Essay On Theories Of Crime

There are many theories and explanations as to why crime occurs or as to why some individuals become criminals while others do not, some theories or explanations focus on the individual and other theories focus more on the social elements that can cause and individual to engage in criminal activity. It is difficult to make a concrete conclusion on which theories or explanations are better or are more conniving than the others given the situational nature of crime. Through examination of psychological positivism, focused on the personality traits of the individual, and strain theory, it will become clear that all cases of crime are different and are decided by a number of different factors in regards to the individual meaning that no one theory or type of theory, whether it be social or individual, is more a more convincing theory compared to another.
As a whole positivism is based on scientific understandings of crime and criminality, there is an assumption that that is a distinct difference between what is classified as the ‘normal’ and what is classified as the ‘deviant’ and these differences are studied to try and figure out what causes deviant or criminal behaviour in some people but not in others. The positivist approach contends that behaviour is pre-determined and that this behaviour is influenced by biological or psychological factors. A large psychological factor is that of personality, as shown by the work of Hans Eysenck. In Eysenck Personality Theory, there are three dimensions to personality that influence whether or not a person engages in criminal or deviant behaviour, the first dimension is weather an individual is more introverted or extroverted, the second dimension is weather an individual is more neurotic or ...

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...riminal was most likely a white male, in his thirties from DC whereas the real snipers were two black males, one of whom was 17 and the other 41, who were from the west coast of America. Cases such as tend to take away from the strength of psychological positivism as a theory. Another major criticism of psychological positivism is the research behind it, with many studies behind psychological positivism being discredited due to the researcher’s limited ability to control all variables with in the experiment. When specifically looking at Eysenck’s Personality theory, research done by Farrington (1982) showed that offenders scored higher in terms of psychoticism and neuroticism but not extraversion, this goes against Eysenck’s original thinking however this particular study is considered more acceptable by other researchers as it compares criminals to non-criminals.