Is Criminal Psychology Caused By Nature Or Nurture

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Monsters are real! They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Anyone could be a “monster” because there are no physical characteristics we can see that are unique only to them to distinguish them apart from the rest of society. The study of what makes them tick and makes them who they are is called criminal psychology. Criminal psychology studies the causes, motives and statistics surrounding criminals and their evil deeds.
Causes
The root cause of crime has been a topic of heated debate for centuries. In all fields of psychology, there has always been debate about whether psychology is caused by nature or nurture. Some believe that psychology is the product of nature (genetics), while others believe it is the product of nurture (upbringing …show more content…

Combining all of this information helps predict potential high-risk individuals early on to try to prevent them from continuing on that path as well as profile unknown suspects who have already committed a crime so as to increase the ability of the police to catch criminals who were not caught during the process of their crimes. There are different types of crime statistics that criminologists and criminal psychologists look at: general crime statistics, victimological statistics and perpetrator statistics. General crime statistics don’t look into the details of victims or perpetrators. They focus on the types of crimes and compare prevalence of certain types of crimes compared to others. They compare violent to non-violent crimes, types of weapons within violent crimes, etc. One perpetrator demographic that is included in general crime statistics is age (Brennan & Dauvergne, 2011). This is because juvenile/youth crimes are a distinct category of crime defined within the law and can be treated as a type of crime on its own. Some crime statistics instead look at perpetrators, comparing age, race, gender, etc. to extrapolate trends within data indicating correlations between certain types of perpetrators and certain types of crimes. The purpose of this is to develop a list of probable characteristics for unknown suspects. This is called criminal processing. However, being stereotypical guesswork based upon trends, it is not an exact science and is, at best, an educated guess to go on until more information or a solid lead becomes available (Snook, Eastwood, Gendreau, Goggin, & Cullen, 2007). Victimological statistics look instead at the demographics of victims. Like criminal profiling, there are

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