Causes of Crime
Natural Causes of Crime
The factors and precursors that are associated in whole or in part with the causes of crime are prolific and many. Many of those causes fall under one of three major categories, those being biological, sociological and psychological. Indeed, many crimes are caused in whole or in part by inherent biological attributes, external factors or a combination thereof. Crimes can be committed of a person knowing better and not caring enough to not do or stop the behavior or they can be committed from a person that is at least temporarily unable to process and realize what they are doing due to being on alcohol, an illicit street drug or prescription medication. This report will cover all of those and provide examples of each, either general or specific. While some people perhaps lean a little too heavily on crimes causing them to commit misdeeds, there are indeed causes of crime that are entirely biological and/or mental in nature and thus inform why a person commits a crime and/or continues to commit crimes.
Literature Review
A total of four scholarly journals were consulted and are cited within this report. The first of those four relates to the age of an offender and the corresponding crimes that a person of a certain age, usually those younger in age, commits during the course of their adolescence and teenage years. Indeed, they assert that age is one of the major correlates but they also note that the fleshing out and explanation of this dynamic is both complex and contradictory at times. They note that the vast majority of crimes, more than two thirds, can be reduced if the procedural justice or social learning aspects of what leads to crime among teens are dealt with before the child reaches the age of 25. They note that there was a drop of 69%, nearly seven out of ten, when those specific dimensions were addressed rather than left to flare up more and create recidivism and/or a lifetime of crime and prison stays. In...
If a teen can be reined in and his/her dysfunction corrected and their life focused on better things, then the outcomes tend to be much better the majority of the time (Sweeten, Piquero & Steinberg, 2013).
The next source looks at crime causality in a sociological context. This dovetails a bit with the last subject but focuses more on the environmental causes rather than simply the biological and brain chemistry reasons. These sociological crimes can happen at both the macro and micro levels. Put another way, they can be causes in limited and specific environments or they can take on a very wide geographical and societal scope. For example, one teenager robbing one store would be a micro example. The Los Angeles Riots after the Rodney King verdict would be a macro example. Both of those crimes were caused at least in part by sociological factors but the scope of each is entirely different (Collins, 2013).
Another example of a social criminal uproar was seen during the times of abolition during the United States Civil War in 1863. There was a set of riots in New York City that occurred in July 1863 and lasted for the majority of a week. During that period of time, there were repeated assaults and attacks on the main abolitionist newspaper in New York City, that being the New York Tribune. The police, for their part, were quite aggressive themselves in that they wielded clubs against the accosters and probably made the situation all that more tense. Even so, this is a clear example of a macro sociological criminal even because of the underlying history and societal context that fed that proverbial fire (Collins, 2013).
The third and final cause of crime covered in this…
