Offender Behavior, Career Criminality, and Human Ecology

Introduction: The Prison Overcrowding Crisis

With correctional populations at an all-time high, the cost of maintaining the prison system has been breaking state budgets for years (Pew Center on the States, 2009). For example, the state of Kentucky was facing a $1.5 billion revenue shortfall in 2009 at the same time that it was being sued by its own counties for costs associated with jailing prison overflows. This growing fiscal crisis has confronted politicians, corrections officials, and criminologists for years with no easy solution in sight.

One possible solution to prison overcrowding is the widespread adoption of community- and problem-oriented policing (Maguire and King, 2004). These policing strategies identify locations that foster criminal activity and design interventions that change the environment in ways that discourage such activity; they are therefore primarily preventive in nature. Common examples include "broken windows" and "hotspot" policing. However, these strategies tend to ignore individual contributions to criminality. The emergence of community- and problem-oriented policing therefore depends heavily on the theory that the structure of a community's lived environment is the primary determining factor for individual behavior (Savage and Vila, 2003), while simultaneously holding individuals responsible for their offenses.

The Human Ecology of Crime

This paper examines the validity of the assumption that social forces control individual behavior and discusses the implications of current theories for the future trajectory of the criminal justice system.

In the introduction to their article on the biological and environmental correlates of offender behavior, Savage and Vila (2003) contrast the concept of "normal" people committing a crime due to extreme circumstances with the reality that half of all crimes are committed by repeat offenders. The former suggests that most crime is committed by everyday law-abiding people who, in a moment of exceptional duress, commit a criminal act, while the latter thoroughly debunks that theory. This dichotomy is discussed at the outset because both framings miss the point that some human ecologists try to make: that all individuals are capable of criminal activity under the right circumstances, and that crime becomes a way of life for a few.

The human ecology factors believed to contribute to criminal activity are an individual's past and ongoing interactions with the home and community environment (reviewed by Savage and Vila, 2003). Individual contributions are primarily a product of "behavioral strategies" that seek to procure resources such as family, property, money, or power. These strategies depend on an individual's ability to evaluate the value of a resource and retain it. Criminal behavior is therefore defined as the use of "force, fraud, or stealth to obtain desired resources" (p. 84). In essence, human ecologists equate human behavior with the foraging activity of animals, but with the additional characteristics of high intelligence, high adaptability, and an exceptional capacity for acquiring new behaviors through social interactions. This last trait represents one of the primary ways that the home and community environment can influence an individual's behavior.

The Impact of Social Injustice

From the human ecological perspective, social inequalities can be expressed through crime rates (reviewed by Savage and Vila, 2003). Racial disparities, which create community concentrations of poverty, unemployment, and social isolation, are cited as a credible explanation for differences in crime prevalence along racial lines. Some individuals, living within a society that emphasizes material wealth, will attempt to compensate for lower social status through theft. However, even a social system lacking injustice and having almost uniform conformity to social rules will still generate thieves, because the market for theft is wide open with little initial competition. Human ecology theory therefore predicts that crime will eventually develop in any society, but will be aggravated by social injustices.