Unraveling the Root Causes of Criminal Behavior

Introduction

Legally, crimes generally are defined as acts forbidden by means of law that may be punished via imprisonment and/or fine. homicide, theft, burglary, rape, drunken driving, maltreatment, and failure to pay your taxes all are common examples. However, as several eminent criminologists recently have referred, the important thing to understanding crime is to target essential attributes of all criminal behaviors rather than on specific criminal acts. rather than trying to separately understand crimes like homicide, theft, rape, burglary, embezzlement, and heroin use, we want to establish what they all have in common. a great deal research studies on crime has been confounded by its attention on political and criminal issues instead of behavioral definitions. In what causes criminal behavior essay this topic will be revealed by the author as much as possible.

Crime may be a particularly interesting problem because it's in many respects the exact opposite of altruism. This is very true if we define crime broadly as behavior within which individuals obtain resources from others through force, fraud or stealth. Altruistic acts cost someone more than what he or she gains. Criminal acts do exactly the alternative, individuals that commit these acts intentionally harm others for their own personal gains.

The behavioral definition of crime focuses on, illegal activity, a particular personality profile that causes the foremost alarming styles of crimes. All criminal behaviors involve the usage of force, fraud, or stealth to get material or symbolic resources. As Gottfredson and Hirschi stated, illegal activity can be a shape of strategic behavior characterized by using self-centeredness, indifference to the suffering and desires of others. More impulsive people are much more likely to search out criminality an appealing sort of behavior due to the fact it may provide immediately gratification through relatively simple strategies. some drug dealers, tax evaders, prostitutes and other felony criminals may without a doubt be business-people whose endeavor happens to be illegal. Psychologically, they may no longer differ from regular citizens. furthermore, nearly all regular citizens commit at least small criminal crimes throughout their lives.

Review of Literature

Criminal thinking has been well established in the unfolding of criminal behavior; however, little is known with relevance to the development of criminal thinking itself. One psychological factor that has been proposed as a possible agent within the development of criminal thinking is individual differences in personality. Previous research work has provided tentative support for an association between personality and criminal thinking.

A past study provides the primary piece of empirical evidence of a predictive pathway between personality traits and criminal thinking styles. Personality was measured with reference to Eysenck’s three-factor conceptualization, and each one of the three personality traits emerged as statistically significant predictors of criminal thinking. Neuroticism possessed the smallest amount robust predictive relationship to criminal thinking and also exhibited the littlest effect on criminal thinking sorts of the three personality factors, while psychoticism was found to form the strongest impact on criminal thinking. While these results suggest that increased levels of neuroticism, extraversion, and psychoticism all appear to steer to greater levels of criminal thinking, the foremost important personality factors within the development of criminal thinking is psychoticism.

Psychopathy and It's Relationship to Criminal Behaviour 

The concept of psychopathy is widely contested from a theoretical yet as a scientific factor of view. though its significance is apparent now not only within the fields of psychiatry and psychology, but also in other disciplines, like criminology, it though remains a disorder which has not yet been absolutely explored. in addition discovery of this construct will help in the method of correlating psychopathy scores to antisocial conduct.

Psychopathy is defined as a mental disease in which someone displays unscrupulous and delinquent conduct, suggests an absence of capability to love or set up meaningful personal relationships, expresses intense egocentricity, and demonstrates a failure to learn positively from experience and different behaviors related to the condition. Psychopathy describes a collection of character tendencies and behaviors often associated with lack of emotional sensitivity and empathy, impulsiveness, superficial allure and insensitivity to punishing consequences.

Howard propose that psychopathy offers an ideal theoretical framework for studying severe, violent, and persistent crime, whilst, DeLisi advanced that psychopathy is “the unified principle of delinquency and crime and additionally the purest clarification of antisocial conduct”. Psychopathy and criminal activity do not appear to be the same construct. The powerful, interpersonal, and behavioral characteristics that demarcate psychopathy don't necessarily contain or suggest criminal conduct and “most effective a little minority of these who engage in criminal conduct are psychopaths”. but, certain psychopathic tendencies (for example impulsivity, lack of empathy, and grandiosity) “both increase the chance that affected people will take into account carrying out criminal behavior and decrease the probability that the choice to act are going to be inhibited”. furthermore, psychopathy has additionally been shown to expect delinquent behavior in environments that should theoretically protect against criminal conduct.

References

• Lemert, Edwin M. (1972) Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Reiss, Albert J. Jr. and Jeffrey A. Roth (1993) Understanding and Preventing Violence. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
• Tonry, Michael L., Lloyd E. Ohlin, and David P. Farrington (1991) Human Development and Criminal Behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.
• Vaughn, M.G. and Howard, M.O. (2005), “The construct of psychopathy and its potential contribution to the study of serious, violent, and chronic youth offending”, Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 235-52.
• Wilson, James Q. and Richard J. Herrnstein (1985) Crime and Human Nature, New York: Simon and Schuster.