THEORIES OF CRIME CAUSATION

Theories of Crime Causation

Theories of Crime Causation

Introduction

Recent scientific progress has dramatically influenced societal conception of the biological, neurological and environmental contributions to habitual and deviant human behavior. Behavioral scientists are already moving beyond descriptive scientific claims to predictive ones by boldly asserting causal associations between gene variants and behavioral differences in violence, aggression, and antisocial personality disorder. Discovering the causes of normal and abnormal behavior holds enormous promise. Even though, that promise has not been fully realized, the U.S. criminal justice system is not Content to wait. Lawyers are introducing behavioral genetics evidence into criminal cases with increasing frequency, yet its use in those cases is haphazard, ad hoc, and often ill conceived. Defense attorneys have introduced biological predisposition evidence to exculpate defendants, to bolster preexisting legal defenses, and to mitigate a defendant's culpability and punishment. Prosecutors have instead seized upon the double-edged potential of this evidence, using it to denigrate the defendant's character and to demonstrate a defendant's likely future dangerousness. As scientists discover increasingly specific biological contributions to violence, aggressiveness, impulsivity, and substance abuse, the intersection of these discoveries with criminal cases has the potential to reshape the criminal justice system. The United States Supreme Court recognized this historic intersection when, on September of 2006, it granted certiorari in Schriro v. Landrigan to address whether a defendant's genetic predisposition to violence is relevant to whether he should be sentenced to death for first-degree murder.

Behavioral genetics

Behavioral genetics is the scientific study of the environmental and genetic contributions to behavioral variations between individuals. Since its earliest inception, the discipline has been motivated by the belief in the biological contribution to behavioral variation among individuals in society. The pioneer of the discipline, Sir Francis Galton, posited that the biological differences between individuals contributed to their behavioral variation, and designed a sophisticated statistical system to study those differences. Galton's assumption about the biological contribution to human behavior arose from his observations that behavior is often species specific, can be reproduced in animals in successive generations, may change in response to external injuries (such as a head trauma), and similar traits continually run in families. (Richard 2003) Since the inception of the field, however, behavioral scientists have faced significant methodological obstacles, most basically the difficulty in consistently defining the scope and characteristics of a particular behavior. How, for instance, can one define intelligence? What does shyness mean? Should one describe criminal behavior as both petty thievery and murder? Even when scientists do establish a robust and consistent definition for a peculiar trait, they must also design reliable ways of measuring that trait in a manner that conforms to acceptable standards of scientific validity, including reproducibility. The measurement of traits such as aggression, violence, antisocial personality disorder, and certain mental illness, as well as the reproducibility of the results, has thus far been a prominent hurdle. Behavioral science research faces an additional complication: behaviors, which are complex traits, involve multiple genes, regulated in widely varying manners, and subject to substantial ...