IQ and CRIME

Role of intelligence in crime causation

Role that intelligence plays in crime causation

Introduction

 The study concerning intelligence in the field of research of criminology has flowed and ebbed a lot during the last century during the first 20 to 25 years of the 1900s, a number of studies and researches categorized the criminal offenders as the mentally deficient or even as feeble minded individuals. The following paper discusses in brief the significance of IQ attached to the crime rates and various researches made to identify the ratio of the causal relationship between IQ levels and crime rates.

Discussion

Around fifty studies were conducted from the year 1910 to almost 1914. These studies identified that an average of around 51 % of the institutionalized delinquents are feebleminded. However, in the year 1931, Sutherland openly challenged this ongoing view (Bradley, 2002). What he did was that he made a comparison of the IQ scores of the army draftees, such as those individuals who used to represent the general population, to the IQ scores of the adult offenders. He found out that both groups had almost the same and identical level of IQs. Therefore, he came to the conclusion that intelligence is not particularly a commonly important or crucial cause or factor of delinquency (www.jstor.org). This denunciation of IQ was very widely accepted in almost all the literature regarding criminology around the mid-1970s.

Eventually, in the year 1977, Hindelang and Hirschi reviewed around half a dozen extremely well known and renowned empirical studies. They came to the conclusion that the IQ usually predicts delinquency and criminal behaviour as much stronger as compared to the social class and race (Lassen, n.d). These are the two variables which are very prominently featured and frequently mentioned in the criminological theory. This new revisionist point of view became the reason for stimulating a much greater interest in the context of the relation between crime and IQ over the next couple of decades. In the year 1994, Murray and Herrnstein published their book 'The Bell Curve” which became the cause of a lot of controversy (Wikstrom & Treiber, n.d). In this book, they had argued and discussed, among the variety of other things that the racial differences and diversity in the rate of crimes resulted or in other words, originated from the racial differences and disparity in intelligence. Due to this reason, the book had received a very common and extensive ...