Introduction to Criminology: Explaining Crime

Explore how early biological explanations linked crime to physical traits and how modern research uses twin studies to assess the heritability of criminal behavior.

A twin study in Virginia compares identical and fraternal twins to gene and environment effects on antisocial behavior, finding 30–40 percent heritable in males and 40–60 percent, higher in adolescence.

Explore how brain deficits, low resting heart rate, hormone imbalance, lower IQ, and birth complications, along with mothers' smoking and alcohol consumption during pregnancy, relate to delinquent behavior.

Lead exposure from air, food, water, or products links to higher crime; a St. Louis study connects children's blood lead levels with crime and violence, via impairment of impulse control.

Explore how genes, brain function, the heart, and hormone imbalances influence crime, and how lead exposure affects criminal behavior, as we shift toward the psychology of crime.

Explore how psychology influences crime through personality, mental disorders, psychopathy, and biology. Examine the five-factor traits and how extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism relate to criminal behavior.

Big five personality traits relate to crime, with conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism most strongly linked to antisocial behavior. Results indicate weak or unclear links for extroversion and openness.

The lecture links mental disorders to crime through delusional beliefs and stress with low social support, and notes that many mentally ill people live in the community.

Explore psychopathy as a personality disorder, detail the PCL-R scoring system, and analyze the Aileen Wuornos case to show links between trauma, biology, and violent crime.

Explore how personality relates to criminal behavior. Examine how mental disorders relate to crime, and analyze psychopathy and its potential causes.

Explore the classic school of criminology, detailing free will, rational choice, and the hedonistic calculation of benefits and costs that deter crime with certain, swift, proportional punishment.

Hotspot policing increases police focus on crime hotspots and repeat violent offenders, reducing violent crime and felonies, and increasing the certainty of punishment to deter crime.

Examine bounded rationality in rational choice theory and how routine activities shape crime by matching motivated offenders with suitable targets and few guardians.

Explore how rationality and routine activities shape burglary target choice, showing why deprived inner-city areas, prosperous-looking homes, and accessible major thoroughfares and corner houses are more at risk.

Explore the costs and benefits of crime, deterrence through swift, proportional punishment, and how Routine Activity Theory links motivated offenders, suitable targets, and lack of guardians.

Explore how crime is learned in groups through examples of street youths in Brazil and Dhaka, highlighting differential association theory and how group attitudes shape criminal behavior.

The lecture explains that the Rwandan genocide arose from group dynamics and politicized ethnicity. Killing was organized in groups, while belonging, fear, coercion, and opportunism sustained participation.

Explore neutralizations for crime before or during acts. Learn tactics such as denial of responsibility, denial of harm, and appeal to higher loyalties, with a Hong Kong shoplifting example.

Explore white collar crime, from health insurance fraud to tax violations, and see how offenders use neutralisation techniques like appeal to higher loyalties, denial of injury, and blaming the victim.

Explore how crime can be learned through group dynamics and social processes that motivate criminal behavior. Examine attitudes, rationalizations, and neutralizations, including how men and women neutralize white collar crimes.

Explore social bonding as a social control explanation for crime, emphasizing attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. Strengthening bonds to conventional society and non-offenders reduces crime by limiting opportunities and temptations.

Age-graded informal social control shifts with stages; marriage, children, and work steer offenders toward lawful living. Finland data show marriage 10%, parenthood 15%, both 22%, and work 40% fewer convictions.

Self-control theory links crime to low self-control, driven by impulsivity and risk seeking. Inadequate child rearing fosters low self-control, yet evidence suggests it can change, enabling crime prevention.

The study shows that transforming self-control via daily messages from future selves on Facebook increases future orientation and reduces youth delinquency.

Examine how social bonds with family and friends deter crime, how marriage and work can shift criminals toward law-abiding behavior, and how low self-control and impulsive behavior influence crime.

Labeling theory explains how being labeled as a criminal by others, such as parents or peers, can shape self-identity and trigger secondary deviance. Stigmatization and reduced opportunities further propel crime.

Explore how police labeling theory redefined hippies who used marijuana, pushing them into a deviant subculture. Drug use then became central to their self-identity as they withdrew from mainstream society.

Explore how reintegrative shaming and restorative justice use conferences with victims, offenders, and the community to repair damage and reintegrate offenders.

Family group conferences unite youth, family, extended family, and professionals to plan restorative action. Rooted in Maori traditions, they promote greater family involvement in child protection and juvenile justice.

Explore how labeling and stigmatization from punishment can fuel crime, and how reframing a criminal label can reconnect individuals to society, while next module shifts to how places generate crime.

Explore how neighborhood characteristics shape crime through social disorganization, linking poverty, housing instability, and ethnic heterogeneity to weak informal social control, opportunities for crime, and disorder.

Explore how signs of disorder, from graffiti to litter, can elevate crime risk through the broken windows theory, as demonstrated by field experiments in the Netherlands.

demonstrates how crime prevention through environmental design uses territoriality, natural surveillance, image management, and access control to reduce crime and improve residents' sense of safety.

Rate your home using a CPTED checklist, assigning 1s and 0s for surveillance, image management, territoriality, and access control, then compute your overall security percentage.

Explore how the environment shapes crime and how city area and neighborhood contexts influence rates, with disorder, litter, and social disorganization contributing, and how design can deter crime.

Examine how deprivation and limited opportunities create strain that can lead to crime, through strain theory and general strain theory, with delinquency as a response to abnormal conditions.

Examine how strain and differing opportunity structures fuel crime through a Medellín case study, showing how masculinity, status, and wealth drive gang involvement.

Explain how strains from goals, social comparison, and losses trigger emotional responses like anger and frustration, leading to corrective actions such as crime or drug use under General Strain Theory.

Explore how General Strain Theory links anger to crime across cultures, comparing American and Tibetan perspectives on anger as a crime driver or moral response to injustice.

Examine how strains and stress, including lack of opportunities and middle-class dreams, can drive crime through strain theory and General Strain Theory, noting cultural differences.

Conclude by recapping the most common explanations for crime, reinforced with examples, case studies, and research findings. Engage with the criminology community through the blog, discussions, and course feedback.