jeremy Bentham and the Italian Cesare Beccaria. The ideas underlying the classical school of thought in criminology were not original with Bentham and Beccaria; the ideas and arguments were
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Beccaria
Beccaria
Properly titled, he was Cesare Bonesana, Marchese di Beccaria. But he has come down in history as simply Beccaria, a democratization of which he would certainly approve. He was a European aristocrat, born in Milan in ¡748, but he was an aristocrat of the reformist type, as was his French contemporary, the Marquis de Lafayette. He was ripe for rebellion against the establishment, influenced by the chaos and cruelty of the criminal justice system of the eighteenth century, the ideas of the Enlightenment, the a
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2. Schools of Criminology
activists of that period felt strongly that they were emerging from a time of darkness and ignorance into the light of reason, science, and respect for the common man. Impressed by new advances in science and technology, including the dramatic discoveries in physics by Isaac Newton, they were advocates for progress in all areas of human knowledge, and for the reform of political and religious institutions. It was an intellectual rebellion against religious authority and against governmental oppression. Becc
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Beccaria’s principal foray down this shining path was his Essay on Crimes and Punishments, published in ¡764. The great French philosopher Voltaire wrote a commentary on it in ¡766 and afterwards this commentary and the Essay were frequently published together. In his book, Beccaria eloquently argued against the severities and abuses of the criminal law, especially capital punishment and torture. At that time, torture was a legal means of obtaining confessions and other trial evidence. The death sentence wa
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If the Enlightenment in Europe was the general context for the Essay, then the specific context was the case of Jean Calas. In ¡762 in France, the Huguenot Jean Calas was sentenced to death for the murder of his son. The prosecution argued that Calas had killed his son because the son had converted to Roman Catholicism. Voltaire took an interest in the case, and he was able to present evidence showing that the son had committed suicide. In a published work called Treatise on Tolerance, he argued against lega
If the Enlightenment in Europe was the general context for the Essay, then the specific context was the case of Jean Calas. In ¡762 in France, the Huguenot Jean Calas was sentenced to death for the murder of his son. The prosecution argued that Calas had killed his son because the son had converted to Roman Catholicism. Voltaire took an interest in the case, and he was able to present evidence showing that the son had committed suicide. In a published work called Treatise on Tolerance, he argued against lega
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slogan of the French Revolution.Four months after Voltaire’s famous letter, Beccaria began his book.
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Essay on Crimes and Punishments is a brilliantly reasoned, withering attack on the administration of justice, which Beccaria originally published anonymously, apparently for fear of retribution. He argued that the punishment should fit the crime and that a government did not have the legitimate authority to punish any more than was necessary to prevent the crime from occurring again.
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“If we open our histories, we shall see that laws which are, or should be, pacts between free men, have for the most part been only the instrument of the passions of the few, or the product of an accidental and temporary need; they have never been dictated by a cool scrutineer of human nature, able to condense to one particular the activities of a multitude of men, and consider them from this point of view: the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”What an original and appealing phrase: “a cool scrutin
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Beccaria continues in this vein, developing with persuasive reasoning and elegant, engaging prose, an argument against the criminal justice system at that time. The flavor of his famous Essay, the excellence of both his argument and his expression of it, can best be appreciated by digesting a sample. Below is a passage from his section on The Origin of Punishments:
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Laws are the conditions of that fellowship which unites men, hitherto independent and separate, once they have tired of living in a perpetual state of war and of enjoying a liberty rendered useless by the uncertainty of its preservation. They sacrifice a portion of this liberty so that they may enjoy the rest of it in security and peace. The sum of all these portions of liberty sacrificed for each individual’s benefit constitutes the sovereignty of a nation, the sovereign is the lawful depository and administr
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2. Schools of Criminology
ance the strong e›ect of passions whose bias is opposed to the general good. Eloquence, declamation, even the most sublime truths, have not been enough to curb passions for any length of time when excited by the lively impact of present objects.
Since then it was necessity which compelled men to yield portions of their liberty, it is certain that the portion each man was willing to add to the common stock was the smallest possible—only as much, that is to say, as would induce others to defend the whole. The right to punish is the sum of these smallest possible portions. Anything above that sum is abuse, and not justice; a fact, but certainly not a right.
Punishments which go beyond the need of preserving the common store or deposit of public safety are in their nature unjust. The juster the punishments, the more sacred and inviolable the security and the greater the liberty which the sovereign preserves for his subjects.
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Beccaria then develops more specific arguments against the practices of his time. His arguments have a decidedly modern resonance. The law should apply equally to all regardless of social, economic or religious considerations. He argues against obscure laws, wide judicial discretion, overly severe punishments, and victimless crimes. He is very concerned about what constitutes evidence in a criminal trial and he argues for trial by jury. Concerning the deterrent power of the laws, Beccaria proposes that it is
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He ends his Essay with this compelling sentence: “In order that punishment should never be an act of violence committed by one or many against a private citizen, it is essential that it be public, speedy, and necessary, as little as the circumstances will allow, proportionate to the crime, and established by law.”
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As influential as the Essay has been, both then and now, there are dissenting voices. Graeme Newman, for example, writes that Beccaria’s importance has been seriously overblown: “The majority of reforms that occurred during and soon after Beccaria’s treatise can as easily be ascribed to prevailing social and political conditions as to Beccaria or his tract.” Beccaria was a “pampered intellectual who had no first hand knowledge of the criminal justice system.”If that be true, he had something besides the princ
As influential as the Essay has been, both then and now, there are dissenting voices. Graeme Newman, for example, writes that Beccaria’s importance has been seriously overblown: “The majority of reforms that occurred during and soon after Beccaria’s treatise can as easily be ascribed to prevailing social and political conditions as to Beccaria or his tract.” Beccaria was a “pampered intellectual who had no first hand knowledge of the criminal justice system.”If that be true, he had something besides the princ
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amplified by Voltaire. He wrote what his readership wanted to read. They adored what he wrote.”
¡¡

And we still adore it. Beccaria is variously referred to as the leader of the classical school, the founder of the classical school, and the father of modern criminology. Jones reports that “most scholars agree that modern criminology came into being in ¡764 with the publication at Liverno, Italy, of the Trattato dei delitti e elle pena, written by Cesare Bonesana, the Italian Marchese di Beccaria.”Mario Cuomo, modern day reformer and former governor of New York, quotes Beccaria thus: “[T]he most far seeing
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Unfortunately Beccaria had little to say on the causes of crime. Like Bentham and other writers of the Enlightenment, he held a rather simplistic view of Rational Man. His assumption was the same as Bentham’s, that men seek their own self interest, and with reasoned calculation, seek pleasure and avoid pain. He assumed that crime was the inevitable result of human passions and opposing interests. All human behavior was the product of free choice by people who had the capacity for logic and reason and could
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2. Schools of Criminology
Two Sovereign Masters: Pleasure and Pain
Two Sovereign Masters: Pleasure and Pain
Certainly one of the most famous and eloquent voices in the great debate between the mighty opposites is that of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. He is appropriate for consideration here because his work most directly influenced criminology and because he is given homage in every published criminology textbook. Bentham was born in ¡748 in London and was a child prodigy who entered Oxford University at the age of ¡2. He graduated with a law degree but never practiced. He was so shy and sensitive that h
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Here are the famous first lines of The Principles of Morals and Legislation:
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Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and e›ects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every e›ort we can make to throw o› our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure thei
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From this eloquent opening, Bentham develops a detailed and logical system for determining what action to take when confronted with moral decision making. Happiness consists of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain. These “two sovereign masters,” pleasure and pain, govern the behavior of both individuals and of communities. The purpose of government is to provide the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. All laws should be based on
From this eloquent opening, Bentham develops a detailed and logical system for determining what action to take when confronted with moral decision making. Happiness consists of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain. These “two sovereign masters,” pleasure and pain, govern the behavior of both individuals and of communities. The purpose of government is to provide the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. All laws should be based on
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this principle of utility, also called the greatest happiness principle, the felicity principle, or the pleasure pain principle. Bentham believed that this principle could be demonstrated mathematically and he attempted to work out precise mathematical formulas for the infliction of e›ective punishment. For this reason, his point of view is sometimes called hedonic calculus.
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There is debate enough in this principle of utility for a thousand philosophers and we will not indulge them here. A‡rmations and refutations of this point of view would require at least a volume of its own. For our own purposes, it is su‡cient to note the influence of this concept on criminology and to acknowledge its continuing presence in our e›orts to understand crime and criminals. The principle of utility is a forerunner of behavioral psychology and is thus a progenitor of cognitive behavioral psycholo
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Bentham’s major purpose, however, was neither psychological nor philosophical, but political and practical. He wanted to reform the penal codes in England and to make them more rational and less harsh and discriminatory. He argued against capital punishment (except in “the most exceptional cases”) on rational grounds during a time in which the death sentence was very widespread and very popular. In England in ¡780, the year before the publication of Bentham’s famous book, there were about 350 capital o›ence
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2. Schools of Criminology
the sta›. However, he had left entirely out of consideration a most important element, the o›ender. This is why the Panopticon became known as a fine example of armchair criminology. Because Bentham was a scholar with no firsthand knowledge of o›enders, he failed to understand how o›enders would respond to the environment that he had created. This shortcoming resulted in the failure of his project. It is a deficiency that can still be found today, for example, in the rise of privatized prisons where entreprene
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However, some of Bentham’s ideas about prisons are current today, including the proposals that prisoners should not be idle, that they should be engaged in organized work projects, and that they should receive pay for their labor. Bentham also originated the idea that prisons are schools of crime. Bentham’s insistence that punishment for a criminal act should not be for revenge, but should be for the purpose of preventing a reoccurrence of the act, is the same as the “punishing smarter” thinking of today. H
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¡8
Though very popular and influential, both in his time and in ours, Bentham’s ideas were not without severe criticism. Karl Marx wrote that “in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self satisfied a way.”Sorokin observed that Bentham never addressed the obvious objection that what gives happiness to the greatest number of human beings does not necessarily bring the maximum of happiness to some individuals, and what gives the most happiness to some persons does no
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Bentham placed his emphasis on the crime and not on the o›ender. He held to a strictly legal definition of crime—no crime without a law— and he was much more interested in the consequences of a criminal act than in the motivation for the crime. The principle of utility was su‡cient, in his view, to explain crime, and he did not look further or deeper for an explanation for antisocial behavior. Our modern understanding of the psychopath does indeed see him as calculating, but very often in a short
Bentham placed his emphasis on the crime and not on the o›ender. He held to a strictly legal definition of crime—no crime without a law— and he was much more interested in the consequences of a criminal act than in the motivation for the crime. The principle of utility was su‡cient, in his view, to explain crime, and he did not look further or deeper for an explanation for antisocial behavior. Our modern understanding of the psychopath does indeed see him as calculating, but very often in a short
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sighted and self destructive way. He is certainly not very precise and is frequently irrational in his calculations. Some twentieth century theorists of the positivist school have proposed that what is wrong with the psychopath is that he is able to focus only on the immediate gratification of his wishes and cannot engage in long term planning or delay of gratification. Perhaps what is wrong with criminals is that they see only the immediate pleasure and fail completely to see the long term calculation of ple
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His e›ectiveness in reforming the harshness and arbitrariness of the criminal law of his day remains his greatest achievement. He frequently chided the legal profession for not e›ecting change in judicial practices. Among Bentham’s contributions to legal reform are the abolition of the transportation of convicted criminals to penal colonies, the mitigation of the severity of criminal punishment, removal of certain defects in jury systems, abolition of usury laws, rational opposition to the death sentence, a
2¡
The principle of utility, still a subject of earnest debate, has not answered all of our questions about the causes of crime, but for his contributions to criminology and law, Jeremy Bentham deserves a respectful acknowledgment.
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Positivist Criminology
Positivist Criminology
The positivists replaced the notion of free will with that of determinism. They emphasized empirical research, the individual treatment of criminals, and punishment that fit the criminal rather than the crime. They initiated the search for the cause of crime. One of the most influential progenitors of positivism in the social sciences was Auguste Comte, who published his six-volume Course in Positive Philosophy between ¡830 and ¡842. In this highly influential work, Comte introduced his “Law of Three States.”C
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In criminology, positivism was carried into criminology by A.M.
2. Schools of Criminology
Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet and by the Italian criminologists Cesare Lombroso, Ra›aele Garofalo, and Enrico Ferri. There are earlier precursors of positivism in criminology, perhaps beginning with Jean Baptiste della Porte, who published The Human Physiognomy in ¡586 in which he suggested that a thief is easily identified by his small ears and nose, bushy eyebrows, mobile eyes and sharp vision, large lips, and long slender Sellin proposed him as “the first criminologist.”In any case, whoever may be first, we w
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fingers.
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A University of Criminologies
A University of Criminologies
As we suggested in an earlier section, “The Explanation of Crime,” there are su‡cient schools of criminologies to form a university of them, with departments of every description. There are as well numerous ways of organizing your thinking about them. Walklate, for example, proposes three categories for schools of thought about the causes of crime: (¡) the behavior of criminals, positivist theories and classical theories; (2) the criminality of behavior, such as social disorganization theories, strain theor
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theory and critical theory.
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Lilly, Cullen, and Ball suggest that social context contributes greatly to theorizing about crime. Thus, for example, Lombroso’s theory of the criminal man emerged as the theory of evolution was new and much disHowever, for this book, we have chosen a traditional and simple approach to schools of criminology. We will present them as biological, psychological, and sociological. There is some overlap in this approach; for example, Anthony Walsh proposes a biosocial criminology and Curt Bartol calls his book a
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cussed.
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behavior.
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3.

Correlates of Crime:. Age, Gender, Race, and IQ.
Correlates of Crime:. Age, Gender, Race, and IQ.
Aging Out
Aging Out
Age and gender are the characteristics that have the strongest and most consistent relationship with criminal behavior. Gender is considered in the next section. As for the relationship between age and crime, there are a number of di›erent ways of demonstrating this relationship, but the graph below is an especially clear and compelling illustration.
Figure
The data used in constructing this graph are from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports for 2002. The y axis shows the percentage of the total arrests for 2002 for index crimes in the United States. Index crimes are the especially serious crimes that are used by the FBI to study crime trends: murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, arson, burglary, larceny (theft), and motor vehicle theft. The x axis shows the age of the person at
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3. Correlates of Crime
the time of arrest in categories of two years each. Each age category is labeled on the graph.
There are many interesting points that could be made from this graph; for example, 53 percent of all arrests for index crimes were of persons between ¡8 and 34 years of age. There were more people arrested under the age of ¡5 than there were arrested over the age of 54. But the main point is clear from the definite shape of the graph. Serious crime is strongly related to age, with most serious crimes being committed by persons ¡4 to 29 years of age. There is a decline after age 29 and another sharp and stead
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This strikingly robust e›ect between age and crime is, of course, no perfect rule. Most of our young men are not criminals, despite the confusion of adolescence and the abundance of testosterone coursing through their blood vessels. On the other hand, one of the most extreme criminals with whom I was personally acquainted was 72 years old. He was as vicious, as criminally active, and as estranged from other human beings as anyone I had ever met inside the walls of a prison. Nevertheless, the relationship be
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The phenomenon of spontaneous desistance does not prove that age is the reason for the decline in crime, only that the two are very consistently related to each other. This relationship naturally leads to the speculation that criminal activity may be a developmental or maturational issue and it suggests that biology is at least a part of the picture, as does the relationship between crime and gender. But at present there is no viable biological explanation for this e›ect, and most theories that have address
The phenomenon of spontaneous desistance does not prove that age is the reason for the decline in crime, only that the two are very consistently related to each other. This relationship naturally leads to the speculation that criminal activity may be a developmental or maturational issue and it suggests that biology is at least a part of the picture, as does the relationship between crime and gender. But at present there is no viable biological explanation for this e›ect, and most theories that have address
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aging out are social explanations. For example, Mo‡tt proposes that many of our teenagers are the victims of an unnaturally protracted adolescence, during which they identify with unsocialized peers rather than with positive mature adults. In place of the adult role models employed by our ancestors, modern adolescents tend to imitate the pseudoadult models provided by their more unsocialized peers.This is a typical sort of social explanation which addresses the emergence, or onset, of criminality but does n
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In contrast, Trasler o›ers this explanation: The reinforcers that maintain delinquent behavior in adolescents cease to do so when the person becomes an adult. As they grow older, young men gain access to other sources of achievement and satisfaction such as a job, a girlfriend, a wife, a home, and eventually children, and they become less dependent on peer group support. This new lifestyle is inconsistent with delinquent activities. In other words, the situation changes for maturing adolescents in our socie
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Some explanations that have been advanced are based on the idea that normal biological, social, and psychological maturation decreases criminal activity over time. As a group these are known as maturational reform theories. But these theories also have the deficiency that they do not explain the emergence or onset of criminal activity in adolescence, unless you wish to take the rather extreme position that criminal activity is a normal part of the maturation of the organism. Mo‡tt suggests that we look at tw
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3. Correlates of Crime
Other explanations include the idea that age enables people to more accurately calculate the probability of success in crime, which leads to their rejection of it. Most criminals do not have great financial gains over time nor are they able to avoid arrest, conviction, and incarceration with great success. So, as they gain experience, they more often reject criminal activities. Another idea is that the population of o›enders grows dramatically smaller with age as many active o›enders are dead, sick, or incar
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Matza proposes to resurrect the notion of will and to make a criminal o›ender, if not totally free of deterministic constraints, at least freer than he is normally pictured by theorists who espouse a deterministic point of view.In other words, at least a portion of the aging out phenomenon could be explained by choice.
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It seems that situation, choice, and criminality must all be included and that there is not a single explanation for the age e›ect. The innate tendency of a person to commit crimes is certainly the stage on which situational variables play their part. In early adolescence the opportunities to make bad choices begin to multiply and would appeal most strongly to young people who have already demonstrated their antisocial tendencies. Like Matza, we are not willing to deprive the individual adolescent of all ch
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Gottfredson and Hirschi state that they do not think that aging out needs to be explained. It is what it is: spontaneous (that is, unexplained) remission. They point out that everyone slows down with age. They contend that useful and accurate theories of crime can be proposed and tested without explaining the crime-age relation and that some important dimensions of crime causation may be (in fact, probably are) age independent.Even so, we think that it is telling that one of the few universally accepted fac
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Pragmatists would not be too concerned about explaining aging out but would be more interested in how it might be used. One psychiatrist quipped that because of the age-crime relation, our concept of sentencing
Pragmatists would not be too concerned about explaining aging out but would be more interested in how it might be used. One psychiatrist quipped that because of the age-crime relation, our concept of sentencing
criminal o›enders should be revised. Instead of sentencing convicted criminals to a specific number of years based on the type of crime that they had committed, we should sentence all o›enders to incarceration until they reach the age of 40, however long that might be. Then we could release them with no perceptible e›ect on the crime rate! Unfortunately, we cannot always agree that pragmatic decisions are just decisions. Therein lies another of the great dilemmas in criminology.
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Why Is Criminal Man a Man and Not a Woman?
Why Is Criminal Man a Man and Not a Woman?
Men are always and everywhere more likely to commit crimes. Male participation in serious crimes at any age greatly exceeds that of females, regardless of crime type, source of data, level of involvement, or measure of participation. For example, here are arrests by gender from the Uniform Crime Reports of the FBI for the year 2002.
Gender by Crime
Gender by Crime
Figure
(Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 2002) Though the number of females arrested has increased ¡4.¡ percent since ¡993, this number still does not approach that of the males. This gender di›erence holds true cross-culturally and historically, wherever such data is available. Dr. Lombroso’s daughter, Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, published a book in ¡9¡¡ summarizing his work and repeating some of his findings on the incidence of female criminality in the latter part of the nineteenth century in Europe: Austria ¡5 per
8.2 percent.Let’s assume that the more serious o›enders, the ones that we are concerned about in this book, eventually find their way to prison. Data on the composition of the prison population in the U.S. shows this gender contrast even more sharply (see top of page 5¡).
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This strong gender contrast for criminal behavior suggests a biological cause, though the social learning of gender roles may be just as important a factor. We face two fundamental problems: (¡) the gender ratio problem: why are crime rates for men so high? and why are crime rates
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3. Correlates of Crime
51
Prison Population by Gender
Prison Population by Gender
(Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Source Book of Criminal Justice Statistics, 2000)
for women so low? And (2) the generalizability problem: are the explanations for female criminality the same as explanations for male criminality, or do di›erent explanations apply? There have been numerous explanations proposed for the observed gender di›erence in criminal behavior. Let’s start with the “father of scientific criminology,” Cesare Lombroso. He wrote a book on female criminality, one of a relatively few books on this subject. As was usual for him, he had some interesting observations, some of
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Moreover, the born female criminal is, so to speak, doubly exceptional, as a woman and as a criminal. For criminals are an exception among civilized people and women are an exception among criminals, the natural form of retrogression in women being prostitution and not crime. The primitive woman was impure rather than criminal.
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As a double exception, the criminal woman is consequently a monster. Her normal sister is kept in the paths of virtue by many causes, such as maternity, piety, weakness, and when these counter influences fail, and a woman commits a crime, we may conclude that her wickedness must have been enormous before it could triumph over so many obstacles.
¡2
As his work progressed, Lombroso gave increasing importance to social factors in his theory of criminality: “Female criminality tends to increase proportionately with the increase of civilization and to equal that of men.”This is essentially the same as the more modern “liberation thesis.” The liberation thesis is that the women’s liberation movement suc
As his work progressed, Lombroso gave increasing importance to social factors in his theory of criminality: “Female criminality tends to increase proportionately with the increase of civilization and to equal that of men.”This is essentially the same as the more modern “liberation thesis.” The liberation thesis is that the women’s liberation movement suc
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ceeded in blurring the distinction between male and female gender roles, and that this liberation carried over into criminal activities as well as to legal activities. Women were liberated, goes the argument, to engage in all sorts of previously male behavior, both prosocial and antisocial. Thus some of Lombroso’s observations are echoed today, though as we can easily read for ourselves, the father of scientific criminology was far from a feminist. Here, for example, is another quote, the content of which is
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What terrific criminals would children be if they had strong passions, muscular strength, and su‡cient intelligence; and if, moreover, their evil tendencies were exasperated by a morbid psychical activity! And women are big children; their evil tendencies are more numerous and more varied than men’s, but generally more latent. When they are awakened and excited they produce results proportionately greater.
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¡4
This argument seems even more perverted and misogynistic when we remember that crime is fundamentally a male phenomenon.
Explanations after Lombroso continued to argue the line of innate sexual characteristics. Female criminality has been related, though not very convincingly, to abnormal chromosomal configurations, body fat, the castration complex, menstruation, and the onset of puberty. Thomas in Sex and Society, published in ¡907, argued that women are “anabolic” and men are “katabolic” (sic) by which he meant that women tended to accumulate body fat and fluid, while men tended to release such bodily characteristics. Thus wo
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Current explanations for female criminality tend to emphasize social learning and gender roles over innate biological characteristics, though sometimes in unusual ways. For example, Pollak argued that the di›erence in male and female criminality is only an apparent di›erence because female criminality is hidden by gender roles.Another line of argument begins with the shift in the ¡970s towards increased participation in the
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3. Correlates of Crime
labor force for women. This change resulted in greater opportunities for women to commit crimes and also greater exposure to the frustration and stress of the workplace. It also led, as the argument goes, to increased imitation of male behavior. The feminist view is that female delinquency is a defensive reaction to male e›orts to control and dominate women’s lives economically, emotionally, and physically. (Feminist criminology is discussed in greater detail in chapter ¡¡.)
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Another argument says that girls are not labeled as delinquent nearly as often as boys and are not thereby set on a course for criminality, although some studies have shown that girls are actually treated more harshly than are boys for delinquent behavior.It may be that girls have more self control than boys both because they are more strongly supervised by parents and because they have more innate self control. Since the consequences of their misbehavior are greater, there exist stronger deterrents for gir
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Females are freer to engage in delinquency when the mother is working. Hagan and his colleagues studied patriarchal families, in which the father worked but the mother did not; egalitarian families, in which both parents worked; and mother-only, single parent families. They omitted single parent families in which the father was the head of household because they could not find enough of these to study. Their research confirmed the prediction that female delinquency would be higher and more similar to male del
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Mo‡tt, Caspi, Rutter, and Silva have published interesting research on gender di›erences in antisocial behavior from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. The Dunedin study is a 26-yearold longitudinal study of ¡,000 male and female subjects born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in ¡972–73. The subjects were followed from age 3 to age 2¡ in their research published in 200¡, though the study is continuing. Mo‡tt and her colleagues found that the adolescent limited versus life course persistent
Mo‡tt, Caspi, Rutter, and Silva have published interesting research on gender di›erences in antisocial behavior from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. The Dunedin study is a 26-yearold longitudinal study of ¡,000 male and female subjects born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in ¡972–73. The subjects were followed from age 3 to age 2¡ in their research published in 200¡, though the study is continuing. Mo‡tt and her colleagues found that the adolescent limited versus life course persistent
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females than males su›er the primary individual level risk factors for life course persistent antisocial behavior?” The researchers consider this to be “an unanswered question.”
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Studies of aggression are not unequivocally helpful here. Men are more aggressive and more violent, are bigger risk takers, have more opportunity, seek more excitement, and are also, perhaps, more frustrated than are women. The problem with studies of aggressiveness is that it has never been shown that aggressiveness is the equivalent of, or inevitably leads to, criminal behavior. There are many socially acceptable ways to express aggressiveness that are not crimes, and there are certainly plenty of people
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Two books were published in ¡975 that addressed “the emancipation thesis,” sometimes called “the opportunity thesis,” the proposition that the women’s liberation movement of the ¡970s, while providing greater equality and freedom for women, would also increase the female crime rate. Freda Adler proposed in her book Sisters in Crime that as women began to move out of traditional homemaking roles and into the competitive marketplace, they would become more masculine in orientation and that they would acquire
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larger number of o›enses committed by women.
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ment in drugs.
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It may be seen that many of these explanations address the increase in female criminality in the last years of the twentieth century but do not
3. Correlates of Crime
address the fundamental di›erence that has always existed between male and female criminality. In addition, some of these are really explanations for juvenile delinquency rather than explanations for adult criminality. As we shall see later, these are not the same thing, and the same explanations do not always apply. Even so, the above are a fair sample of explanations available for the gender di›erence in crime. We think that they show collectively that we don’t know very much about it. The strongest and m
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Black over White over Asian
Black over White over Asian
The title of this section, “Black over White over Asian,” is jargon for the consistent finding in criminology that blacks commit more crimes than whites who commit more crimes than Asians. This finding has been consistent since crime statistics have been kept in the United States. Blacks are overrepresented at every stage of the criminal justice system, from reported crimes to arrests to convictions to The same finding holds true for research conducted in the United Kingdom by Rutter and The very same pattern
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incarceration.
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Giller.
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countries.
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The FBI in its Uniform Crime Reports for the year 2002 reported that for all arrests in that year, 7¡ percent were whites, 27 percent were blacks, and 2 percent were Asians or American Indians. This is striking since blacks are only ¡3 percent of the population. The situation is considerably worse if you look at serious crimes: 50 percent of all arrests for murder and manslaughter were blacks and 54 percent of all arrests for robbery were blacks. It should be also noted that African Americans are disproport
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ately the victims of crime.
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This is an emotionally charged, contentious, and politically explosive subject. In researching for this book, it was surprising to find how many otherwise detailed and comprehensive books on the causes of crime essentially ignored this subject. Walsh writes in 2002 that “[m]any shy away from dealing forthrightly with matters of race because they are aware of the tendency to label those who do as racists.”But this does not set the stage for objective, dispassionate science. No other topic in criminology has m
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The first skirmish line in this debate is that race, when carefully analyzed, is a rather bizarre concept, which appears to be a biological variable, but certainly is not. The racial or ethnic identity of someone is much less certain than age or gender. In the United States, the category of race may not explain anything more than the concept of social class explains. For example, a person with one black grandparent may be considered black, and if arrested, would appear in the category for African Americans a
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A second skirmish line in the debate is that the statistics themselves are biased, compiled in such a way as to reflect unfavorably on minority groups. Evidence against this charge comes from victim surveys, in which the victims of crimes report the race of persons who committed crimes against them. For example, Hindelang found that 62 percent of those arrested for robbery in a single year were black and also that, in that same year, the victims of robbery described their assailants as black 62 percent of th
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whites.
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3. Correlates of Crime
Attempts to explain the observation that African Americans commit crimes, especially violent crimes, at a disproportionate rate include economic disadvantage, inadequate socialization, and the evolution of a subculture of violence. There is some truth in each of these explanations. In the case of economic deprivation, the theory is that blacks have met with serious obstructions in achieving legitimate goals through legitimate means and therefore turn to crime more often in order to achieve their economic as
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Constitutional, or biological explanations, such as IQ or temperament, have also been attempted, but have fallen into disrepute. Biological explanations for crime, beginning with Lombroso’s “criminal man,” have always been criticized as having racist implications. This is not without justification, as we shall see in the section on biology and crime. The relationship between crime and IQ has its own individual history, which we will review in the next section. At present, hardly anyone is satisfied with any o
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Crime and IQ: The Science of the Caught?
Crime and IQ: The Science of the Caught?
Depictions of the brilliant criminal, like the evil genius in a James Bond movie, or the real life Je›rey MacDonald in Fatal Vision, will mislead us in our search for the causes of crime. Most experienced observers of the o›ender population have remarked on the criminal’s apparent inability to learn from past experience and have noted his below average intelligence. Harry Goddard, a major figure in the debate on intelligence and criminality in the early part of the twentieth century, put it this way:
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[H]ow many of the crimes that are committed seem foolish and silly. One steals something that he cannot use and cannot dispose of without getting caught. A boy is o›ended because the teacher will not let him choose what he will study and therefore he sets fire to the school building. Another kills a man in cold blood in order to get two dollars. Somebody else allows himself to be persuaded to enter a house and pass out stolen goods under circumstances where even slight intelligence would have told him he was
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irresponsible.
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This is a far cry from the evil genius, or even from the bright psychopath. Goddard was writing in ¡9¡4, and throughout the length of the twentieth century, scientists have made similar observations about criminals, remarking on the impulsive and self defeating qualities of their behavior, and on their consistently low scores on tests of academic ability. It is possible that our observation of the intellectual abilities of criminals is directly linked with the dynamics of getting caught; that is to say, cri
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Sometimes this line of thought is extended to the conclusion that criminology is simply the study of unsuccessful psychopaths while the successful psychopaths are busily running government, industry, the military, and corporations of all sorts. This possibility must be admitted, and, on any given day, after the conclusion of the evening news on TV, it seems
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3. Correlates of Crime
a more than plausible proposition. But I think that, in general, this is too cynical a view, and in particular, it does not focus us on our definition of crime as a group of behaviors about which there is a strong cultural consensus, such as rape, robbery, and murder. We need not feel compelled to explain behavior about which there is considerable doubt or disagreement. Various forms of selfish corporate behavior, for example, may indeed be contrary to the public good, and may unfairly take advantage of other
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Intelligent criminals exist, of course. There is no especially strong correlation between intelligence and goodness in an individual. A person may be very bright and very bad, or, conversely, a not-so-gifted person may be an extraordinarily good person, showing us once again that our intelligence alone does not necessarily advance us through the stages of moral development. But the aggregate data, gathered over the last ¡00 years, strongly suggest intellectual deficits in the criminal population. Much of thi
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The debate about intelligence and criminality had an early start. The French psychologist Alfred Binet began his eventually successful e›orts to measure intelligence in the ¡890s. His test of mental ability was gradually improved and became widely used. However, Binet’s test, based on the concept of mental age, tended to overestimate retardation when applied to adults. We shall see how this error contributed to the debate on IQ and The English physician Charles Goring, in his famed refutation of Lombroso’s
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community.
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The next year, Harry Goddard, an American physician and administrator of the New Jersey School for the Feeble-Minded, presented his data and his conclusions on criminality and intelligence. He had studied the
The next year, Harry Goddard, an American physician and administrator of the New Jersey School for the Feeble-Minded, presented his data and his conclusions on criminality and intelligence. He had studied the
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intellectual capacities of inmates in ¡6 reformatories. He reported, “Every investigation of the mentality of criminals, misdemeanants, delinquents and other antisocial groups has proven beyond the possibility of contradiction that nearly all persons in these classes, and in some cases all, are of low mentality … it is no longer to be denied that the greatest single cause of delinquency and crime is low grade mentality, much of it within the limits of feeblemindedness.”How suspicious we must be — and must
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William Healy was an American psychologist and influential expert on delinquency who published, along with Franz Alexander, a book called The Roots of Crime in ¡935. This book was widely read at the time. Healy’s data convinced him that the delinquent male is five to ten times more likely than a normal boy to be mentally deficient.
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There was opposition to this line of thought. The U.S. Army began to administer IQ tests to draftees during World War I. Zelney reported that these tests indicated that one third of army draftees would be classified as feeble This was a startling result and cast doubt on the work of Goddard and others who had found so much “feeble mindedness” in reformatories and prisons. We can recall that Binet’s test tended to overestimate retardation. Carl Murchison of Clark University published his book Criminal Intelli
minded.
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ties for crimes, including the death penalty for a third felony conviction.
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Sutherland reported in ¡93¡ on 350 studies of mentality and crime and concluded that the relationship between crime and feeblemindedness
3. Correlates of Crime
is “comparatively slight. Certainly intelligence is not as closely related to crime as is age or sex.”The majority of prison inmates are not mentally handicapped and the mentally handicapped, as a group, are not especially inclined to committing crimes. However, both of the above observations could be true without leading necessarily to the conclusion that there is no relationship of importance between IQ and crime. Sutherland’s determined attack on the link between crime and IQ, and his prestige in crimino
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population.
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The debate reopened in the ¡970s. Marvin Wolfgang’s landmark Philadelphia cohort research in ¡972 reported that among nearly 9,000 males in the study, the chronic o›enders in the group had consistently This result held even within social classes. In ¡977, Hirschi and Hindelang determined that a low IQ is a good predictor of “o‡cial” juvenile delinquency, but an even (However, this result has a possible interpretation that is somewhat humorous: high IQ delinquents are smart enough not to self report illegal
lower IQ scores than did those without police records.
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better predictor of self reported delinquency.
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points.
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Farrington published a study in ¡989 as a part of the Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development, which showed that IQ at age eight predicted both self reported delinquent behavior and o‡cial measures of violence at age 32.In ¡995, David Lykken, of the University of Minnesota, wrote: “It is now well established that o›enders, whether juvenile delinquents or adult prison inmates, have lower IQ’s than non›enders, a mean IQ of about 92 compared to the general population value of ¡00, or to the estimated mean fo
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5¡
But what does this relationship mean? Its explanation cannot be
But what does this relationship mean? Its explanation cannot be
entirely and neatly cut o› from general issues about IQ scores, which are still very much debated: What do they really measure? Are they consistent and stable for individuals over time? Are they culturally biased? Are they racist? As Wilson and Herrnstein wrote, these issues are hotly argued, and “with more passion than understanding.” It is interesting how our story of the causes of crime pushes so many of the hot button issues of our present time, as here for instance, in the meaning of IQ testing and its
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Perhaps making a more sophisticated analysis will help us. The most frequently used test of intelligence is one of the several versions of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, designed by the American psychologist, David Wechsler. This test is divided into ¡¡ di›erent subtests, which measure di›erent mental abilities. These subtests can be summed to produce two subscores called verbal IQ and performance (spatial) IQ. A review of relevant research by Quay in ¡987 showed that, for criminals, performance IQ
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Another suggestion is found in the fact that IQ has been found to be related to type of crime. Such crimes as bribery, forgery, and embezzlement are associated with higher IQs than is average for the o›ender population. Assaults, homicide, and rape are associated with lower IQs. In the middle, or average, range of intelligence for o›enders are property o›enders, burglars, auto thieves, and alcohol and drug o›enders. Low test scores are associated with impulsive crimes. This impulsiveness, or lack of self co
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Another line of thought is that IQ does not directly a›ect delinquency, but that low IQ hinders academic performance, which then a›ects other factors that are critical to criminal behavior, such as peer associations and employment opportunities. Other important attitudes and skills are also a›ected by IQ, especially verbal IQ, such as goal setting, problem solving,
3. Correlates of Crime
delay of gratification, and moral reasoning. Hirschi wrote in ¡969 that “hundreds” of studies showed the relationship between academic competence and criminal behavior and that the lack of relationship between school achievement and delinquency as posited by many criminologists “must be considered one of the wonders of social science.”
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It has been best stated by Wilson and Herrnstein:
A child who chronically loses standing in the competition of the classroom may feel justified in settling the score outside, by violence, theft, and other forms of defiant illegality. School failure enhances the rewards for crime by engendering feelings of unfairness. In addition, failure in school predicts, to a substantial degree, failure in the marketplace. For someone who stands to gain little from legitimate work, the rewards of noncrime are relatively weak. Failure in school therefore not only enhances
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crime.
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I think that this is the best interpretation of the data that we have at present. It is not the evil genius who is the proper subject of our concern, but rather the adolescent male with average to below average intelligence who is frustrated in school and misguided at home. The problem of the successful criminal and his IQ has not been satisfactorily settled and will continue to haunt us until we are clever enough to discover some workable method for the systematic observation of noninstitutionalized crimin
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