Contemporary Theories Of Crime

Researchers have been trying to explain criminal behaviour in a scientific way since many years. Earlier, researchers like Lombroso and Sheldon gave the Atavism and the Somatotype theories of crime ,but , these theories fail to clearly explain the subject as there is a lot of variations and exceptions and also the sample size on which ther esearch was conducted was way too small. However,on the other hand, modern researchers have given theories based on genetics and psychology.

Genetic Types
Osborn and West in the year 1979 conducted an experiment by which they found that 13% people with a non-criminal father have criminal records while the rate was 20% for people whose father had criminal records.

Farrington in the year 2002 also made similar observations. He experimented people having criminal relatives up to 3 generations. He also found out that people who had criminal relatives have more probability of being a criminal.

Another experiment by Ishikawa and Raine gave very convincing results. They found out that between identical twins if one person is a criminal then there is a 44% chance that the other twin will also be a criminal but among non-identical twins this chance is 21.6%. These experiments give some convincing evidence that the there can be some relations between criminality and genetics.

Criminal Personality
Another theory is that criminality can be psychological in nature. This theory was put forward by Eysenck. He said that criminals have a criminal personality. According to Eysenck , criminals have a slow learning nervous system. For example, a normal person will learn quickly about good and bad actions based on the effects caused in the environment like if we get scolded while doing a wrong thing our nervous system learns that the act is bad and should not be repeated again. Criminal nervous system is slow in the registering process, and thus, they take time in differentiating between good and bad.

Eysenck also said that there are 2 types of personality traitsi.e. extroverts and introverts. Among these two personality types, people who have extrovertism and neuroticism tends to show criminality. Neuroticism are people who show characteristics of anxiety and emotional instability.

McGurk and McDougall in 1981 had conducted a test on students of similar age by categorising them as delinquent and non-delinquent. He found that some students from the delinquent group were showing traits of extroversion, neuroticism and psychoticism. There were no such traits shown by the students of the non- delinquent groups. However, there was a large sample bias in this experiment. All the people who were experimented upon were students and were of similar age.

None of the experiments give us a clear view of the reason for criminality. But whatever may be the reason for criminality, the purpose of this search is still in a haze. What if we understand which people are having a high probability of committing a crime and who do not have? What will be the advantage of that? Will it be justified to restrain or arrest the individual merely on the basis of high probability, because experiments will always have exceptions? Until and unless a person commits a crime will it be justified to convict the person just on the basis of scientific experiments and evaluations? These are the questions that still needs to be answered in the contemporary theories of crime.