Psychological Theories of Crime

There are five psychological theories of crime: biological, behavioural, social learning, social ecological and situational explanations.

Attention has been directed to human cognition (mental content, process and abilities) and affect (moods and emotions), and to the biological foundations of and the environmental influences of behaviour.

Biological

• Individual genetic variations may be linked to criminality; transferring these genetic variations to biological offspring
• This heritability of criminality may exist in a genetic foundation for crime-related behavioural tendencies such as aggression, addiction, selfishness, impulsivity and sexual deviance.
• Biological changes such as those during adolescence provide an increase in physical strength and sexual urges. This may help to understand the increase in the crime rate for males peaking in early adulthood and steadily declining afterwards.
• Children of criminal parents are more likely than children of non-criminals to becomes criminals.
• This intergenerational transmission of crime may be a product of learning.
• The ingestion of alcohol and other drugs, act on the CNS producing poor social judgment and aggression as well as other environmental contributions such as brain injuries/damage and toxins increasing the likelihood of deviant behaviour occurring.
• From an evolutionary perspective the biological make-up serves the fundamental purpose of survival and reproduction.
• r/K theory: r-selected strategy; opportunistic, impulsive, aggressive and dominant. K-selected strategy; cautious, self-controlled and socially co-operative.

Behavioural

• Behavioural focuses on the way that individuals learn, using classical and operant conditioning.
• Classical conditioning is the pairing of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus which produces a conditioned response. The previously neutral stimulus is then a conditioned stimulus.
• Operant conditioning uses two types of consequences: reinforcement; the behaviour is more likely to occur and punishment; the behaviour is less likely to occur. Both types of consequences can be positive or negative.
• It is possible in classical conditioning for a learned association to occur with a single trial learning although classical conditioning typically corporates multiple pairings.
• A concern for the justice system would be that operant conditioning sees that unless punishment occurs immediately after (typically) the behaviour, the individual will not associate the punishment with the behaviour.