Crime

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CRIME

Crimes are commissions of acts that are publicly proscribed or the omissions of duties that thereby make offenders liable to legal punishment. More colloquially, a crime is any grave offense, particularly against morality, and thus something reprehensible, foolish, or disgraceful. Criminal behavior is in most cases unethical; it has also been subjected to scientific study in criminology. Technological change has in turn given rise to new forms of crime.

Legal Traditions

In some legal traditions, there is a distinction between crimes and torts. The former are offenses against the state or society that are enforced by agents of the state. The latter are offenses against specific citizens, which the machinery of the state will enforce only if victims pursue their grievances in the form of a civil suit. The boundary between these categories is fluid, as discussed below with respect to homicide's historical transition from tort to crime. In keeping with ordinary parlance, both sorts of offenses are considered here.

What qualifies as crime in both its technical and informal meanings is cross-culturally variable, because laws and norms are cross-culturally variable. Premarital sex, profanity, abortion, political dissent, alcohol use, homosexuality, littering, and remaining standing in the presence of the king are all crimes in some societies but not in others. Theories of crime are thus concerned not only with the causes of criminal behavior, but with social norms and the labeling of acts. However, the fact that what is considered crime varies between times and places does not imply that it is arbitrarily constituted. There is substantial overlap in the content of criminal codes, both written and traditional, from around the world. The acts that are most consistently criminalized are concentrated in a few principal domains: certain acts of violence, certain sexual acts, certain acts of expropriation, and certain betrayals of the collectivity to rival collectivities. In general, crime entails self-interested action that violates the interests of others.

Most crimes have identifiable victims, and for criminal sanctions to be widely accepted as legitimate and just, it is important both that the victimization was undeserved and that the offender behaved with inadequate consideration of the victim's interests. Law sometimes excludes consideration of whether a victimization was deserved when deciding an offender's guilt, but this is by no means generally true—consider the breadth of cases in which "provocation" can mitigate criminal responsibility—and even where it is true, the prevalent defense practice of "putting the victim on trial" suggests that desert is a more influential consideration than a literal reading of criminal codes might suggest. As for the offender, it is not enough in Anglo-American law that a wrongful act (an actus reus) was committed; there must also have been a wrongful intent (mens rea).

The essence of the mens rea criterion is that the wrong-doer was overvaluing his own interests and undervaluing those of others. The two principal justifications for criminal sanctions both demand such a criterion. If criminal sanctions constitute just moral retribution, then assigning culpability without reference to intent is wrong. Alternatively, if criminal sanctions are justified by their social utility, then punishing outcomes without regard to intentions is unlikely to deter antisocial behavior. However, the concept of mens rea is necessarily broader than just a specifically malevolent intent, because it encompasses reckless disregard for the well-being of others, thereby permitting the criminalization of acts such as drunk driving in which the perpetrator may have intended no harm to anyone but was still excessively overvaluing his own desires relative to the interests of others.

In modern nation-states, criminal offenses are considered offenses against the state and it is the state that prosecutes them. This practice has evolved historically from the "self-help" justice characteristic of traditional societies lacking professional police or judiciary, where victims or their relatives might demand material compensation or undertake retaliatory action in response to offenses against persons or property. Blood revenge in retaliation for homicide and persistent blood feuds between lineages are cross-culturally widespread manifestations of such self-help justice. The first step toward a criminal justice system occurs when a socially recognized power, such as a king or a council of elders, rules on the validity of grievances and hence the legitimacy of retaliation. Note, however, that punitive response remains in the hands of victims, with the consequence, for example, that killing someone who lacked family and friends would not be penalized.

It is only relatively recently that nation-states have assumed the responsibility (at least in principle) of punishing violations against all citizens. In Britain, for example, crimes became crimes against the state only after the Norman conquest of 1066, and even then, a murder victim's lord or kinsman might still negotiate monetary compensation from the killer or his/her kin. However, because such agreements did not affect prosecution by the crown and resultant fines, confiscation of the offender's belongings, and corporal or capital punishment, and because William the Conqueror also treated private retaliation as a crime, there was little incentive for a killer or his kinsmen to reach an accord with the victims. These practices gradually faded away, as did any central role for victims of crime other than as witnesses.

From the king's or state's perspective, blood revenge and feuds between powerful families were disruptive of social order, jeopardized the tax base, and weakened societal defensive capabilities against external threat. Why the citizenry succumbed to the rise of state authority also seems clear. An ideal of impersonal state-administered justice has been associated historically, and presumably causally, with a decline in the solidarity of kin groups and a rise in contractual relationships and individual responsibility. Impersonal justice is widely considered essential for keeping the citizenry safe from predatory victimization, and it certainly does extend the umbrella of protection to the relatively powerless. Moreover, even those with retaliatory and deterrent capability may welcome it. In the case of homicides, for example, the powerful as well as the weak may be relieved to relinquish the duty of vengeance, but only if they can trust the machinery of state to punish their enemies on their behalf.

Criminology

Although crimes always entail conflicts of interest, not all conflictual action is criminal. It follows that a general theory of crime requires both a theory of the nature of human interests and a theory of what legitimizes some, but not other, ways of pursuing self-interest at others' expense. The academic discipline of criminology arose primarily within sociology, and most theories of crime rely primarily on sociological concepts such as inequity, power, norms, legitimacy, and social control. Underlying psychological theories, in the form of assumptions about human desires, developmental susceptibilities, and social inferences, are typically more implicit than explicit, and at an even more basic level, criminological theories almost never explicitly address the origins and elements of a human being's interests, which must be identified before one can recognize violations thereof. Arguably, this question is within the domain of evolutionary biology, which provides the only relevant scientific theory, namely that the apprehension of where one's interests reside has evolved to promote Darwinian fitness within the circumstances prevailing in ancestral environments. This level of analysis is uniquely able to shed light on such questions as why rape is considered a particularly horrific violation regardless of attendant physical trauma, why men are more likely than women to respond violently to social disadvantage, why maternally perpetrated infanticide is widely considered a less heinous offense than other homicides if indeed it is an offense at all, and why adultery is a sexually asymmetrical offense defined as sexual contact between a married woman and a man other than her husband in all premodern legal codes.

Psychological science is primarily concerned with elucidating the mental and behavioral processes characteristic of a prototypical human being: how memories are laid down and retrieved, how people make probabilistic inferences, what emotions people all share, and so forth. A secondary focus of psychological science is the elucidation of how individuals differ. Both lines of inquiry are relevant to understanding crime.

At the panhuman level of analysis, psychologists investigate basic mental processes, and attempt to explain historical, cultural, and ecological variability in behavior as contingent products of a universal psychology's responses to variable circumstances and experiences. Anger, for example, is a motivational/emotional state that can be elicited in any normal person, with characteristic effects on physiology and information processing; it plays a role both in mobilizing physiological resources for violent action and in advertising one's likelihood of engaging in such action. Note that these claims entail hypotheses about the functions of being angry. A psychologist who assumes, for example, that the principal function of the psychophysiology of anger is to mobilize the organism for effective physical assaults will look for a somewhat different set of manifestations and social controls than another who instead assumes that anger functions primarily to threaten and deter so as to limit the costs of violent confrontations. Within this universalist research tradition, the reasons why people vary in their frequency and intensity of anger are to be sought in the social and material forces impinging upon them.

Notwithstanding advances in the understanding of how this universal human response operates, both centrally and peripherally, it is also evident that individuals differ in their responses to identical circumstances and stimuli. Whether these differences can be attributed to the cumulative effects of prior experiences acting on a universal human nature, or instead require a different sort of theory of individual differences, is not always apparent. Psychiatrists have identified a personality type that is disproportionately responsible for crime, especially violent crime: the "antisocial personality." Risk factors associated with the development and maintenance of antisocial personality include poverty, maleness, early maturity, poor school performance, parental criminal history, and psychopathology, implying that antisocial personality is in large part a facultative developmental response to experiential indicators of the lesser utility of developing a more "prosocial" personality. However, there is also evidence from twin and adoption studies that antisocial personality is substantially heritable, implying that individual differences in behavior are attributable to genetic differences.

Despite a large body of research on the genetics of crime, there has been relatively little consideration of this puzzle: why does genetic variability affecting phenomena such as criminal behavior exist? The reason for asking is because natural selection generally tends to eliminate genotypes with suboptimal phenotypic consequences, and one might expect that selection would have favored a panhuman phenotypic "design" with violence and other conflict behavior under appropriate contingent control. One possible answer to the puzzle is that heritable variation in antisocial behavior is a modern phenomenon and there has been insufficient time and/or fitness cost to eliminate the variability from human populations. A more interesting possibility is that antisocial personality types have social and material advantages in populations where they are rare and can exploit the trust and friendliness of the prosocial types.

Discussions of crime are often couched in the language of pathology. This is appropriate insofar as criminal acts reflect psychoses, delusions, and brain damage, but the language of pathology can mislead. Pathologies are failures of anatomical, physiological, and psychological adaptations, as a result of mishap, senescent decline, or subversion by biotic agents, such that the adaptations are no longer achieving the functions for which they evolved. The prototype of a pathology is a fracture: A broken bone can no longer perform its function. But crimes against people and property are not clearly pathological, and the term is certainly not applicable to violence in general. Violence is often well-regulated, self-interested behavior, and there are parts of the normally-functioning human brain that are dedicated to the production of controlled violence. The misconception that human violence is pathological has perhaps been reinforced by studies linking it to disadvantaged backgrounds and environments, but these associations are by no means universal. In nonstate societies, violence has been a prominent attribute of high-status men and a contributor to their social success. In modern state societies, the welfare of most people no longer depends on their own or their allies' violent capabilities, so violence is relatively rare and relatively likely to reflect psychological pathology. Nevertheless, disproportionate numbers of violent offenders are drawn from groups who lack access to the opportunities and protective state services available to more fortunate citizens, and who therefore find themselves in "self-help" circumstances much like those experienced by most people's ancestors.

Most crime is committed by men, and more specifically by young men. Criminologists and other social scientists have offered various hypotheses to explain these facts, but most of these hypotheses invoke local aspects of particular societies and thus provide no candidate explanation for the cross-cultural generality. Such consistently gendered behavior is better understood in terms of the different selection pressures confronting humanity's male versus female ancestors. There is morphological, physiological, developmental, and psychological evidence that humans evolved under chronic circumstances in which the variance in fitness was greater among males than among females: men had both a higher ceiling on their potential progeny and a higher chance of dying childless. In human beings, as in other animals, a higher variance in reproductive success has selected for a psyche that is more inclined to see life as a competitive contest with same-sex rivals, and is more willing to accept risks in the pursuit of material and social resources, including a willingness to embrace dangerous confrontations.

Criminal offenders have been characterized as lacking self-control and the capacity to delay gratification. In effect, criminal offenders tend to value the near future more highly, relative to more distant futures, than do law-abiding citizens. Discussion of these phenomena often presupposes that steep discounting of the future is dysfunctional, but an alternative view is that the human psyche has been designed by selection to adjust the discount rate ("patience") in relation to age, sex, and social and material circumstances. In this view, a short time horizon may be a rational response to information that indicates an uncertain or low probability of surviving to reap delayed benefits, and the sort of reckless, risk-accepting mindset that facilitates criminal acts may be aroused when the expected material or social profits from safer courses of action are negligible.

Variations in rates of crime are social phenomena, affected by sociological and demographic variables such as local cultural practices and the population's age structure. Elucidating exactly how and why these variables affect criminal acts by some and not other citizens is a project requiring interdisciplinary synthesis involving all social and biological sciences.

MARGO WILSON
MARTIN DALY