Criminals

SIGNIFICANCE: Although the concept of “criminals” may seem obvious, identifying and understanding criminals is actually fraught with ambiguity, disagreement, and misunderstanding.

Definitions of “criminals” are inexorably intertwined with definition of “crime.” All societies have laws; therefore, all societies have both crimes and criminals. The maintenance of order in any social group, whether small or large, primitive or advanced, requires that laws governing the interactions among its members be established and enforced. However, definitions of “crime” and “criminals” vary widely across societies. Conduct that makes a person a criminal in one society might be regarded as neutral or even heroic in another society. Nevertheless, despite ambiguities in definitions of crime and criminals, it is useful to categorize different types of criminals. At least five basic types can be identified.

Classifying Criminal Types

Perhaps the most frightening criminals are those who commit crimes of violence. Robbers, murderers, and rapists all qualify as violent criminals. It is also important to recognize that under Western law, violence can occur even when no clear bodily harm results. For example, a rapist who psychologically coerces or manipulates an underage victim is considered a violent offender.

What is not commonly understood is that many violent criminals are not repeat offenders. Many violent crimes of passion, such as aggravated assault and murder, are unique events that occur under extraordinary circumstances involving highly charged emotional conflicts that are often fueled by drugs or alcohol. Nevertheless, in the United States, fear of violent crime and concern about so-called “repeat violent offenders” has spurred interest in stiff laws on mandatory sentencing.

Far more common than violent criminals are property criminals, who include shoplifters, purse and wallet snatchers, and vandals who deface or destroy public or private property. Many property criminals are drug addicts who steal to finance their addictions. Others, such as cat burglars and professional car thieves, are experienced professional criminals who can make steady livings from their crimes.

A third category of criminals includes members of organized crime syndicates. These include the Mafia, drug and prostitution rings, and stolen car “chop shops.” Criminal organizations often profit from so-called consensual crimes, such as illegal narcotics and prostitution.

A fourth category, white-collar criminals, includes professionals such as stock traders who use improperly acquired information to make stock transactions, industrialists who violate occupational safety and environmental laws, and embezzlers. The proliferation of electronic commerce in the late twentieth century generated new types of white-collar criminals, such as identity thieves, who steal personal information to tap their unaware victims’ bank and credit card accounts.

The category of political criminals may be the most controversial of all. Figures such as the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Indian nationalist leader Mohandas K. Gandhi are now celebrated as heroes who opposed injustice. However, both men were once considered criminals by their governments’ law-enforcement officials and spent considerable time in jail. Gandhi became a criminal under British colonial law when he opposed imperialism in South Africa and India.

In the United States, many white Southerners regarded King as a criminal because of his open defiance of segregation laws. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), regarded King as a dangerous subversive and kept special files on him. Both Gandhi and King were political criminals because their political positions made them the targets of the institutions of law. However, their opponents never openly called them “political criminals.” The descriptions most often applied to them include “anarchists,” “seditionists,” and “traitors.”

Terrorists are also political criminals. However, definitional issues beset even this example. To Americans, the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States were barbarous acts of murder, and their perpetrators were international criminals. However, in some parts of the Arab and Muslim worlds, the attacks were considered justified, or at least understandable, retaliation for perceived mistreatment of Muslims in American foreign policy, and extremists regarded the hijackers as holy warriors and martyrs.

In any attempt to identify general crime types, it is important to remember that criminals, like the crimes they commit, are not easily boxed within mutually exclusive categories. For example, the September 11 hijackers can be considered violent criminals for their murders of thousands of people; they can be considered property criminals because of their destruction of billions of dollars worth of private and public property; they can be classified simply as terrorists; and they might even be considered members of an organized crime syndicate, al-Qaeda.

Biological and Psychological Theories

A subfield of sociology, criminology is the social science of observing and explaining the behavior of criminals. Criminologists and political scientists have long debated the causes of criminality. There have historically been many competing views of crime causation. Basic theories of crime can be divided into four very broad categories.

One category falls under the heading of biological/psychological theories. The idea that innate human tendencies explain the existence of criminals has a long history in criminology. Primitive and early religious societies generally attributed antisocial behavior to individual moral defects or the temptations introduced by demons or devils. Even throughout most of Western history, there was no meaningful distinction between ecclesiastical and secular law. “Illegal” was synonymous with “un-Christian.”

The Age of Enlightenment saw the introduction of more scientific explanations of crime. In 1876, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso wrote The Criminal Man, in which he argued that autopsies showed that criminals were more likely than other people to exhibit so-called atavistic traits, such as asymmetrical faces, exceptionally large or small brains, and unusually long arms. Lombroso’s notions are now generally dismissed as pseudoscience, but the idea that innate individual attributes can explain criminal behavior persists.

Studies of twins separated at birth indicate that antisocial tendencies are at least partially inheritable, suggesting a biological component to crime—often oversimplified as the idea of a “crime gene.” There is also evidence that life experiences, especially early childhood events, can powerfully shape individual psychology for better or worse. Inmates of modern prisons are disproportionately likely to have had traumatic pasts, such as abuse or neglect, that can solidify psychological trajectories toward criminal behavior.

Environmental Theories

Many sociologists deny or downplay the importance of psychological or biological attributes in explanations of why some people become criminals. They argue that even if there are variations in criminal tendencies among different individuals, the most powerful causes of criminal behavior are immediate environmental factors, such as family and peer influences, work and education opportunities, and socioeconomic conditions.

These sociological views of crime are numerous and well researched. For example, various social-learning theories contend that some individuals become criminals by imitating the behaviors and adopting the values of criminal peers. “Strain” theorists contend that poor and marginalized individuals are blocked from traditional means of survival and success in a competitive society such as the United States. These individuals turn to crime in reaction to the strain resulting from the incongruity between their aspirations and their legitimate prospects.

Social-Control and Critical/Conflict Theories

Rather than attempting to explain why some people become criminals, social-control theories approach the question of crime by explaining why most people do not become criminals. For example, the general theory of crime holds that individuals with propensities for analogous high-risk behaviors are also more likely to become criminals. Early childhood experiences can condition this propensity for high-risk behaviors. Children not properly disciplined and socialized can later become adults without the ability to empathize with others or appreciate the consequences of their actions, and they are thus more likely to become criminals.

“Critical,” or “conflict,” criminologists argue that criminals are neither made nor born. Instead, criminals are defined into existence by law. These theorists argue that the institutions of law favor the interests of the privileged and powerful who make the laws. Members of racial and ethnic minorities are economically, socially, and politically marginalized, making it easy for the dominant interests to frame them as “dangerous criminals” whose crimes should be aggressively targeted by the institutions of law. At the same time, these theories downplay or ignore crimes committed by the social elite, such as securities fraud, occupational safety violations, and environmental crimes.

A potential limitation of the critical/conflict perspective is accommodating “absolute” moral imperatives. Some legal or ethical restrictions are nearly universal, suggesting that some moral understanding beyond the hegemony of arbitrary law explains them. For example, almost everyone would agree that murder, rape, and incest should be forbidden, even if there are substantive differences on the exact definitions of these crimes. However, in other cases, the conflict interpretation is more compelling.

One oft-cited instance is the schedule of penalties for drug offenses under federal law. For example, the penalties for crack cocaine are harsher than those for powder cocaine, even though no proven medical differences between the two exist. Since crack cocaine is disproportionately used by poor members of minority groups, the latter are more aggressively prosecuted and overrepresented for drug crimes in federal prison, even though the proportions of White and minority drug use are roughly equal. Conflict criminologists argue that this focus on the drug crimes of marginalized classes is a classic example of how law itself creates criminals.

The explanations of crime summarized here focus on individual-level crime and are only a basic typology of the vast literature of criminological theory. There are other individual theories of crime, as well as a host of sociological theories explaining why some geographic areas and social groups, as opposed to individuals, are especially prone to pervasive crime.

The Social Construction of Criminals

The word criminal can conjure any number of images. However, in a mass-media-dominated society such as the United States, the public’s understanding of criminals is generally confined to television, film, and newspaper presentations. These media images of criminals can be both powerful and constricting, because most people have limited firsthand knowledge of criminals. Commonly held beliefs about criminals are thus socially constructed, not formulated from direct observations.

Television crime dramas emphasize plots about lurid and bizarre crimes and the heroic law-enforcement professionals who solve or prevent such crimes. Print and television news sources generally emphasize sensational car chases, shoot-outs, and murders in an effort to attract viewers and maximize advertising revenue. In the print media, many editors openly admit that “if it bleeds, it leads.” White-collar and corporate crime, by contrast, tend to be less sensational and less amenable to “sound bite” news coverage, and thus often receive less attention. Additionally, some argue, there are institutional barriers that prevent the crimes of powerful individuals and corporate entities from coming to light in the mainstream media. These media images and omissions can create or reinforce dubious assumptions in an unaware public. Citizens can easily come to believe that the typical “criminal” is a young, disheveled, thuggish, male member of a dark-skinned minority group who commits his crime out of naked greed or barbarous impulse, or that serial killers pose a frequent and pervasive threat.

There are, in fact, some criminals who fit these caricatures. More common, however, are the drug-addicted prostitutes, burglars, thieves, minor juvenile offenders, and tormented individuals who commit tragic, atypical crimes of passion, and little media attention is paid to them or to the underlying economic and social conditions that are arguably responsible for much crime. These incomplete media images could in turn distract both the public and elected policymakers from the best solutions to crime. If the socially constructed image of “criminal” is limited to include only physically menacing, impenitent brutes or serial killers, the public might be less sympathetic toward social policies that can alleviate the underlying social and psychological conditions that create most criminals, and less inclined to invest public resources in potentially effective rehabilitation and drug-treatment programs to help them.

Bibliography

Akers, Ronald L., and Christine S. Sellers. Criminological Theories: Introduction, Evaluation, and Application. 6th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.

Andrews, Donald A., and James Bonta. The Psychology of Criminal Conduct. 5th ed. 2010. New York: Routledge, 2015. Print.

Geldenhuys, Deon. Deviant Conduct in World Politics. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Print.

Hernan Di Marco, Martin. "Why? How Perpetrators of Male-Male Homicide Explain the Crime." Journal of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 38, nos. 1-2, 2022. DOI: 10.1177/0886260522108193. Accessed 25 June 2024.

Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein. Crime and Human Nature. New York: Simon, 1985. Print.