Crine Causation

Growing up a little boy watches gang member’s violent behavior and how people are rewarded within the gang; this little boy is more likely to follow in the same footsteps. This is an example of the behavioral theory. There are many reasons experts believe people commit crime. They range from biological, to cognitive to the latent trait theory. In this paper three different reasons are going to be observed. Those three are psychodynamic, behavioral, and personality.

Created by Sigmund Freud, the psychodynamic theory believes that people who break the law have suffered damage to their personalities early into development and that this damage renders them powerless to control their impulses. Some of these people have mental disabilities that take over their personalities. They may suffer delusions and feel persecuted, worthless, and alienated. Some of these people have schizophrenia that causes hallucinations and hearing voices. Usually when adults have been arrested for multiple crimes they are more likely to have a psychiatric disorder. This theory stresses the importance of developmental experiences in shaping personality. There is a ton of research showing that people who suffer from server mental illness and distress seem to be more antisocial than members of the general population and that punishment may do little to reduce their criminal offending.

Behavioral theory is the example that was given in the beginning. A little boy watching violent behavior and the criminal rewards within his peers is more likely to have the same behavior. When a person is a rewarded for their behavior the behavior becomes habitual; when a person is punished for their behavior the behavior is extinguished. Social learning theory is a sub-branch of behavioral theory of particular relevance to criminology. According to social learning theorists, people act aggressively because, as children, they modeled their behavior after the violent acts of adults. Social learning theorist ruled that the antisocial behavior of a probable violent person can be triggered by many influences such as verbal taunting. The central idea behind behaviorism is that only observable behaviors are worthy of research since other abstraction such as a person’s mood or thoughts are too subjective. This belief was popular for a long time but has since changed. In this new day and age a topic that has been popular discussion is whether the entertainment media can influence violence.

Personality can be defined as the reasonably stable patterns of behavior including thoughts and emotion, which distinguish one person from another. Antisocial personality is a personality characterized by a lack of warmth and feeling, inappropriate behavioral responses, and an inability to learn from experience (also called sociopath or psychopath). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the APA defines the antisocial personality as a pervasive patter of disregard for,