Explanations of criminal behaviour

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Explanations of criminal behaviour

• Individual and Cultural Differences in Criminal
  Behaviour

What are these differences? Why? Brainstorm
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Individual differences

• Age
• Gender
• Ethnicity

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Age

• Statistically delinquency peaks at 16-17 years of
  age, then declines.
• However, the vast majority of offences are
  minor ones. A random sample of around 1,500
  13-16-year-old London boys found that 70 had
  stolen from a shop (quoted in Moir and Jessel,
  1995).

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Age

• Aggressive individuals are rejected by their
  peers and end up with other aggressive
  individuals (Pepler and Slaby, 1994).
• Alternatively, rejected children seek out and
  associate with other children with similar views
  on life (Cairns and Cairns, 1991). 

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Two areas of research interest

• The existence of specific causes for juvenile
  delinquency like Attention Deficit Hyperactive
  Disorder (ADHD) and Conduct Disorder (CD)
• Whether juvenile delinquency persists in
  offending as adults.

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ADHD

• ADHD revolves around three principles
  inattention,. impulsivity and hyperactivity.
• A physiological explanation is an under-aroused
  frontal cortex.
• Another explanation could be that ADHD is a
  convenient social label for difficult children.

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Conduct disorders

• This includes behaviours like stealing,
  fire-starting and running away from home as a
  teenager.
• It is estimated that 9 of American males under
  eighteen show this behaviour (Farrington, 1991).

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Farrington, D.P. (1996)

• The Development of Offending and Antisocial
  Behaviour from Childhood to Adulthood.
• A KEY STUDY.

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Results (Farrington 1996)

• By the age of 32, 37 per cent of the males had
  committed criminal offences.
• The peak age was 17.
• Nearly three quarters of those convicted as
  juveniles were reconvicted between the ages of 17
  and 24.
• Nearly half of the juvenile offenders were
  reconvicted between the ages of 25 and 32.

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Results (Farrington 1996)

• Offending was very much concentrated in families.
  
• Just 4 per cent of the 400 families accounted for
  50 per cent of all convictions.
• The worst offenders tended to be from
  large-sized, multi-problem families.

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Results (Farrington 1996)

• The most common crimes in late teens were
  burglary, shoplifting, theft of and from
  vehicles, and vandalism. All of these declined in
  the twenties, but theft from work increased
• Self reports showed that 96 per cent of the males
  had committed at least one crime that might have
  led to conviction, so criminal behaviour was not
  deviant.

Need to combine this with KEY STUDY - Farrington
2002. See booklet.
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Predictors of crime at age 810

• Antisocial child behaviour including
  troublesomeness, dishonesty and aggression.
• Hyperactivity-impulsivity-attention deficit.
• Low intelligence and poor school attainment.
• Family criminality.
• Family poverty, including low family income,
  large family size and poor housing.
• Poor parental child-rearing techniques, poor
  supervision, parental conflict and separation
  from parents.

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Gender

• The most evident indicator of crime is being
  male, on a ratio of 91 (which has remained
  constant for many decades).
• Why? Give reasons.

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Dennis and Erdos

• Dennis and Erdos have argued that young men,
  particularly in areas of high unemployment, are
  in a state of permanent boyhood and never grow up
  ('Wot U Lookin' At', 1993).

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Box (1987)

• Box (1987) explains female crime in terms of
  poverty and unemployment.
• Womens usual response to lack of opportunity and
  school failure, he argues, is to blame themselves
  rather than society so they are less likely to
  turn to crime.

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Violence by women is increasing.

• When Auburn University sociologist Penelope
  Hanke, Ph.D., reviewed records from an Alabama
  prison from 1929 to 1985,
• She discovered that 95 of the cases where women
  murdered strangers occurred after 1970, along
  with 60 of slayings of friends and relatives.

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Domestic Violence

• Murray Straus, (19751985)
• Total of 8,145 married and cohabiting couples
• 12.4 of women have assaulted their spouses,
  compared to 12.2 of men.
• When it comes to severe assaults, the numbers
  were 4.6 for women and 5 for men. 

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Domestic Violence

• Irene Frieze, Ph.D.
• college students.
• 58 of women had assaulted their dates, compared
  to 55 of men.
• The men don't take the violence seriously

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Domestic Violence

• Straus admits that when it comes to the most
  brutal domestic assaults, the domain is still
  men's--they commit six times the number women do.

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Violence on the Street

• The statistics show that arrests of women for
  violent crimes increased 90 between 1985 and
  1994, compared to 43 for men.
• Only in the case of murder did men widen their
  lead a 13 rise for men compared to a 4 drop
  for women.

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Sentencing bias

• A Florida-based study showed that men were 23
  more likely to be imprisoned than women who
  committed the same crime.

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Social Learning Theory

• Albert Bandura conducted a series of experiments
  in which children watched adult models hitting
  inflatable Bobo dolls
• The children were then offered the opportunity to
  imitate the behaviour.

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Social Learning Theory

• Under normal circumstances, the boys knocked down
  the dolls far more often than the girls did.
• When the models got rewarded for knocking down
  the Bobos, the boys and girls became almost
  equally aggressive.

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Socialisation

• Sutherland 1939
• Boys are more likely to become delinquent than
  girls because they are less strictly controlled
  and are taught to be aggressive and active risk
  seekers
• Evaluation - Now girls are being encouraged by
  the media, etc to be violent - could explain rise
  in female crime.

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Physiological

• In a 1980 study (quoted in Moir and Jessel, 1995)
  of 50 violent female London prisoners, 44 of
  their crimes had been committed during
  paramenstruum (four days before menstruation).
  This is often called 'premenstrual tension' (PMT)
  
• Only 3 to 4 of women are affected

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Ethnicity and crime

• UK Home Office figures show that more Afro
  Caribbean youths are arrested as a percentage of
  the Afro-Caribbean population compared to white
  youths.
• For example, in London in 1984 52 of the
  arrests for street robbery were of
  Afro-Caribbeans, while non-whites only make up
  14 of the London population.

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Ethnicity and crime

• Feldman (1993) points out that if there is a
  generalizable difference, then it is that
  Afro-Caribbeans commit more single 'casual'
  (opportunist) offences while whites are
  'high-rate offenders'.
• However 'white collar' crimes are 'white crimes'
  because non-whites are not usually in the
  position to commit them.

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Percentage in Prison
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Percentage in Prison

• Ethnic minorities represent 10.3 of the English
  prison population, compared with 6.93 of the
  population aged 1624 years, and 5.5 of the
  total population (Home Office, 1991).

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Stop-and-Search

• Police stop-and-search powers have been shown to
  be used disproportionately against young black
  males (NACRO, 1997)
• However Wilbanks (1987) believes the differential
  in imprisonment rates is actually the result of
  higher crime rates among black people

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Sentencing

• Crawford (2000) explored the effects of race on
  over 1,100 habitual female offenders in Florida
• African-American women were given harsher
  sentences than their white counterparts.
• Similarly, when crime seriousness, crime type and
  prior record are controlled for, black males
  receive harsher sentences than white males do
  (Crawford et al., 1998).

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Commentary

• Almost all of this research is again concentrated
  on males. Rice (1990) calls this 'macho centric'
  (male centred), and it ignores the experiences of
  black females.
• In general,much of this research is ANDROCENTIC
  having a focus on men to the exclusion of women.

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Evaluation key points

• For top marks you need statistics of frequency of
  occurrence of crimes
• For evaluation consider, weaknesses of biological
  explanations for age and gender and ethnicity.
• Again most research is correlational or
  longitudinal. No Cause Effect.

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Examination Question

• (a) Outline one study of individual or cultural
  differences in criminal behaviour. (6)
• (b) Evaluate the approaches to explaining the
  differences in criminal behaviour. (10)
  Jan. 2004