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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.