Theories of Crime (2006) PDF

THEORIES OF CRIME Presenting a clear, comprehensive review of theoretical thinking on crime, this book encourages students to develop a deeper understanding of classic and contemporary theories, and provides an interdisciplinary approach to criminology through the contributions of sociology, psychology and biology. Chapters cover: Crime: the Historical Context Biological Explanations for Criminal Behaviour Psychological Explanations for Criminal Behaviour Sociological Explanations for Criminal Behaviour Explaining the Criminal Behaviour of Women Explaining the Criminal Behaviour of Ethnic Minorities By adopting an interactive approach to encourage students to react to the text and think for themselves, this book distinguishes itself from others in the field and ensures its place as a valuable teaching resource. The student-centred nature of the book is further enhanced by reflective question breaks throughout the text, chapter summaries and suggested further reading and websites. Theories of Crime is a key text for any undergraduate student following programmes in Criminology and Criminal Justice. Ian Marsh is Course Leader for Criminology at Liverpool Hope University and is a widely published textbook author. His recent publications include Criminal Justice: An Introduction to Philosophies, Theories and Practice (2004) (with John Cochrane and Gaynor Melville), Sociology: Making Sense of Society (3rd ed.) (2005) and Theories and Practice in Sociology (2002). Gaynor Melville, Keith Morgan and Gareth Norris are lecturers in Criminology at Liverpool Hope University. Zoe Walkington is lecturer in Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University. THEORIES OF CRIME Ian Marsh, with Gaynor Melville, Keith Morgan, Gareth Norris and Zoe Walkington First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2006 Ian Marsh, with Gaynor Melville, Keith Morgan, Gareth Norris and Zoe Walkington All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-03051-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–37069–8 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–415–37068–X (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–61401–9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–37069–1 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–37068–4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–61401–3 (ebk) CONTENTS Preface vii 1 Crime: the Historical Context 1 2 Biological Explanations for Criminal Behaviour 15 3 Psychological Explanations for Criminal Behaviour 56 4 Sociological Explanations for Criminal Behaviour 91 5 Explaining the Criminal Behaviour of Women 134 6 Explaining the Criminal Behaviour of Ethnic Minorities 162 References 184 Index 197 v PREFACE The intention of this book is to provide students (and tutors) with an interdisciplinary approach to explaining criminal behaviour. It describes, reflects on and attempts to evaluate a range of theoretical approaches that have offered explanations for crime, in particular the contributions of sociology, psychology and biology. The central aim of the book is to encourage students to develop a deeper understanding of classic and contemporary theorizing about crime. CONTENT Theories of Crime starts by considering the history of criminal behaviour and how it has been punished in Chapter 1. It considers the relative nature of crime and how changing definitions and perceptions impact on studying the history of crime. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 examine the ways in which the different disciplines of biology, psychology and sociology have tried to explain criminal behaviour. In Chapter 2 the focus is on biological explanations. Written by Keith Morgan, with help from Sue Aitken, this chapter considers the controversy over attempting to explain criminal behaviour in biological terms. It starts by debating the value of biology in this context and after looking at the history of biological theorizing it considers in some depth the importance of evolution, genes, physical characteristics of offenders and brain structures in affecting behaviour and, particularly, criminal behaviour. Chapter 3, written by Gareth Norris and ZoeWalkington, looks at the range of different explanations for crime that psychologists have offered. It considers these theories in terms of criminality as being an element of personality, and then examines the precursors, or reasons, why a person may become involved in criminal behaviour. It also highlights how psychological and social factors interact and need to be considered together in offering a full explanation for crime. Chapter 4 turns to explanations offered from sociological perspectives. Although the differences between the different disciplines of biology, psychology and sociology are not absolute or rigid, the emphasis in sociological theorizing is on the social context in which crime takes place – crime and criminal behaviour can be fully understood only in relation to the social structure, to specific social conditions and processes. The chapter starts by looking at classical criminology that emerged in the late eighteenth century, then considers the major early founding writers in sociology (including Durkheim and Marx) and how the vii PREFACE theoretical approaches they developed have helped to explain crime. It looks at examples of theorizing within the sociology of crime and deviance that have developed from these major theoretical positions, including interactionism and labelling theory, feminist criminology, the postmodern influence and cultural criminology. The final two chapters apply the different theoretical approaches and perspectives to explaining the patterns of criminal behaviour of women and of ethnic minority groups. Chapter 5, written by Gaynor Melville, looks at how theorizing from the major disciplines has helped provide an understanding of the criminal behaviour of women. After looking at the history of women and crime and the changing patterns and trends in female criminality it discusses a range of theoretical explanations, including naturalistic, biological, psychological, sociological and feminist explanations. Chapter 6, by Ian Marsh and Gaynor Melville, offers a similar approach to considering the criminal behaviour of ethnic-minority groups. After reviewing the patterns and trends in ethnic-minority criminality, it looks at explanations of two main kinds – firstly, ethnic-minority, and especially black, crime is a social reality and the reasons for the greater criminality amongst such groups needs to be examined; secondly, that the criminal justice system is biased against certain ethnic-minority groups and this can explain the higher rate of crime amongst such groups. FEATURES Theories of Crime adopts an interactive approach that actively encourages the student to engage with and react to the text and think for herself or himself. There are question breaks throughout the book that provide opportunities for reflection. Some of the question breaks include stimulus material from original studies or contemporary media accounts and ask students to respond to questions on the material; others are just short stop-and-think-type questions. These reflective breaks enable tutors to use the material being examined as exercises for their students to engage with. At the end of each chapter there are suggestions for further reading, including key texts on the subject matter of the chapter and relevant websites. This book, along with the recently published Criminal Justice: An Introduction to Philosophies, Theories and Practice (2004), has been a collaborative venture, and the authors would like to thank Gerhard Boomgarden, Constance Sutherland and the rest of the production team at Routledge for their involvement with the development of the text; and the various anonymous reviewers who have commented on the material. viii CHAPTER 1 ❚ Introduction ❚ The history of juvenile crime ❚ Studying the history of crime Crime: The ❚ Communities and the control of crime ❚ Changing definitions of Historical Context crime INTRODUCTION Crime, criminals and how they are dealt with by society are topics of endless fascination. Look at any newspaper or glance at what’s on television or at the cinema and it is immediately clear that there is a vast and seemingly insatiable interest in crime and criminals. We are interested both in ‘real-life’ crime and criminals and in fictional accounts. We could ask why there is so much interest in this area – even if many people break the law from time to time, most people are not involved in spectacular criminality, yet we seem to love to watch and read about it. Maybe such an interest demonstrates a sense of moral outrage and the enjoyment of seeing the wrongdoer punished and justice being done – given that in most fictional crime stories the criminals tend to come off worse eventually. Or perhaps it reflects a sympathy with the underdog and a degree of admiration for those who try to beat the system – with yesterday’s public enemies and villains having a habit of becoming present-day cult figures. Or maybe this interest just demonstrates the excitement and enjoyment gained from reading about and watching that which we ourselves would not engage in – a sort of substituted excitement or vicarious pleasure. Whatever the reasons, murder, robbery, fraud, drug smuggling, gang warfare, rape, football hooliganism and so on make good subjects of conversation and exciting and profitable films. Indeed a visitor from another culture might assume crime was a basic and ever present feature of everyone’s everyday lives – yet, apart from minor law breaking, very few people go on to become professional criminals. 1 THEORIES OF CRIME QUESTION BREAK: CRIMINALS AS CELEBRITIES ‘Mad Frankie Fraser’, a notorious (ex-)gangster, is now a popular speaker at social functions. The following extracts are taken from his own website. Frank has been a contract strong-arm, club owner, club minder, company director, Broadmoor inmate, firebomber, prison rioter but – first and last – a thief. 26 convictions. 42 years inside. In the 60s Ron and Reggie Kray sought his services but Frank chose to pitch in with Charlie and Eddie Richardson and their South London alleged ‘Torture Gang’. GUEST APPEARANCES Frank is available for guest appearances at weddings, birthdays and all special occasions. Make it a night to remember! For more info please telephone: Also available for After Dinner Speeches, Functions and Boxing Tournaments List other criminals that have become celebrities. Why do you think people admire such criminals? This interest in criminality has existed throughout history. The briefest scan of the history of literature reveals the central role played by crime and criminals – from the Greek tragedies to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to Bill Sykes in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a classic work of criminal psychology, while the New Testament story of Jesus tells of wrongful accusation, arrest, trial, conviction and execution. However crime is not a clear-cut or static phenomenon. What was viewed as criminal in the past was often quite different to current notions, just as many contemporary criminal acts would not have been viewed so in earlier times. Indeed in studying crime and punishment over time the most obvious ‘finding’ is the relative nature of crime. What is seen as and defined as criminal varies according to the particular social context in which it occurs, as the extracts and questions below illustrate. 2 CRIME: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT QUESTION BREAK: THE CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL RELATIVITY OF CRIME It is easy to think of examples of behaviour which one society sees as criminal and another as quite acceptable and normal; and there are behaviours which are seen as criminal now but which were perfectly acceptable in previous times. Consider the extracts below and the questions that follow them. It is easily observable that different groups judge different things to be deviant. This should alert us to the possibility that the person making the judgement of deviance, the process by which the judgement is arrived at, and the situation in which it is made will all be intimately involved in the phenomenon of deviance... Deviance is the product of a transaction that takes place between a social group and one who is viewed by that group as a rule breaker. Whether an act is deviant, then, depends on how people react to it... The degree to which other people will respond to a given act as deviant varies greatly. Several kinds of variations are worth noting. First of all, there is variation over time. A person believed to have committed a given ‘deviant’ act may at one time be responded to much more leniently than he would at some other time. The occurrence of ‘drives’ against various kinds of deviance illustrates this clearly. (Becker 1963, 4–12) Burning and hanging women as witches was commonplace in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Witches were believed to have made pacts with the Devil which gave them supernatural powers. They were blamed for all sorts of personal and social misfortunes – illnesses, bad weather, loss of and damage to property. Although many people associate burning at the stake with witchcraft it was used much less in England than other parts of Europe – particularly France, Switzerland and the Nordic countries. Only a few witches were burnt in England, the majority were hanged, possibly as a cost saving exercise and possibly because the public would not tolerate such a barbaric punishment. Scotland did burn witches and there are at least 38 recorded instances, the last being in 1722. In the late 19th century cocaine was widely used as a pain killer in the USA – much as aspirin is today – and advertised with pictures of children at play [see poster advert below]. (Johnson 1989, 249) Alcohol drinking and bigamy illustrate the relative nature of crime and deviance. 3 THEORIES OF CRIME List other types of behaviour that have been categorized as criminal or deviant in one society but not another. Give examples of behaviour that has been criminal or deviant at certain periods of time but not at others. In looking at responses to crime and deviance Becker refers to ‘drives’ against certain types of behaviour. What types of crime or deviance have been subject to such drives in recent years in the UK? The fact that crimes, and the ways in which they have been punished, vary from place to place and time to time highlights the importance of social reaction in determining what behaviour is categorized as criminal. There is no particular action that is criminal in itself – an action becomes criminal only if society defines it as such. So even an action such as killing another person, which, in the form of murder, can be the most serious of crimes in modern society, in many contexts can be quite acceptable. Indeed in some situations killing other people can be seen as heroic and people can be punished for not wanting to engage in killing – conscientious objectors were imprisoned in Britain in the First World War as were those who tried to ‘dodge the draft’ to fight for the US army in Vietnam in the 1960s. Bearing in mind the relativity of crime and how it is dealt with, it would be useful to consider the history of crime before examining theoretical explanations for it in later chapters. In considering the history of crime we will examine the historical myths and traditions that surround the way in which crime has been and is viewed. Although there is a general awareness that there was horrendous violence and crime in the past, it is a widely held notion that modern, Western societies have become more and more criminal and dangerous places to live in. Given this tendency to think that 4 CRIME: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT things are much worse nowadays, we will start our historical overview by considering if there ever was a ‘golden age’, when ‘things were so much better’, when violence and criminality were only a marginal part of everyday life. THE HISTORY OF JUVENILE CRIME We will start our account by referring to Geoffrey Pearson’s study of the history of juvenile crime (1983). Pearson used literary and journalistic accounts of crime to argue that it was important not to view criminality in modern society as a new or unique problem and to make the point that, when examining the history of crime, an appropriate subtitle would be ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’. Pearson takes issue with the notion of moral degeneracy (of young people in particular), not in an attempt to underplay the problem of violent crime in modern society but to demonstrate that, if anything, it is a continuation of traditions rather than a new phenomenon. He shows that for generations Britain has been plagued by very similar problems and fears but that the myth that Britain has historically been a stable, peaceful, law-abiding nation and that violence is somehow foreign to our national character shows little sign of waning. The most striking aspect of the history of delinquency is the consistency with which each generation characterizes the youth of the day and the way of life of twenty years previously. In 1829 Edward Irving is quoted as enquiring, ‘Is not every juvenile delinquent the evidence of a family in which the family bond is weakened and loosened?’ He talks about the ‘infinite numbers of unruly and criminal people who now swarm on the surface of this great kingdom’. Thus, while hooliganism and delinquency still make news as alarming and unusual, such behaviour is clearly not new. QUESTION BREAK: JUVENILE CRIME – THERE’S NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN The following quotations are taken from press, political and literary sources – many are taken from Pearson (1983) although some more recent ones have been added. Place these quotations in historical order – and suggest when they might have been said. (The answers are at the end of the chapter – but see how many you can locate correctly before turning to them.) 1 One of the most marked characteristics of the age is a growing spirit of independence in the children and a corresponding slackening of control in the parents. 2 We have to recognise where crime begins... we must do more to teach children the difference between right and wrong. It must start at home. And it must also be taught in our schools. 5 THEORIES OF CRIME 3 Looked at in his worse light the adolescent can take on an alarming aspect: he has learned no definite moral standards from his parents, is contemptuous of the law, easily bored. 4 The morals of the children are tenfold worse than formerly. 5 (On the increase in juvenile crime). In many cases they (juveniles) find themselves in a large city without friends, without family ties, and belonging to no social circle in which their conduct is either scrutinized or observed. 6 Parents failed to instil respect in their children... neighbourliness had broken down in villages, towns and cities. Decades of poor parenting and increasing selfishness has made life a misery for the police. 7 People are bound to ask what is happening to our country... having been one of the most law-abiding countries in the world – a byword for stability, order and decency – are we changing into somewhere else? 8 The most characteristic part of their uniform is the substantial leather belt heavily mounted with metal. It is not ornamental, but then it is not intended for ornament. 9 There seems to be a general corruption throughout the kingdom... the spirit of luxury and extravagance that seems to have seized on the minds of almost all ranks of men. 10 Any candid judge will acknowledge that manifest superiority of the past century; and in an investigation of the causes which have conspired to produce such an increase of juvenile crime, which is a blot upon the age... Is it not (the case that) the working classes have generally deteriorated in moral condition? Pearson starts his study by looking at contemporary society – and, as the book was published in 1983, at the late 1970s and early 1980s. In introducing his historical account he makes the point that if each generation has a tendency to look back fondly to the recent past, it is sensible to start with present-day society and compare it with the situation twenty or so years previously, and then to compare that generation with its predecessor. Of course, there are bound to be difficulties in comparing different ages and periods – there will be differing definitions of crime and different measuring techniques and, in particular, a lack of adequate records in previous times. None the less, an impression of the style and extent of crime, and of the popular concerns about it, can be gained by looking at contemporary accounts from newspapers and books of the particular period. As mentioned, Pearson’s study starts with present-day attacks on our ‘permissive age’ by contemporary public figures and ‘guardians of morality’. In March 1982 the Daily Telegraph suggested that ‘we need to consider why the peaceful people of England are changing... over the 200 years up to 1945, Britain become so settled in internal peace’. There were warnings of a massive degeneration among the British people which was destroying the nation. Kenneth Oxford, the Chief Constable of Merseyside, prophesied that the ‘freedom and way of life we have been accustomed 6 CRIME: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT to for so long will vanish’. There are numerous instances of such statements from prominent politicians and public figures alleging that contemporary society was witnessing an unprecedented increase in violence and decline in moral standards. Indeed there was a great consistency in the view of Britain’s history as based on stability and decency, and that the moderate ‘British way of life’ was being under- mined by the upsurge in delinquency. QUESTION BREAK: IMAGES OF CONTEMPORARY YOUTH How are youth viewed today? What words are commonly associated with contemporary youth? (Consider how many of these words are negative and how many positive.) Looking back a generation, how would you characterize British society in the 1960s? What words would you associate with British youth of the 1960s? Twenty years previously, however, we can find remarkably similar comments. At the Conservative Party conference in 1958 there was discussion of ‘this sudden increase in crime and brutality which is so foreign to our nation and our country’. The Teddy Boys were arousing similar apocalyptic warnings of the end of British society. The Teds’ style of dress was derived from men’s fashion of the reign of Edward VII, which explains the name Teddy Boys. Rock and roll was the musical focus of this youth subculture, and the reaction which the Teddy Boys engendered was one of outrage and panic. The press, in particular, printed sensational reports of the happenings at cinemas and concerts featuring rock and roll films and music. A letter in the Daily Sketch (a popular newspaper of the period) in 1956 announced that ‘the effect of rock’n’roll on young people is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke carelessness, and destroy the sanctity of marriage’. An article in the Evening News of 1954 suggested that ‘Teddy Boys... are all of unsound mind in the sense that they are all suffering from a form of psychosis. Apart from the birch or the rope, depending on the gravity of their crimes, what they need is rehabilitation in a psychopathic institution.’ This reaction was widespread: off-duty soldiers were banned from wearing Teddy Boy suits, and Teddy Boys were viewed by the rest of society as ‘folk devils’. Nowadays when we look back at old photographs and films of the 1950s rock and roll craze and the Teddy Boys we might wonder what all the fuss was about. In comparison to groups who have come since then, they look quite straight. If anything, Teds are remembered with a degree of nostalgia and viewed as something quaint. Quite a contrast with the reaction in the mid-1950s illustrated above. Pearson asks whether it was pre war Britain that was characterized by a law-abiding youth and a stable society. In fact the Second World War has been seen as a kind of watershed with the postwar period being morally inferior to the ‘full rich back street life and culture of pre-war England’. However, when looking more closely at this period familiar declarations and allegations appear. In the 1930s there was a similar 7 THEORIES OF CRIME bemoaning of the ‘passing of parental authority’ and the ‘absence of restraint’. The targets of criticism have a common ring: football rowdyism and the increasing crime and disorder. In the 1920s there were fierce street battles in North London between Spurs and Arsenal fans, some of whom were armed with iron bars and knives, while a part of Bradford football ground was closed in 1921 after the referee had been pelted with rubbish. It is sometimes implied that such incidents, and delin- quencies in general, have become ‘more serious’ or ‘more violent’ over time, and since the war. The evidence would not seem to back up such suggestions. Crime in the interwar years was characterized by razor gangs, feuds between armed gangsters, vice rackets and so on. Moving back to the turn of the century and the pre-First-World-War period Pearson suggests that we seem little nearer to finding the traditional way of life based on a ‘healthy respect for law and order’. A wide range of popular culture came under severe criticism in the early twentieth century. The music halls, professional football and the noisy presence of working-class people at seaside resorts on Bank Holidays were all attacked. There was even a good deal of excitement and panic over the ‘bicycle craze’ of the late 1890s. There are newspaper accounts of youths whizzing about madly on their bikes, dashing along quiet country roads and through peaceful villages with loud shouts, causing pandemonium among the traffic and knocking over pedestrians, with headlines such as ‘The Dangers of City Cycling’ (Daily Mail, 1898) and ‘Cyclomania’ (News of the World, 1898). As ever, youth of the period were compared unfavourably with previous generations. Baden-Powell in his Scouting for Boys published in 1908 suggests that professional football is betraying the British traditions of ‘fair play’ and sportsmanship: Thousands of boys and young men, pale, narrow-chested, hunched up, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes, numbers of them betting, all of them learning to be hysterical as they groan and cheer in panic unison with their neighbours – the worst sound of all being the hysterical scream of laughter that greets any little trip or fall of a player. One wonders whether this can be the same nation which had gained for itself the reputation of being a stolid, pipe-sucking manhood, unmoved by panic or excitement, and reliable in the tightest of places. Neither does nineteenth-century, Victorian Britain provide any comparative baseline of a tranquil, law-abiding society. The first officially named ‘Hooligans’ of the 1890s and the ‘Garrotters’ of the 1860s do little to kindle nostalgia for Victorian city life and culture. It was in the late 1890s that the words ‘Hooligan’ and ‘Hooliganism’, were used, to describe delinquent youth. There were regular news reports of Hooligan gangs smashing up coffee-stalls and public houses, robbing and assaulting old ladies, attacking foreigners and setting upon policemen in the streets. In line with later youth subcultures and gangs, Hooligans had a distinct style of dress, a recognizable look. As with so many of the later youth subcultures, there was no doubt an over-reaction to Hooligans. Nevertheless, whether correct or not, there was a widely held feeling that hooliganism was a major problem. Earlier in the Victorian period in the winter of 1862, panic swept through respectable London over a new variety of crime called ‘garrotting’, a type of violent 8 CRIME: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT robbery that involved choking the victim – a Victorian parallel with present-day ‘mugging’ perhaps. The press reacted in familiar manner, with The Times observing that it was ‘becoming unsafe for a man to traverse certain parts of London at night’. Punch magazine launched an ‘anti-garrotte’ movement, which invented a variety of somewhat bizarre anti-robbery devices – metal collars with long steel pikes being favoured forms of protection against throttling. The possibility that it was industrialization that destroyed the stable and peaceful life of pre-industrial Britain does not appear to hold up either. Certainly in the mid nineteenth century it was widely felt that life in the previous century was greatly superior and that the increase in juvenile crime was a blot on this age. However, writing in 1751 Henry Fielding (mayor of London and well-known author) paints a very similar picture with his prediction of an imminent slide into anarchy when the streets of our cities ‘will shortly be impassable without the utmost hazard’. It is difficult to find evidence that there has been a massive deterioration in the morality and behaviour of the common people, in comparison to the pre-industrial world. From the late seventeenth century there have been complaints of increasing wickedness, crime and disorder. The streets of pre-industrial London were extremely dangerous, with no effective system of street-lighting nor a police force. It is not just societal reaction and fears that echo one another through the ages, and Pearson also examines the recurrent nature of different explanations of the criminal question. Time and again a permissive present is contrasted with the not too distant past. If such accusations are accepted, we would be forced to conclude that with each generation crime and disorder has increased dramatically. The over-representation of youth in the criminal statistics is rediscovered in each wave of concern over crime and delinquency. Looking back over Pearson’s historical review, it is hard to believe that Britain’s cities are any more perilous today than those of pre-industrial Britain, or when they were frequented by gangs of Garrotters and Hooligans. STUDYING THE HISTORY OF CRIME While contemporary sources are important indicators, it is necessary to consider how these sources relate to the findings of historians on crime levels in the past. However, in measuring the history of crime, a statistical approach, while essential, is fraught with difficulties. Sharpe (1995), in examining the different approaches to studying the history of crime, argues that the counting of crime has to go hand in hand with interpreting the meaning of crime to different communities at different times and with considering the changing definitions of crime. The statistics of crime Although criminal statistics are usually quoted as ‘hard facts’, and as such are used by governments and public bodies for making policy decisions with regard to crime and its treatment, they are far from being perfect indicators of the extent or character of crime. There are two major and important deficiencies with them – firstly, the 9 THEORIES OF CRIME problem of omissions, in that only a proportion of crimes and offenders are included in official figures; and, secondly, the problem of bias, in that those crimes and offenders that are included might not provide a representative picture of all crime and of all offenders. The amount of crime that is not officially known about is termed the ‘dark figure’ of crime and there are many factors which lead to the non-reporting and non-recording of crime. QUESTION BREAK: THE DARK FIGURE OF CRIME There are many reasons why crime statistics might underestimate the amount of criminal activity, including Victims being unaware that they are victims of specific crimes Victims not wanting to waste time or money in reporting a crime Victims feeling that there is no point in informing the police Victims dealing with matters informally, outside of the legal system Victims’ embarrassment Victims (or witnesses of a crime) not trusting or liking the police Victimless crime – crimes where all parties involved do not wish the police to know about it Victims’ fears of reprisals. Consider each of those reasons and suggest how much more (or less) relevant they would be in relation to measuring crimes at different periods of history. What other factors might have stopped people from reporting crime in the past? Sharpe (1999) makes the point that the importance of the dark figure would be reduced if there was a constant relationship between recorded and unrecorded crime. If, for instance, the same proportion of crime, however large or small, was invariably reported, the changes in the crime statistics could be said to indicate changes in the actual level of criminal behaviour. However, there do appear to be substantial variations in the willingness of people to report criminal behaviour – during periods of ‘moral panic’ the public seem much more ready to report crimes. And the practices and efficiency of the police and other criminal justice agencies will also have an effect on the crime statistics. Of course, it is highly likely that these problems and deficiencies would be more marked when looking at criminal statistics from hundreds of years ago; and that the ‘dark figure’ of unrecorded crime would be ‘darker’ the further back in history we go. Indeed there are no official statistics for crime in England before 1805, and historians of previous periods have to search court records for their data. The further back we go, the fewer official records and sources have survived. However 10 CRIME: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT there have been studies that have tried to quantify the extent of crime. For instance, the beginning of the eighteenth century was a low-crime period compared to the previous century, but with increasing urbanization the later 1700s in England were characterized by a significant rise in crime. Later, the growth of an industrialized nation, along with the demobilization of soldiers and sailors after eighteenth-century wars and the defeat of the French in 1815, led to large numbers of the labouring classes living in the growing urbanized areas without adequate incomes; a situation that led, in turn, almost inevitably to a massive rise in property crimes. The relationship between property crime and the growth of an industrial capitalist society was an area of explanation considered by historians of crime. The first half of the 1800s was a period when there were real concerns about rising crime combined with fears of social disintegration; however by the end of the nineteenth century such fears were diminishing, along with the rise of a more prosperous, ‘respectable’ Victorian working class and a better policed society than ever before. Indeed explanations for the emergence of the modern police in the early to mid nineteenth century highlight this fear of the ‘dangerous classes’ – the new urban, industrial proletariat. This notion of the ‘dangerous classes’ is conflated with that of the ‘criminal classes’. Sharpe (1999) indicates that, by the 1850s, the idea of a criminal class was generally accepted. It was seen by Victorian scholars as a product of industrialization and urbanization which concentrated the ‘lower orders’ in poor, dangerous groups who lived mainly on the proceeds of crime and who were separated from the bourgeoisie but also from the ‘respectable poor’. The Victorians saw this new ‘criminal class’ as essentially the product of rapid and vast economic and social change. However Emsley (1996) suggests that while there may have been groups of habitual criminals such groups did not necessarily form what might be called a ‘class’, which implies a large and homogeneous group of people. The overwhelming majority of offences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not organized and large-scale crimes but rather petty thefts and disorderly behaviour. Emsley points to the convenience for ‘respectable’ society of the idea of a criminal class who act as a sort of alien group committing crime against law-abiding citizens. And it is important to emphasize that, even if the existence of such a class is dubious, the idea that there was one was certainly widely believed by the Victorian population. COMMUNITIES AND THE CONTROL OF CRIME Studying how the law was enforced in different communities also helps to fill out the picture of the history of crime and criminals. Certainly informal sanctions played an important role before the emergence of the modern police and will have played a part in the under-recording of criminal activity. Community action against nuisance offenders was commonplace and the widespread opposition from working-class communities to the new police ensured that informal controls existed long after the emergence of a professional police force (as they still do of course – criminals and gangsters throughout history have rarely been willing to involve formal bodies in sorting out their affairs). 11 THEORIES OF CRIME In providing an overview of the ‘early modern criminal’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Sharpe (1999) argues that there was little organized or professional crime at this time, ‘the pathetic, small-time whore and the opportunistic pilferer were more typical, if more elusive, figures than the high-class madame or the criminal entrepreneur’ (171). While there were some people regularly on the wrong side of the law, criminal associations were casual and ad hoc in manner; gangs of highwaymen and horse thieves might have existed but, outside of London, organized crime was ‘rarely very sophisticated or permanent’. Sharpe suggests that there was little evidence of anything approaching a criminal subculture or class; and he makes the point that if there was a ‘dangerous class’ then those in it were far more of a danger to one another than to anybody else – as always, the poor stole from the poor, and assaulted and killed each other rather than those from different backgrounds. CHANGING DEFINITIONS OF CRIME As we suggested above, while there are some actions which virtually all societies will define as criminal and sanction accordingly, there are many more activities which are seen as criminal or not depending on the time or place in which they occur. In broad terms, Sharpe (1995) suggests that historians of crime have pointed to a transition from notions of crime based on sin to notions of crime based on concern over ownership of property. In the period up to the mid seventeenth century there was little attempt to separate out the different categories of sin and crime (male homosexuality, for instance, was a made a capital offence in 1563). This is not to say that the link between religion and crime disappeared in the 1700s; the connection between law enforcement and Christian morality remained strong through the next two centuries; and arguably still plays a role in British criminal justice processes. So while it is clear that crime is a problem in contemporary society, and that we are experiencing serious law and order problems, our predecessors have from time to time felt similar concerns. Sharpe (1995) points to the periods around 1580–1650 and 1800–60 as ones of severe economic dislocation but also as times when the fears about crime eventually proved groundless; and these periods were soon followed by periods of relative stability and harmony. The history of crime shows us how little attitudes have shifted between different ‘thens’ and now. The panics about Victorian garrotters and Elizabethan vagrants can be seen as examples of the criminal stereotyping that is still prevalent in modern society. The garotters were commented on earlier (p. 8), while Sharpe (1999) refers to the increase in vagrancy in the later sixteenth century being seen as a threat to the social order of the day. Vagrants were not solely criminals and included, as Sharpe puts it, ‘the pathetic and the bizarre’. The crimes that were committed by vagrants tended to be opportunistic and small- scale thefts. Although property crime has always been the most common form of offence, it has always been violent crime that has frightened people and made the most news- worthy stories. In concluding his study of crime between 1750 and 1900, Emsley (1996) suggests that while periods of economic slump and hardship might have 12 CRIME: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT increased the temptation towards property crime, the ‘steepest overall increase in the criminal statistics during the period 1750 to 1900 coincided with fear for the social order, fear of “the mob”, fear of revolution and... anxiety about “the dangerous classes”’. This chapter has briefly looked at the history of criminal behaviour; the rest of the book considers the major theoretical explanations for such behaviour. In particular the next three chapters look (respectively) at biological, psychological and sociological approaches to examining crime – they review early examples of these different theoretical approaches through to current theorizing about crime in each discipline. Chapters 5 and 6 then apply these varied theoretical approaches to explaining the criminal behaviour of women and of ethnic minorities. FURTHER READING Emsley, C. (1996), Crime and Society in England 1750–1900, second edition. Harlow: Longman. An analysis of the period that highlights the scale of crime in the first part and then explores changes in the courts, police and systems of punishment in the second part. Pearson, G. (1983), Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. London: Macmillan. This is a journey back through the history of youthful delinquency and responses to it. Making use of contemporary accounts, including newspapers and pamphlets, it shows that for generations Britain has been plagued by the same problems and fear that today we see as unique to our own society. Sharpe, J. A. (1999), Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750, second edition. Harlow: Longman. A wide-ranging analysis of crime, criminality and punishment in the early modern period. The book explores the extent, the causes and the control of crime and its impact on society. WEBSITES Two easy to navigate websites that provide contemporary accounts to illustrate different periods and enable users to look for coverage of criminal behaviour during those times are www.eyewitnesstohistory.com and www.bbc.co.uk/history/ society. SOURCES OF QUOTATIONS ON pp. 5–6 1 M. Barrett, Young Delinquents, 1913 2 M. Howard, Home Secretary, 1993 3 British Medical Association, The Adolescent, 1961 4 Lord Ashley, House of Commons, 1843 13 THEORIES OF CRIME 5 W. Morrison, Juvenile Offenders, 1896 6 D. Blunkett, Home Secretary, 2004 7 Daily Express, 1981 8 Daily Graphic, 1900 9 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 1738 10 H. Worsley, Juvenile Depravity, 1849 14 CHAPTER 2 ❚ Introduction ❚ The debate over the value of biology ❚ The history of biological theories of criminal behaviour Biological ❚ Evolution ❚ Genes Explanations for ❚ Physical characteristics of offenders Criminal Behaviour ❚ Brain structures ❚ Development of the brain ❚ Conclusion ❚ Summary INTRODUCTION In this chapter we examine the controversy over attempting to explain criminal behaviour in biological terms. We consider the main types of biological explanation for human behaviour that are used within the subject of criminology and the evidence that underpins them. Typical biological theories are that some people are more likely to commit violent crimes because of the genes that they have inherited; or that there is more chance of acting in an impulsive way that breaks the law if you have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), because it involves a reduction in activity in a part of the brain that helps us both to control our own actions and to see their consequences. It will be clearer if, before we engage with the criticisms of a biological perspective on criminal behaviour, we set out a very brief outline of why biology must be relevant. Human beings are surely just one species out of the millions of living creatures on the earth. Criminal behaviour is still behaviour even if what is regarded as ‘criminal’ changes over time and place. All our behaviour, thoughts, feelings, etc. are rooted in our biology. Given these points, it must be possible to learn about criminal behaviour by taking a biological perspective. 15 THEORIES OF CRIME THE DEBATE OVER THE VALUE OF BIOLOGY When the contents of this textbook were first proposed, several criminologists considered the outline. Some thought that a chapter on biology was valuable, but some said that a chapter about biological explanations of criminal behaviour did not belong in a criminology book. This reflects a lively controversy within criminology (Wright and Miller 1998). We have sympathy for those who oppose the use of biology within criminology because of two interrelated strands of the history of the social sciences. Firstly, for the majority of the twentieth century social scientists rejected biological explanations for human behaviours (Tooby and Cosmides 1992), especially social behaviours, of which criminal behaviour is an example (Walsh 2002). Secondly, biological explanations of human behaviour were used by politicians to legitimize inhumane and invalid policies. This was seen in major countries with diametrically opposed political systems from the first to the last decade of the twentieth century. For example, ‘Social Darwinism’ refers to a group of theories that claim that Darwinism could be applied to social institutions as well as to organisms. It is best known in the version proposed by the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who wrote on psychology, sociology, evolution and philosophy and influenced Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859, in which he first set out his theory of evolution by natural selection. Spencer and Darwin were both heavily influenced by Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). In 1798 Malthus published his ‘demographic theory’ proposing that famine and conflict were inevitable because population grows exponentially (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32) while resources increase only arithmetically (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4). He argued that the poor, but not the wealthier members of society, should show moral restraint by having fewer children. His arguments were used to justify laws that made life harder for the most vulnerable. This type of Social Darwinism was popular from late Victorian times until the Second World War. The results were used to justify the inequalities of wealth found in capitalist society as the natural consequence of the survival of the fittest – a term coined by Spencer – as well as the exclusion of would-be immigrants from Eastern Europe to the USA. They were rejected on the grounds that they were poor because they lacked the biological potential to succeed. Therefore, if they were allowed to enter the USA they would interbreed with, or outbreed, the established American population from largely Western European backgrounds and bring down the country by degrading its biological, genetic, quality. This position, which now seems clearly to reflect the prejudice of those who supported such policies rather than being an objective consequence of biological theory, was taken by other governments, including the UK, and was a factor in trapping so many Jews in Nazi Europe where they were the target of genocide (Rose 1997). Another consequence of this crude application of biological principles to political and social issues was the widespread acceptance of eugenics by both left-wing and right-wing political thinkers. Eugenics is selective breeding, whereby people with 16 BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS ‘good biological stock’ were encouraged to reproduce and those with ‘poor biological stock’ were discouraged, in the extreme by sterilization and abortion. The Nazis appealed to ‘science’ to justify their campaign to exterminate the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, gays and the mentally handicapped – all of whom were said to have inferior biological make-ups. This was used to demand their destruction for the good of humanity. Because the Nazis so enthusiastically embraced eugenics it was publicly rejected by most societies after the Second World War, though even then it was used covertly in several Western countries. Two American controversies since the 1950s show how biological explanations are still being used to justify discriminatory policy. Firstly, the claim that black children do badly at school (and, indeed, in life – including their higher rates of criminal conviction) because they are inherently less intelligent than other racial groups for biological reasons (see the discussion of Murray and Herrenstein’s book The Bell Curve in Chapter 5, p. 170). Secondly, and directly concerning criminal behaviour, were two American projects to apply biology to criminal behaviour in the inner cities. In 1966 three Harvard professors, Frank Ervin, Vernon Mark and William Sweet, were involved in a federally sponsored, low-profile research programme set up in response to serious inner city riots. They proposed using brain surgery for the ringleaders and other treatments for those who took part. The argument was that the causes could not be poverty, racial discrimination and social breakdown, because then all the people in the area subject to the same factors would have rioted. Fortunately the public became aware of what was going on and the government abruptly changed its policy and removed all funding for research into brain surgery; unfortunately some individuals had already been experimented on and left permanently damaged (Breggin 1995). Things then went quiet until President George Bush announced the Federal Violence Initiative in 1992 with the goal of identifying biological factors in, and interventions for, criminal behaviour. Once again, as soon as people began to talk about what was going to be done in detail it looked as if it was based on the idea that Black American young males were obviously biologically different. This difference explained their higher levels of violent crime, rather than social, economic and political factors. The respected researcher, Frederick Goodwin, chosen to head the programme, compared unusually aggressive and sexually active monkeys seen in natural populations to inner-city youths (Breggin 1995). After a period of media and political debate Goodwin resigned; later the funding for the overall programme was withdrawn but several of the individual projects are still going on. The problem here is the implicit assumption that the reason that some groups are poorer, more anti-social and have shorter life-spans etc. is a result of their different biological make-up. The solution is to ‘fix’ their biology with surgery, electrodes or drugs rather than considering the environmental disadvantages that are much more likely to be relevant. 17 THEORIES OF CRIME QUESTION BREAK Can you think of any other examples of how biological explanations could be used to justify social policies? As some policies based on biology have had terrible consequences, do you think biological explanations should be ignored? Give reasons for your answers. The historical factors (as shown in these examples) of the political misuse of biological explanations to justify extreme discrimination and of the dominance of non-biological theories within the social sciences make the distrust of biological explanations by criminologists very understandable. However, there is growing support for the recognition of the key role of biology in understanding human behaviour. This chapter argues for the Biosocial Interaction (BSI) model (e.g. Raine 2002b) which recognizes the critical contribution of other factors such as family environment, the peer group and the opportunities to behave in particular ways. BSI is consistent with the vertical integration approach to understanding. Vertical integration recognizes that we can validly examine something like anti-social or criminal behaviour at many distinct levels of explanation, and that these are arranged in a ladder going from the lowest levels, like physics, through increasingly higher levels such as chemistry to biology to psychology to sociology (Rose 2003a). Mayr (1982) sets out how explanations of the way that something is caused (for example, rape) need to match both the level of the perspective being used and the question being asked. Explaining rape in terms of physics seems pointless; using a biological perspective may treat rape as being just heterosexual sex against the female’s wishes (see the section below on evolution, p. 26); while a sociological approach can include factors such as political change, shifting gender roles and sexual politics. However, a sociological approach is blind to biological factors such as brain systems. One crucial element of this model of understanding is that the rules, relationships and laws at a particular level cannot be predicted simply by knowing all about the lower rungs of the ladder. Even if one could understand all the biology of human development through adolescence it would be difficult to see patterns crucial to the psychology of adolescent development (Steinberg and Morris 2001) such as the experience of first love, or relationships like that between skin colour and chance of being imprisoned. The world as seen from a higher rung is said to ‘emerge’ from the world as seen from those rungs below it. Consciousness, a key psychological phenomenon, is often held to be an emergent property that is based on biology and yet cannot be explained from a biological perspective. This example may help: everything that a computer does is based on physics, because a computer is a physical, material thing. If you sit down at your keyboard and compose a love poem it would be possible to give an explanation of this at the level of physics (e.g. how the ‘L’ of ‘Love’ was created on the screen by directing electrons using structures and processes within the computer, and even in terms of 18 BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS quantum mechanical interactions within some of the essential components). This could be accurate and correct; however it can never be complete because the world of physics does not have concepts like ‘love’ – something essential for a full understanding and totally unpredictable from a knowledge of physics alone. No level is absolutely best: the levels that you use need to reflect the question you want to answer and provide information suitable for the task at hand. Today’s biological researchers largely accept three propositions. The brain is the cause of the mind (whatever goes on in your mind is the result of physical processes in your brain). The mind is modular (made of many specialized parts, each largely independent of the rest but taking their input from other modules and sending their output to yet others). The brain is also made of largely separate, interacting systems. This suggests certain research questions: for example, which systems are involved in aggression? Are they different in those convicted of violent crimes? How are they different, and can we change this or compensate for it? Are particular brain systems important in impulsive aggression? Most current biological researchers also accept that the way to understand subjects as complex as human beings is to reduce the complexity by breaking them down into simpler parts: this is termed reductionism. Reductionism suggests that the way to understand, say, road rage attacks is to look for the parts of the brain involved; the organization and activity of neurons that make up those critical parts; the functioning of the chemical messengers that mediate communication between those neurons; the involvement of genes in that functioning and communication; and the effect of all of these on road rage behaviour. The reductionist approach has been incredibly successful across science and seems rational, but it has limits. For example, suicide bombings are an extreme behaviour so one might expect to find evidence that suicide bombers are different in some biological way. Or if not, that there are clear differences between their experiences and those of other people. It is important to realize that biologists have no problem with the idea that our biology may predispose us to behave in particular ways in response to outside forces. In this case things like having seen your family maltreated, or how extreme your religious or political education has been, appear plausible suggestions. However, researchers have looked hard for signs of differences between suicide bombers and others without much success. This is true at the level of personality (an aspect of ourselves clearly connected to our biology (Davidson 2001)) and of experience. Some researchers think they have found slight differences in both areas but they are not enough to suggest that suicide bombers are basically different from the rest of the world. Instead it seems to be largely social pressures that lead to their actions (Bond 2004). Stanley Milgram’s studies, inspired by the savage behaviours of concentration camp guards and other staff during the Second World War, had a very similar outcome. To the amazement of experts and lay people it turned out that almost all normal 19 THEORIES OF CRIME people can be made to give an innocent stranger apparently lethal electric shocks simply by being told to (Milgram 1983; Blass 2000). From these two examples of the most extreme anti-social behaviour we can see that biological differences are not necessarily present just because the perpetrators do what most people agree is wrong. In this chapter the emphasis on the interaction of biology with other factors at higher levels is an admission that reductionism cannot explain criminal behaviour. Biological researchers are also predominantly materialists. This means that they see the real world as being made of physical ‘stuff ’ – matter and energy. If you believe this then you are likely to ask questions about material things such as genes, chemicals and brain structures. Finally, the majority of modern biologists are determinists. This means that they believe that everything that happens is caused by something else. For example, if someone sexually abuses a child we can assume that the behaviour followed some facilitating thoughts and was motivated by some strong feelings. These in turn will have been caused by other factors such as genetic predispositions or low activity in brain systems involved in self-control. Our approach is to argue for a ‘weak’ determinism which suggests that criminal behaviour is determined not solely by the person’s biology but rather by the interaction of various factors including biological ones. The complexity of the interplay between different elements cannot be resolved. This is why we cannot say that one cause is more important than others for criminal behaviour; instead we must look at what seems to increase a person’s chance of displaying criminal behaviour and in which environments this is the case. As they tend to be reductionists, materialists and determinists, biological researchers give more importance to the simpler, biological processes. This easily slips into treating biological factors as causing the psychological, behavioural and sociological phenomena that are relevant to criminal behaviour. BSI explicitly takes biological and non-biological factors as equally important, this reduces the risk of invalidly assuming that our ‘biological essence’ is the real cause of criminal behaviour. Critics attack the very assumptions upon which most biological criminology rests (Poole 1994), but the biological perspective on humans is becoming more dominant. Politically and economically the biological paradigm fits with the spirit of the age (American Psychiatric Association 1997; Herbert 1997), and the simple stories it tells are convincing even when the evidence and argument are not really sound (Rose 1997). Indeed the history of biological approaches to human nature demonstrates how easily popular prejudices can be transformed into apparently ‘scientific’ truths (Sennett 1977). However, non-biological researchers are just as likely to make these errors: the last century saw the blaming of mothers for every sort of social problem from ‘refrigerator mothers’ producing schizophrenia in their children to poor mothering creating criminals (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998). It is important to remember that whichever approach we use carries the risk of ignoring factors from other levels of explanation. The BSI model supported here is an example of a non-additive interaction model because the effect of two different factors cannot be predicted reliably by simply adding the effect that the first would have by itself to the effect 20 BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS the second factor would have by itself. Think of a recipe: a cake does not taste like raw flour plus raw eggs and the other ingredients. QUESTION BREAK When researching rape, what questions do you think that biological criminologists might ask? What might they hypothesize leads to rape? What questions and hypotheses do you think psychological or sociological criminologists might use instead? Do you think that a biological approach to understanding rape is likely to be a good thing? Why? Before we briefly consider the history of biological theories of criminal behaviour, there is one simple biological factor that is associated with a big increase in risk of criminal behaviour. Stop here and try to think what this might be before reading the next paragraph. The factor can be seen from several biological perspectives: Possession of a Y chromosome Having a penis and testes rather than a vagina and ovaries Having higher levels of testosterone Behaving more aggressively Being a male. Why should this be so unless the biological differences between males and females are also connected to the very different levels of crime they commit? Unfortunately it is plausible that such differences could arise from social and cultural factors, together with incidental consequences of the differences in strength and in time spent looking after children, for example. In summary, then, we believe that the differences in criminal activity are due both to biological and to other factors. THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOUR Now you have thought about some of the wider issues concerning the value of biological explanations of criminal behaviour we will consider the history of this type of theory. Since the time of the earliest surviving records, ugliness, disability and deformity have been taken as reflections of evil and criminality. Egyptian papyri, the Bible and Homer’s Iliad all take the link as valid and this belief has survived to the present day. Physiognomy (assessing personality from facial features) traces its roots to ancient 21 THEORIES OF CRIME Greece where the concept that mind, morality and body were intimately interrelated was widely accepted, even by Aristotle (perhaps the most scientific of the ancient Greeks). Socrates was condemned to death partly on the evidence of a physiognomist that his face showed him to be a cruel drunk. In medieval Europe physical imperfections, such as warts, moles and third nipples, were taken as proof of demonic possession (Einstadter and Henry 1995) and in ordinary, secular, law if two people were under equal suspicion then the uglier was to be found guilty (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985). The pre-existing belief that appearance reflected inner worth was first woven into a more scientific version of physiognomy by Della Porte (1535–1615). Della Porte studied dead bodies and claimed he had found a connection between facial features such as small ears and large lips with criminal behaviour. Later physiognomists such as Beccaria (‘On Crimes and Punishments’, 1764) and Lavater (‘Physiognomical Fragments’, 1775) extended Della Porte’s theory. Many of their claims are still heard in everyday conversation, for example ‘weak chins’ and ‘shifty eyes’ are still remarked upon as if they were true indicators of moral weaknesses. The increasing status of scientific methods encouraged the search for physical signs of moral degeneracy. Phrenology was a theory adopted and publicized by Gall (1758–1828). It proposed that the surface of the skull was raised where it lay over parts of the brain that were more active than average. In many ways it prefigured our present view of the brain as made of many largely independent modules each with a specific task. Indeed, Gall correctly predicted the location of a part of the brain concerned with producing spoken language. Some of the ‘bumps’ that phrenologists linked with criminal behaviour actually have some empirical support. The ‘destructiveness centre’ behind and above the left ear really is prominent in about 17 per cent of criminals, and there are others at the back of the skull that seem to reflect abnormalities of two parts of the brain, the hippocampus and amygdala. You will see that these are thought to be important in violent anti-social or criminal behaviour (see the section below on brain structures, p. 44). It may be that things that distort the development of our brains can also disturb the growth of the neighbouring bone, or vice versa. Injuries later in life certainly can damage the skull and the underlying brain tissue. The methods, and philosophical understanding, to test Gall’s theory did not exist in his lifetime and his attempts to get around these problems ended by invalidating the project. Indeed, the popular success of phrenology (it became quite fashionable to ‘have one’s bumps felt’) led to a counter-movement that focused not only on the problems of testing its claims but also on the idea that our brain was built of largely independent systems. QUESTION BREAK Phrenology is a well-known enough fashion for it to have appeared in The Simpsons. When Homer’s mother comes back and Mr Burns spots her likeness 22 BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS to an ancient ‘Wanted’ poster the Springfield officers interview him. Officer Friday asks ‘Are you sure this is the woman you saw in the post office?’ Burns replies ‘Absolutely! Who could forget such a monstrous visage? She has the sloping brow and cranial bumpage of the career criminal.’ When Smithers objects to Mr Burns’s use of phrenology by saying ‘Uh, Sir, phrenology was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago’, he is met with the unanswerable riposte ‘Of course you’d say that: you have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter’ (Appel 1995). Have these old ways of thinking about humans disappeared? If not, where can you see their influence? The next major step on the road to current biological theories comes with Lombroso, one of the people who founded modern criminology. As Garland (1997) points out, the founders of criminology as we now understand it were very open to the idea of biological factors leading to criminal behaviour. Lombroso (1876) used Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to argue that criminals were biological throw- backs (i.e. their looks, morality and behaviour were atavistic – or like their primitive ancestors). Criminals were physically and morally degenerate. Biological positivism is the term for theories that claim that criminal behaviour is caused by biological factors: most current criminologists regard it as either false or simplistic. When the claims of physiognomy, phrenology and other similar ‘sciences’ were disproved by empirical data, biological theorizing in general was brought into disrepute. However, even if the specific claims were wrong there could still be other biological bases for criminal behaviour. If you are not convinced by Lombroso’s claim that prostitutes’ feet showed the same prehensile (or gripping) form as our primate relatives (e.g. apes and monkeys), the link between looks and criminal behaviour could still be true. After all, why would an idea have such a long history if it had no basis in reality or was completely invalid? Indeed these ideas are so attractive that they appear in the wider popular culture. For example, in his novel Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky makes a point of the central character’s good looks. He does not want readers to assume that his evil acts are a consequence of an innate weakness that would show itself as both a physical and a moral deficiency. Dostoyevsky knew that at that time, 1866, people believed that the two went together in most criminals. Charles Dickens often makes the connection between physical appearance and morality in his novels. Think of Oliver Twist, where Oliver, even though he does not know it, is from a ‘good family’ and thus carries ‘good genes’ (although that term did not exist then). Oliver turns out to be good because of his biological inheritance while the Artful Dodger, from a classic deprived background, is destined to go to the bad because of his (Dickens 1897). Lombroso himself studied 383 criminals looking for a set of signs (stigmata) that he argued showed atavism. These included such things as excess digits and an asymmetrical face. He found that about one in five had one sign and over two in five 23 THEORIES OF CRIME had at least five. On this evidence he argued that five or more stigmata indicated that someone was born biologically destined to be a criminal. In a later study he found that about one in three anarchists (people who believed that violence was justified to gain their political aims) showed the stigmata compared to about one in eight members of other extreme political factions. He did compare his criminals to a control group of soldiers and used simple statistics but he did not control for variables such as mental illness and ethnic origin. The criminal groups showed more mental illness and had more Sicilian people: both of these would accentuate any differences between criminals and controls. As the methods were not adequate for the task his data cannot be relied upon and should be treated as of historical interest. The problems with Lombroso’s work illustrate the importance of methodology and statistics. Lombroso and Gall both struggled to get around the relatively primitive methodology of their times. An English scientist responded to Lombroso’s claims with one of the earliest convincing tests of the atavism hypothesis. Goring (1913) compared over three thousand habitual criminals with large, varied control groups over a decade: he used objective measures for 37 possible signs of atavism and found no differences other than that the criminals were, on average, two inches shorter and about five pounds lighter. Goring took this as support for his own theory that criminals had inherited a poorer set of genes but it is also consistent with the hypothesis that if people grow up in impoverished environments then they are likely to be physically less developed and more likely to turn to crime. Interestingly, 26 years after Goring’s book, Hooten (1939) published the results of a study of nearly fourteen thousand prisoners compared to 3,200 controls using 33 measures, many of which could have come from Lombroso, including mal- formed ears and sloping foreheads. Hooten found the criminals to be ‘inferior’ on all the body-part measures. Unfortunately Hooten’s study had serious flaws, such as unsuitable controls and the same plausibility of environmental explanations for the physical differences as for Goring’s results. He also claimed differences between types of criminal although many had been previously convicted for different offences. However as mentioned earlier, one would expect people to engage in behaviours for which they are physically suited, so big people are more likely to be able to use force effectively. In addition Hooten’s theory and style of writing embody racist assumptions of the time. Indeed, Hooten’s work was dismissed with contempt (e.g. Merton 1938) particularly for the circular reasoning that criminals were biologically inferior and therefore whatever physical differences they showed must indicate biological inferiority that must explain their criminality... and so on. QUESTION BREAK Do you think it is reasonable to think that there may be a link between looks and criminality? 24 BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS What biological explanation(s) might explain any connection? What non-biological explanations can you think of? How could you test whether looks themselves caused criminal behaviour? The idea that looks and crime are somehow connected via biology continued to develop, and after the Second World War Sheldon (1949) published a book that proposed a theory that body type was linked to personality. There have been ideas like this for hundreds of years – think of Shakespeare having Caesar say that he did not want lean men like Cassius around him as they were dangerous: ‘Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, He thinks too much; such men are dangerous’ (Julius Caesar, I.ii.194), but Sheldon used scientific methods to support his hypotheses. There were three extremes: the round, chubby endomorph who is tolerant, extrovert and likes food and people; the ectomorph who is slender and artistic, sensitive and introverted; and the mesomorph who is muscular, shaped like a triangle pointing down, and aggressive, competitive, fearless and risk-taking. If you imagine a triangle with each extreme at one point we all fall somewhere within it – few people are ‘pure’ mesomorphs, endomorphs or ectomorphs – but the more a person approached the mesomorphic point then the more likely Sheldon thought they were to be criminal. He produced data to show that convicted offenders are more mesomorphic on average than the rest of the population. Other researchers have confirmed this: in one study by Eleanor and Sheldon Glueck 60 per cent of delinquents compared to only 30 per cent of non-delinquents had mesomorphic body characteristics (Glueck and Glueck 1950). But the Gluecks’ theory is vulnerable to the criticism that of course muscular people are more likely to commit crimes involving aggression and violence. However, you will see later in this chapter that there is some biological support linking testosterone levels with both mesomorphic bodies and aggressive criminal acts. Whatever the reason there does seem to be a connection between looks and the risk of conviction: Cavior and Howard (1973) took 159 photographs of male juvenile delinquents and 134 of male high-school seniors. University psychology students rated them for attractiveness: the high-school seniors were significantly more likely to be judged attractive. Even more convincingly Kurtzberg et al. (1978) took one hundred ‘ugly’ convicts from one of the USA’s toughest prisons, Rikers Island, New York, at their release and gave them plastic surgery. They were compared against a control group of equally ugly convicts who did not receive surgery. After 12 months those who had had plastic surgery were significantly less likely to have been rearrested. Finally, Saladin, Saper and Breen (1988) showed that there is a bias to believe that uglier people are more likely to be criminal by showing two psychology classes a set of photographs. The first class rated them for attractiveness and the other rated them on the chance they would commit murder or robbery: those rated less attractive tended to be judged more likely to commit serious crime. All of these studies of attractiveness should remind you of the claims of the physiognomists and the historical beliefs that physical beauty reflects goodness. 25 THEORIES OF CRIME This takes us into the ‘modern’ period of biological thought on which the rest of this chapter concentrates. As you will see, studies of the possible genetic basis of factors related to criminality had already been going on for decades. An important study by Cloninger et al. in 1982 can now be seen as a milestone in the development of methods which highlighted the interaction between biological and social factors: the biosocial interaction model that is the most promising in this area. Also Wilson’s revolutionary book (1975) argued that human social behaviour had biological roots and was evolved. The rest of the discussion is divided into five sections: Evolutionary perspectives, to give you a framework within which to interpret the other viewpoints. Genes, as the bridge between evolution and our working bodies and brains – this subsection also covers the transmitters that carry signals within the brain. Physical characteristics, as some are related to your risk of criminal behaviour. Brain structures, as the organ with which we sense, process and respond to the world. Development of the brain, as this process ties together the other biological perspectives. EVOLUTION The most useful way to begin looking at particular approaches within biology is to consider criminal behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. As the geneticist Dobzhansky (1973) wrote: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ To give you an idea of how this may help understand criminal behaviour, after introducing the concept of evolution below, we will look at three applications: firstly, one of the most convincing, which explains the age–crime curve for males (Kanazawa 2003); secondly, one of the most interesting but contested claims – that step-parents are much more of a danger to children than biological parents (Daly and Wilson 1988, 2002); thirdly, one highly controversial and not very convincing hypothesis – that rape is a behaviour that has evolved to increase men’s chance of leaving the greatest number of offspring (Thornhill and Palmer 2000). Introducing evolution Evolution applies to populations of animals (including humans) not to individual animals. You are the product of many generations of evolution, but the pattern of change that evolution produces can be seen only by looking at the whole population that you are a member of. Individuals differ in their genes and so in their characteristics. Different characteristics give you differing chances of surviving and leaving successful offspring. Those offspring will carry their parents’ genes into the next generation. The more successful descendants a person leaves, the more successful they are in evolutionary 26 BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS terms. (See Dawkins (1976) for an explanation of how it is really genes that are ‘successful’ or not.) Thus, if you look at the population as a whole over time you will see evolution: an increase in the proportion of the population carrying versions of genes that fit them well to the environment. The production of different combinations of genes is ruled by chance. The success of the combinations is tested by the particular environment: evolution is shooting at a moving target: the best combinations of genes now, in Latvia, is not likely to be the same as the best in a thousand years’ time in Surinam. The environment ‘selects’ those genes that lead to more offspring. However, evolution does not produce ‘progress’; we are no ‘better’ than our ancestors; what is good now was not, and will not be, good in other environments. Humans are as highly evolved as every other living organism, no more, no less. Owing to our shared evolution we share genes with other living things: the more closely related we are (i.e. the more recently that we shared a common ancestor with another species) the more of our genes are shared with them. We share about half of our genes with the banana (Begley 2002), even though that is obviously only distantly related to humans, but chimpanzees and humans have over 96 per cent of their genes in common (Holmes 2005). Recently researchers have found clear evidence that we are still evolving quickly. Two genes that control development of the brain have versions, or alleles, that are being selected by the environment – this means that people who have the preferred versions are leaving more successful offspring. This seems to be an extension of the differences between humans and chimps and has lead to the selected alleles becoming much more common over the last six thousand to thirty thousand years, broadly speaking up to the period that city life first appeared (Inman 2005). Evidence showing substantial human evolution over the last fifteen thousand years across at least seven hundred of our 25,000 genes has been published with the expectation that many more will be recognized (Douglas 2006). Evolution will tend to make a really useful adaptation spread throughout the population for example the impulsivity, competitiveness and high sex-drive of 15–30- year-old males are typical of males in general (just as antlers are typical of sexually mature male red deer). This is thought to be due in part to sexual selection where members of one sex prefer mates with certain traits, as when female deer prefer bucks with larger antlers. Then, even if those traits have other disadvantages, the genes that underlie them will become more common. This will go on until the disadvantages (of say huge antlers or extreme com

Theories of Crime (2006) PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript

Upgrade to continue