Understanding Criminal Behavior

Introduction

“Any Kind Of Antisocial Behavior, Which Is Punishable By Law Or Norms, Stated By Community,” Can Be Stated As Criminal Behavior.

Criminal behavior study is to understand the behavior of criminals and find some answers to questions such as:

Why do criminals commit an offence?
Who are they?
How do they think?
What do they do?

A risk factor in criminality is anything in a person’s psychology that will somewhat increase the possibility that he/she will get involved in a criminal activity. These may include:

Behavior disorder,
Lack of education,
Media influence,
Poor personal temperament,
Low IQ,
Antisocial beliefs,
Influence of society
Poor parenting, etc…

How To Measure Criminal Behavior?

Criminal behavior is usually measured by:

Arrests and charges,
Self-reported offences.
Actual crime rates.

Causes of Criminal Behavior

Family issues – Children with violent parents are more likely to become violent through learned behaviors.
Financial problems, or starvation – When A person has to struggle every day just to fulfil his/her basic needs, the probability that they commit a crime to complete their desire.
Socioeconomic status – Many feel inferior or low because of their lower-middle or poor-class lifestyle, and sometimes, to gain a higher status, they choose the wrong path.
Genetics – Any type of mental disorder, such as anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, Schizophrenia, Depression, etc.
Mental illness– More than half the population in jails and state and federal prisons have some kind of mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Theories Of Criminal Behavior

Three Broad Models Of Criminal Behaviors Are The Following:

Sociological Models
Psychological Models
Biological models

Psychological Approaches

Crime control policy based on psychological principles targets individuals and tries to prevent criminal behavior from this point.
Any policy aimed at preventing crime by targeting persons, such as training, education, promotion of self-awareness, rehabilitation, resocialization or identification of risks of criminal behavior, is psychological in nature.
Some fundamental assumptions of psychological theories of criminality are as follows:
Normality is generally defined by social consensus.
The individual is the primary unit of analysis in psychological theories.
Criminal behavior may be purposeful for the individual insofar as it addresses specific felt needs.
Defective, or abnormal, mental processes may have a variety of causes, i.e., A diseased mind, inappropriate learning or improper conditioning, the emulation of inappropriate role models, and adjustment to inner conflicts. (Mischel, 1968.)

Sociological Approaches

According to social control theory, if a person’s social bonds are weak, he/she will be more likely to commit a criminal act, because people care what others think of them and try to conform to social expectations because of their attachment to others.

Sociological notions of criminality are defined as:

How the contradictions of all of these interacting groups contribute to criminality.
Attempting to connect the issues of the individual’s criminality with the broader social structures and cultural values of society, familial, or peer group.
Criminality is viewed from the point of view of the social construction of crime and its social causes.

Biological Approaches

Biological theories purport that criminal behavior is caused by some flaw in an individual’s biological makeup.

According to the Raine Study, this physical flaw could be due to…

Heredity,
Neurotransmitter dysfunction,
Brain abnormalities that were caused by either of the above, improper development, or trauma.

Many theories share biological approaches, such as:

Trait and Psychodynamic Trait Theories,
Lombroso’s Theory,
Y Chromosome Theory And Others.

There are several types of crime control, which involve artificial interference in human biology, such as;

Psychosurgery,
Chemical Methods of Control,
Brain Stimulation And Others.

How to control it?

There are several types of crime control, which involve artificial interference in human biology, such as Psychosurgery, chemical methods of control, brain stimulation and others.

Psychodynamic Therapy

This theory was developed by Sigmund Freud in the late 1800s and has since become a significant theory in the history of criminality (Siegel, 2005).
The theory is a three-part structure consisting of the id, the ego and the superego.
The id is considered the underdeveloped, primitive part of our markup. It controls our need for food, sleep and other basic instincts. This part is purely focused on instant gratification.
The ego controls the id by setting up boundaries.
The superego is the change of judging the situation through morality (Siegel, 2005)

Psychosurgery

Brain surgery to control behavior has rarely been applied to criminal behavior. Indeed, much more common between the 1930s and the late 1970s, there were over 40,000 frontal lobotomies performed. Lobotomies were used to treat a wide range of problems, from depression to schizophrenia.

Today the lobotomy has fallen out of favour due medications used to control behavior, although some view the use of medications as equivalent to a lobotomy (e.g., see Breggin, 2008).

Psychosurgery appears to be an option that will most likely not be put into use due to the stigma associated with it.

Chemical methods of control

The use of pharmacological treatments to try to control crime has been ongoing in two significant areas:
Chemical castration for sex offenders and Pharmacological Interventions for drug or alcohol addicts.
Sometimes, mentally ill people in the criminal justice system are ordered to take medications to treat their mental illness.
Other pharmacological interventions to control crime seem plausible and are being investigated, but do not appear to have been widely used.

Others Methods

Deep brain stimulation is used for some disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, but has not yet been investigated for criminal behavior.
Biological theorists have advocated changes in diet to deal with criminality (Burton, 2002) and better relations between parents.
There is also the famous genetic XYY combination that was once thought to be a marker for a criminal type, but as it turned out, these individuals were found to be less intelligent or more likely to have learning difficulties as opposed to being criminal types.

Principles to remember

We Have Strong Tendencies To Pay Special Attention To Negative Information And At The Same Time, Powerful Tendencies To Expect Things To Turn Out Well. Beware Of Both Because They Can Generate Serious Errors In Social Thoughts.