Criminological Theories Case Study

1. Introduction

Criminological theories are theories about the nature, extent, cause and control of criminal behaviour, of which the main types are biological, psychological, and sociological theories, and certain individual theories like rational choice theory (Akers, 1999). As governments use criminological theories to formulate crime prevention policies, epistemologically unsound criminological theories can lead to wide-ranging ramifications. Thus, it is important that they are epistemologically sound.

However, criminologists do not understand the causes of crime well. A US Congress-sponsored study (Sherman, et al., 1997) concluded that criminologists do not understand how crimes rates can be reduced, and criminologists have themselves pointed

In 19th Century UK, France and Belgium, census data and judicial statistics were used to plot distributions and match crime rates with social indices, in order to derive correlations and thus draw conclusions on the causes of crime (Muncie, 2001). Should we accept the reliability of the statistics, this is a logical first step, as similar strong correlations observed over extended periods of time imply a causal relationship.

However, the causal relationships may not work the way the theories propose – they can be multi-causal, bi-conditional or opposite to that proposed. And this has emerged as a problem in criminology.

For example, labelling theory (a sociological theory) posits that an individual’s identity and other qualities such as values and cognitive behaviours only exist in the context of society, and predicts that stigmatising labels like “criminal” foster criminal behaviour (Akers, 1999). However, while many labelled as “criminals” do exhibit criminal behaviour, critics have pointed out that courts do not apply the label “criminal” and police do not arrest without probable cause (Akers, 1999). Thus, academics like Bordua (1967) argue that labels reflect rather than propagate criminal behaviour. It is not clear whether one causes the other, whether it goes both ways, or whether they are jointly caused by a third factor. Therefore, theories gathered from empirical correlations

Internal logical consistency

2. Testability: empirical corroboration or falsification

3. Empirical validity

4. Scope

I will adopt these criteria in evaluating criminological theories, as they are epistemologically sound because:

1. Internal logical consistency is fundamentally important for epistemological soundness, for a logically inconsistent theory yields contradictory explanations or predictions, and is unable to either explain or predict crime occurrences.

2. Requiring testability weeds out theories we cannot prove true or false, such as tautologies, or those proposing causes that are not measurable by observable or reportable events.

3. Given that criminology aims to make precise predictions about human behaviour, it needs to ensure that its theories’ predictions correspond to observations of human behaviour.

4. If a theory is able to account for and predict the trends for many crimes, then it is more probable that it is true.

As internal logical consistency is an obvious criterion, and most criminological theories already fulfil it, I will only look at testability, empirical validity and