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- To aid our understanding of crime and criminal behaviour, we'll start with understanding crime's meaning.
Next, we'll discuss the different psychological approaches to understanding crime.
Then, we'll look at the potential causes of crime.
Finally, we will explore how understanding crime and punishment can help us prevent or minimise crime in society.
Understanding crime, freepik.com
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
Crime is defined as any action which breaks the law.
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.
For example, the legal drinking age can differ between countries. In the UK, it's legal for a 19-year-old to buy and drink beer at a bar, but in the US, the legal drinking age is 21. Similarly, driving on the left side of the road or jaywalking is permitted in the UK but against the law in the US.
The law also changes with time; a century ago, producing or selling alcohol was illegal in the US. And in the UK, homosexual relationships were only legalised in 1967.
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.
Operant conditioning is a process through which an individual's behaviour is strengthened or weakened through the consequences of their actions. If the consequences are desirable for the individual, they are likely to re-offend. In contrast, they are unlikely to re-offend if the consequences are undesirable.
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.
Getting away with tax fraud is an example of negative reinforcement. It takes away a negative outcome—paying taxes.
Prison or community sentences are both examples of positive punishment, where a person has to bear the negative consequences of their offence. And an example of a negative punishment could be taking away someone's driving licence for causing a road accident.
One limitation of this theory is that it predicts that punishing people for criminal behaviour should be an effective way of preventing consecutive offences, which may not be the case. In the UK, it is reported that up to 83% of prisoners re-offend within the next nine years after their release.
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.
The evidence for acquiring violent behaviours through the process of social learning comes from the famous Bobo doll study conducted by Albert Bandura in the early 1960s.
In his study, children watched an adult (model) play with toys in the corner of the room. One group of children saw the adult be violent towards the Bobo doll, while the other saw the model play with the doll in a non-aggressive way. After watching the adult, the children were moved to another room with toys, where they were quickly informed they needed to move again because they couldn't play with the toys there. This was done to evoke frustration in them.
Once the children were put in the experimental room alone to play with the toys themselves, their behaviour was observed. The study found that the group that watched the aggressive model showed significantly more verbal and physical aggression towards the doll. They repeated the model's behaviour and showed non-imitative aggressive behaviour. In contrast, the other group was much less aggressive behaviour toward the Bobo doll.
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.
Christiansen (1974) investigated the influence of genes on personality with a longitudinal twin study design. He observed the criminal behaviour of 3,586 monozygotic (sharing 100% of their genes) and dizygotic (sharing 50% of their genes) twin pairs.
He found that if one of the MZ twins committed a crime, the chance of the other twin committing crimes was 50%. While in DZ pairs, the likelihood of the second twin also committing a crime was only 20%. These findings suggest that genes contribute to (but don't determine) criminal behaviour.
Personality and genes are the individual factors that can contribute to criminal behaviour. However, it is important to remember that several social factors like poverty, substance use or childhood neglect and trauma also play a role in criminality.
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.
Understanding Crime - Key takeaways
- Crime is defined as any action which breaks the law. It is a subjective and socially constructed concept. We can distinguish several types of crime, including violent, sexual, drug-related, anti-social and acquisitive crime.
- The behavioural explanation of crime is based on operant conditioning, a process through which an individual's behaviour is strengthened or weakened through the consequences of their actions.
- The social learning theory provides another approach to understanding crime. According to this theory, criminal behaviour is learned through observing and imitating the models in their environment.
- Some psychologists theorise about genetic and personality factors influencing criminal behaviour. Eysenck argued that offenders tend to score highly on extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism, making them likely to commit crimes and difficult to change.
- Psychological approaches to criminality, also influence how our justice system deals with crime.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Understanding Crime
Why is it important to understand crime?
Understanding crime helps design interventions aimed at reducing crime and recidivism.
How can understanding the cause of crimes help prevent them?
Understanding the causes of crime allows us to target them when designing preventative interventions.
What are the 4 perspectives of crime?
Crime can be studied from psychological, sociological, legal and political perspectives.
What is the impact of crime?
Crime can impact victims on a physical, psychological, social or financial level, but it also affects their families and society as a whole.
How has psychology helped us understand crimes?
Psychology has helped us identify both individual and social factors that can influence offending and the limitations of eyewitness testimony. It also helps us determine whether the offender was entirely sane when they committed the crime.
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