Project instructions:
The original Question:
This week’s reading provides overview of the research on biological and psychological perspectives, as well as discusses strain and culture deviance theories. After reviewing the reading for week 2, as well as the week 2 discussion articles in the lesson for this week, discuss/debate with your classmates your position pertaining to biological and psychological perspectives of explaining crime. Also, examine at least one theory from the assigned reading that explain crime and articulate why you either strongly agree or disagree with it.
Instructions:
Each feedback post needs to be 250 words or more, and should include information that helps to enhance the discussion on the topic. Do not include statements such as great work, or excellent post. Try to include info that is challenging and respectful and that will stimulate debate. Also, be mindful of including references and citations whenever citing facts to support your position. APA 6th edition citations and references must be used always!
Ryan Salas:
I find the debate between whether a criminal is born a criminal or whether a criminal becomes a criminal as a result of their environment is a very interesting debate. Biocriminology is the study of the correlations between a person’s genes or hormones that could lead to criminal behavior. Geneticists believe that a person may have a predisposition to act violently or aggressively in certain situations which may be inherited (Adler, Mueller & Laufer, 2013, pg.82). To support their argument, Geneticists have made and continue to make several studies that in my opinion make a strong case that a person’s genetics play a strong role in whether a person is more likely to become a criminal. Of the studies describe in our text I found the most compelling to be the XYY Syndrome and Adoption Studies.
The XYY syndrome states that a male who is born with an extra Y chromosome is 20 times greater to be physically aggressive and more likely to become violent than a male born without the genetic defect. The studies that were completed in the 1960’s that found the frequency of a male with the extra Y chromosome are very surprising, but on the contrary there have been many other violent acts carried out by males who did not have the extra Y chromosome. That is where I find the Adoption Studies to further support that a person’s criminal behavior is in their genetics. The incredibly large Adoption Study that took place in Denmark between 1924 and 1947 sampled 14,427 people of both the male and female sex. The study was set out to find if the criminality of a person’s parents increased that person’s risk of becoming a criminal themselves. I found that the statistics from a sample size of 4,000 males involved in the studied to be very surprising. Of the males whose parents both adoptive and biological were non-criminal 13.5 percent had a conviction. The males whose adoptive parent had a criminal record and biological parents did not, 14.7 percent had a conviction. The males who had non-criminal adoptive parents but criminal biological parents 20 percent had a conviction! That statistic should convince anybody that it is in the genetics. The male who was raised by people who had no criminal background were nearly 6 percent more likely to commit a criminal offense than that of a person raised by adoptive parent with a criminal history. The last statistic further supports the theory. Out of the males who had both adoptive and biological parent with criminal history, 24.5 percent had been convicted of a crime (Adler et al., 2013, pg. 84).
The only issue that I found with the study was if the samples knew that their parent either adoptive or biological had a criminal history or not. I feel that a person may be more psychologically inclined to become a criminal just based on the facts that their parents were criminals themselves. Having said that, I found the Social Learning Theory which states “that delinquent behavior is learned through the same psychological processes as any other behavior” (Adler et al., 2013, pg. 97) support the fact that a person’s upbringing plays a very large role in whether a person becomes a criminal or not. A theory which comes to mind in regards to how an environment plays a large role in crime occurrence is the Broken Window Theory.
Created by George Kelling and James Wilson in 1982 the theory suggested that developmental sequence or “spiral of decline” that occurs in low income neighborhoods due to the existence of what they called “unattended property and behavior” and crimes like assault and robbery. Kelling and Wilson defined “unattended property and behavior” as physically decayed buildings, panhandling, loitering, public intoxication (Fritsch, Liederbach, & Taylor, 2009, pg.102). I feel that the theory strongly supports the idea that a person’s environment like that described in the theory plays a role in how a person may carry themselves.