Understanding Crime

Understanding crime and criminal behaviour

As society grows, the law becomes necessary to maintain order and protect human rights. If the law has such an important function of protecting our rights and liberties, why do some people choose to violate it? To understand the motivations behind criminality, we'll start by defining what criminal behaviour is.

Understanding crime meaning

The definition of crime is general and broad. Law and crime are subjective and socially constructed concepts. Each culture can have different laws, and even within a culture, the law changes with time.

Every society has some laws in place, but each has different ideas about what the law should be and what threatens the order of their community.

Types of crime

The law attempts to regulate many domains of our life, and as a result, we can also distinguish between several types of crime. It's important to recognise that different types of crime can be associated with different motivations and underlying causes. Let's define the different types of crime:

• Violent crimes involve aggressive behaviours, where the perpetrator uses or threatens to use force. Violent crimes can often result in harm to the victim. An example of a violent crime would be assault, rape, robbery, or murder.

• Sexual crimes involve non-consensual sexual acts like rape or sexual assault. Sexual crimes also include prostitution, child pornography, human trafficking, forced marriage, female genital mutilation or spiking someone's beverage or food with the intent of sexually assaulting them.

• Drug-related crimes include producing, selling, or possessing illegal and potentially addictive drugs. The illegal drug market is also associated with violent crimes.

• Anti-social crimes are commonly defined as behaviours that cause harm or distress to other people that are not part of the same household as the offender. These can include intoxicated people becoming rowdy, vandalism, littering or noise disturbance.

• Acquisitive crime involves committing an illegal act with the motivation of material gain. These include tax fraud, theft, online fraud, or burglary.

Burglary is an example of an acquisitive crime, freepik.com

Psychological approaches to understanding crime

Several psychological theories attempt to explain criminality to enhance the current prevention and punishment approaches. These include operant conditioning and social learning theory.

Operant conditioning

According to the behaviouristic view of crime, people resort to criminal behaviour when they perceive the rewards to be greater than the punishment. Criminality, including acquisitive or drug-related crimes, is reinforced through operant conditioning.

There are four processes of operant conditioning that affect criminal behaviour.

• Positive reinforcement involves rewarding someone with a positive outcome.
• Negative reinforcement involves rewarding someone by taking away a negative outcome.
• Positive punishment involves punishing someone with negative consequences.
• Negative punishment involves punishing someone by taking a positive outcome away from them.

Social Learning Theory

The social learning theory provides another approach to understanding crime. According to this theory, criminals are a product of their environment. They have learned criminal behaviours through observing and imitating the models in their environment, whether through watching the models on the internet or the TV, their family members or peers.

The motivation to imitate can become especially strong if we see others benefit from their criminal behaviour; this process is called vicarious reinforcement. It increases our motivation to imitate the behaviour of others. We are also more likely to internalise and identify with the model's actions if we perceive them as someone we'd like to become.

Other processes involved in modelling include the ability to pay attention to the behaviour of a model, retain it in memory, the ability to reproduce it and the motivation to do so.

Causes of crime: personality and genes

Personality psychologist, Hans Eysenck, argued that there is a certain pattern of personality that is characteristic of criminals. In his PEN personality model, Eysenck conceptualised personality using three independent dimensions: extraversion-introversion, neuroticism and psychoticism.

• People scoring high on the extraversion dimension were described as gregarious, active and lively. More extroverted individuals can also prefer higher levels of external stimulation than those who are more introverted.

• Neuroticism is associated with one's level of emotional stability. Highly neurotic individuals tend to experience mood swings and be more vulnerable to stress.

• People scoring high on the third dimension, psychoticism, are considered impulsive, aggressive, low in empathy, and sensation-seeking.

Eysenck argued that offenders tend to score highly on extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism, making them likely to commit crimes and difficult to change. According to Eysenck, criminals are born and not made. He suggested that personality is determined by our biological dispositions, like the sensitivity of our nervous system, and is genetically inherited.

So, is there a criminal gene that determines our behaviour? Not necessarily, but genetic factors can influence some behavioural tendencies like aggression or impulsivity.

Genes can influence criminal behaviour, freepik.com

Understanding crime and punishment

Psychological approaches to criminality also influence how our justice system deals with crime. The use of prison and community sentencing aims to reduce re-offending based on the principles of operant conditioning; this is a form of positive punishment that is supposed to discourage re-offending. Moreover, a community sentence gives the offender a chance to make amends to society.

Token economy programmes are another example of a behavioural intervention based on operant conditioning. It is applied in prisons and correctional facilities and rewards the prisoners with tokens for their good behaviour. This is often used to maintain order in prisons and encourage behaviour change among prisoners.

To address the harm the crime cause to the victim, restorative justice can be used as an additional form of punishment, where the offender has to confront the victim of the crime directly. This approach has been associated with increased satisfaction among victims and reduced re-offending among perpetrators.

Anger is considered to be a primary motive for violence. To address this factor, psychological interventions called the anger management programmes have been created. Such programmes give people an opportunity to reflect on their behaviour, as well as learn and practice how to regulate their anger.