I don’t believe that there is one singular reason that people commit crimes. Rather, I agree with the integrated perspective on criminology: that a combination of biological, ecological, social, economical, and political factors work to cause crime.
The biological perspective on why crime happens, the Trait Theory, shows how criminality can be influenced by diet, allergies, and both physical and mental health. Chemical imbalances impair people’s ability to reason and make rational decisions, which can cause their impulse to commit crime to increase.
Social theories in criminology show how social structure and social learning can cause people to commit crime. Social Structure Theories establish the relationship between a person’s socioeconomic status and their tendency to commit crime. Poor people don’t have the same opportunities for success as wealthy people; this often influences them to turn to crime for a chance at success. Social Process Theories also explore the idea that society influences people to commit crimes. These theories suggest that crime is something that is learned, much like any other behaviour. Everyone has the potential to commit crime, but they are held back by their connections to society and their self-perception. When society labels people in a negative way, they cause those people to become isolated and damage their self-perception, which can influence people to become or remain criminals.
Conflict theory suggests that crime is caused by class conflict. I think that this can be true, but in a lot of cases, it is not. In my opinion, social structure theories are a much better way to describe how socioeconomic status can influence crime
Personally, I tend to agree more with the sociological theories about why crime happens. There are other factors that cause crime, but I think that our environments and the people that we learn from have the greatest impact on who we later become. When children are neglected, they grow up looking for attention or success to prove themselves in ways that they shouldn’t. When the people around us tell us that we don’t fit in, we look for other places to turn to where we will fit in, in some cases resorting to crime.
Obviously, there are biological factors to our behaviour that are beyond control, but if these are dealt with properly, the influence they will have on our criminality will decrease. In the case of people struggling with addiction, which is a mental illness, but in many cases is brought on by the environment they live in, whether they grew up with parents who were addicts, our surround themselves with friends who are addicts. Almost every mental illness can be caused by trauma or stress in our lives, they are just triggered differently in different people. I think that social factors generally have a much greater influence on crime than biological factors, and a lot of the time, psychological conditions can be brought on by living in difficult situations.
Recently, in Ontario, a young woman was the victim of an attempted robbery using a sharp object from which she suffered cuts. This was likely a crime of desperation, the unknown attacker felt they needed money as soon as possible. While the details are scarce, the motive behind this crime could be described using social theories. The attacker was probably of low socioeconomic status, and thus felt that they needed to rob and resort to other forms of crime in order to get the money and success they needed.
Danielle's Criminology Blog 