An overview and comparison of nine different criminal behavior categories.
This paper examines how, in many contemporary criminology texts, theories concerning criminal behavior are generally classified according to some biological, psychological, or sociological perspective. It looks at how, in recent years, however, several theories of criminal behavior have appeared that make such simple categories inadequate for the complexities that have been identified in such analysis and how these new behavioral theories have specifically combined both biological and social environmental variables in their explanations of people’s varying tendencies to commit crime. It reviews nine such categories of criminal behavior, followed by an analysis and summary of the research in the conclusion.
Outline
Introduction
Review and Discussion.
Classical
Psychobiological
Sociological
Conflict
Emergent
Biological
Psychological
Social-Psychological
Phenomenological
Conclusion
Outline
Introduction
Review and Discussion.
Classical
Psychobiological
Sociological
Conflict
Emergent
Biological
Psychological
Social-Psychological
Phenomenological
Conclusion
This category of crime holds that criminal behavior is caused by exercise of free will and criminal responsibility. The classical theory of criminal behavior was prevalent prior to modern criminology’s search for the causes of crime, which did not begin until the nineteenth century. Classical theory did not attempt to explain why people commit crime but was rather a strategy for administering justice according to rational principles (Garland, 1985). Classical theory was based on assumptions about how people living in the emerging historical period of seventeenth-century Europe, called the Classical period or Enlightenment era, began to reject the traditional idea that people were fixed social types (e.g., landed gentry and serfs) with vastly different rights and privileges.