DAY 21: Defining the Concept of the Existence of Criminal Behavior and Crime

THE CRIMINAL FORMULA

In explaining the birth of criminal behavior, we must consider three factors: criminal tendency (T), the total situation
(S), and the person’s mental and emotional resistance to temptation (R).

This formula was devised by David Abrahamsen, Forensic Psychologist, where:

C – Crime/criminal behavior (the Act)

T- Criminal Tendency (desire/intent)

S – Situation (opportunity)

R – Resistance (control)

This formula shows that the Criminal Tendency and Resistance may or may not result to the commission of the crime
depends on which is stronger. This means that a crime or criminal behavior exists when the person’s resistance is
insufficient to withstand the pressure of his desire or intent and the opportunity.

DAY 22: Understanding the Basic Elements of Crime

3 Basic Elements of Crime:

1. INTENT – the actor must have had a guilty mind. Basis:

“Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea”

“An act does not make a person guilty, unless the mind is guilty.”

2. KNOWLEDGE – refers to whether the person performing the act knows what he

is doing.

3. FREEDOM – it refers to whether the actor exercises freewill.

Basis: “Actus me invito factus non est meus actus”

“The act done by me against my will is not my act.”

Note: In order for a crime to happen, all these (3) elements must be present.

LEGAL CLASSIFICATIONS OF CRIME:

1. CRIME OF DOLO – it is with deliberate intent or malice

2. CRIME OF CULPA – it is with fault in the part of the person performing an act.

Elements of Dolo

1. Freedom – the actor should perform the act freely or voluntarily

2. Intelligence/knowledge – the actor knows what he is doing

3. Intent – the actor acts with intention or malice

Elements of Culpa

1. Freedom- the actor should perform the act freely or voluntarily

2. Intelligence - the actor knows what he is doing

3. Negligence/Imprudence - Negligence refers to deficiency of action. Imprudence refers to deficiency of

perception.

Reckless imprudence generally defined by our penal law as voluntary act but without malice, doing or failing to do an
act which material damage results by reason of inexcusable precaution on the part of the actor.

DAY 23: Identifying Different Views On The Causes And Control Of Criminal Behavior

3 Views on the Causes and Control of Criminal Behavior

1. Consensus View of Crime

 Criminal behavior is behavior in violation of the criminal law.

 It is not a crime unless it is prohibited by the criminal law.
 The term consensus implies general agreement among a majority of citizens on what behaviors should be
prohibited by criminal law and henceforth be viewed as crimes.
 The law defines crime, agreement exists on outlawed behavior, and law applied to all citizens equally.

2. Conflict View of Crime

 The definition of crime is controlled by wealth, power, and position and not by moral consensus or the fear of
social disruption.
 It is political concept designed to protect the power and position of the upper classes at the expense of the poor.
 The law is a tool of the ruling class, the law is used to control lower class, and crime is politically defined.

3. Interactionist View of Crime

This position holds that:

 People act according to their interpretations of reality, through which they assign meaning to things.
 They observe the way others react to it, either positively or negatively.
 They re-evaluate and interpret their own behavior according to the meaning and symbols they have learned from
others.
 Crimes are outlawed behaviors because society defines them that way and not because they are inherently evil or
immoral acts.
 To interactionists, crime has no meaning unless people react to it negatively.

DAY 24: Recognize the Personalities in the Biological Determinism

Pioneers in Criminology: Biological Determinism

1. Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615) - The founder of the school of physiognomy- which is the study of
facial features and their relation to human behavior.
2. Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) - Espoused approach a biological to crime causation; developed
phrenology – the study of the shape of the skull as a means of determining the intelligence and character.
3. Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) - Further developed phrenology
4. Charles Caldwell (1772-1853) - A physician who searched for evidence that brain tissue and cells regulate
human behavior.
5. Johann Kaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832) - He espoused biological approach; continued studies of
phrenology.
6. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) - Formulated theory of evolution, which changed explanations of human
behavior.
 7. Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) - Saw determinism as explanatory factor in criminal behavior; posited the
“born criminal”; Father of Modern Criminology
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) - Saw determinism as explanatory factor in criminal behavior; posited the
“born criminal”; Father of Modern Criminology.
8. Richard Dugdale (1841-1883) - Related criminal behavior to inherited traits (Juke Family).
9. Raffaele Garofalo (1851-1934) - Traced roots of criminal behavior to “moral anomalies” rather than
physical characteristics.
10. Enrico Ferri (1856-1929) - Produced first penal code based on positivist principles; replaced moral
responsibility with social accountability.
11. Ernest Hooten (1887-1954) - Related criminality to hereditary inferiority.
12. Ernst Kretschmer (1888-1964) - Introduced the somatotype school of criminology.

DAY 25: Identifying the Biological Theories of Crime

DAY 26:

Pioneers in Criminology: a Chronology

Adolphe Quetelet - 1796 – 1874 Belgian - Was one of the first to repudiate classical freewill doctrine, studied social
determinants of behavior.

Auguste Comte - 1798 – 1857 French - Brought modern scientific methods from physical to social sciences.
Andre–Michel Guerry - 1802 – 1866 French - Was one of the first to repudiate free-will doctrine; related crime
statistics to social factors.

Gabriel Tarde - 1843 – 1904 French - Explained crime as learned behavior.

Emile Durkheim - 1858 – 1917 French - Was one of the founders of sociology; developed theory of anomie and idea
that crime is normal in all societies.

Charles Buckman Goring - 1870 – 1919 British - Used empirical research to refute Lombroso’s theory

of criminal types.

Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck- 1896 – 1980 ,1898 – 1972 American - Espoused primarily social causes of
delinquency, but also psychological and biological explanation.

DAY 27

Sociological Theories of Crime

1. Differential Association Theory EDWIN SUTHERLAND

 Sutherland's Differential Association Theory suggests that people commit crime by learning in a social context
through their interactions with others and communication with them.
 He believed criminal behavior is learned by interaction with others, and this includes learning the techniques of
committing the crime, and the motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes for committing it .

2. Social Bond Theory TRAVIS HIRSCHI

 Claimed that criminality results from commitment to the major social institutions (family, peers and school); lack
of such commitment allows them to exercise antisocial behavioral choices.

ELEMENTS:

1. Attachment
2. Involvement
3. Commitment
4. Belief

3. Social Disorganization Theory CLIFFORD SHAW & HENRY MCKAY

 These scholars found out that criminality rates were high in what they called transitional neighborhoods.
 TRANSITIONAL NEIGHBORHOODS- areas that are changed from affluence to decay.
 They claimed that areas continually hurt by poverty and long-term unemployment also experience social
disorganization

4. Anomie Theory DAVID EMILE DURKHEIM

 “A” means without and “nomo” or “nomos” means law.

 ANOMIE – Means without law or the breakdown of social order as a result of loss of standard and values.
 NORMLESSNESS – produced by rapidly shifting moral values.

5. Strain Theory ROBERT KING MERTON

Holds that crime is a function of the conflict between the goals people have and the means they can use to legally
obtain them.

Consequently, they feel anger, frustration and resentment, which is referred to as STRAIN.
6. Relative Deprivation Theory JUDITH BLAU AND PETER BLAU

 Condition that exists when people of wealth and poverty live in close proximity to one another; the relatively
deprived are apt to have feelings of anger and hostility, which may produce criminality.
 Sharp divisions between rich and poor create an atmosphere of envy and mistrust.

7. General Strain Theory ROBERT AGNEW

Agnew suggests that criminality is the direct result of negative affective states – the anger, frustration, depression,
disappointment and other adverse emotions that derive from strain.

VARIOUS SOURCES OF STRAIN:

 Strain caused by the failure to achieve positively valued goals.

 Strain caused by the disjunction of expectations and achievements.
 Strain as the removal of positively valued stimuli from the individual.
 Strain as the presentation of negative stimuli.

8. Differential Opportunity Theory RICHARD CLOWARD & LLOYD OHLIN

 People in all strata of society share the same success and goals but that those in lower class have limited
means of achieving them.

9. Concentric Zone Theory ERNEST BURGESS AND ROBERT EZRA PARK

 When cities are fully grown; the community will take into the form of five concentric rings and criminality
will be concentrated on the inner center.

10. Learning Theory ALBERT BANDURA

 People are not actually born to act violently but they learned to be aggressive to their life experiences.
 Asserts that criminality is learned through close relationships with others; asserts that children are born
“good” and learn to be “bad” from others.

ELEMENTS: Family, environment, mass media

11. Containment Theory WALTER RECKLESS

 Assumed that in every individual there is a containing internal psychological and protective external social
structure both of which provides defense and insulation against criminality.

12. Drift Theory DAVID MATZA and GRESHAM SYKES

 Suggest that delinquents hold values similar to those law abiding citizens but they learn techniques that enable
them to neutralize those values and drift back and forth between legitimate and delinquent behavior.
 Sykes and Matza suggest that a person develop a distinct set of justifications for their behavior when it
violates accepted social rules and norms. These neutralization techniques allow a person to drift away from
the rules of the normative society and participate in criminal behavior.
1. Denial of the Victim – he has it coming, she talked back, and he has a bad attitude.
2. Denial of Responsibility – they made me do it, I don’t have a choice, and it’s either me or him.
3. Denial of Injury – they have insurance, they have too much money, what’s one CD to a big store.
4. Appeal to Higher Loyalties – I have to protect my buddies, only cowards run away
5. Condemnation of the Condemners – Everyone steals, why pick on me?

13. Differential Identification Theory DANIEL GLASER

  When a person tries to emulate and model the behavior of another person having an undesirable behavior.

14. Labeling Theory HOWARD BECKER and FRANK TANNENBAUM

 Explained that society creates deviance through a system of social control agencies that designate (label)
certain individuals as delinquent, thereby stigmatizing a person and encouraging them to accept this negative
personal identity.

15. Multi-causal Factors Theory

 The cause of crime cannot be solely explained by a single theory.

16. Nurture Theory

 Argued that intelligence is not inherited and that low-IQ parents do not necessarily produce low-IQ children.

17. Social Conflict Theory

 Crime is a function of competition for limited resources and power.

DAY 28

Personalities in Psychological Determinism

1. Sigmund Freud – (1856-1939) the founder of psychological analysis, suggested that an individual’s psychological
well-being is dependent on a healthy interaction among the id, ego, and superego- the three components of human
psyche. The id consists of powerful urges and drives for gratification and satisfaction. The ego is the executive of the
personality, acting as a moderator between the superego and id. The superego acts as a moral code or conscience.
(Psychoanalytic theory)

2. Lawrence Kohlberg – pioneered Moral Developmental Theory, has found that moral reasoning develops in three
(3) phases. The pre-conventional level, children’s moral rules and moral values consist of dos and don’ts to avoid
punishment. Second is the conventional level. Here, individual believes in and have adopted the values and rules of
society. Finally, the post-conventional level, individuals examine customs and social rules according to their own
sense of universal human rights, moral principles, and duties.

3. John Bowly – studied both the need for warmth and affection from birth onward and the consequences of not
having it. He has proposed a theory of attachment with seven (7) features, namely: Specificity, Duration, Engagement
of emotion, Ontogeny (course of development), Learning, Organization, and Biological function.

4. Albert Bandura – a leading proponent of Social Learning Theory, argues that individuals learn violence and
aggression through behavioral modeling.

5. Gerald Patterson, et al – examined how aggression is learned by direct experience.

6. Ernest Burgess and Ronald Akers – combined Bandura’s psychological based learning theory with Edwin
Sutherland’s sociologically based differential association theory to produce the theory of differential association-
reinforcement.

7. Hans J. Eysenck – has been developing and refining a theory of the relationship between personality and
criminality that considers more than just individual characteristics. (Conditioning Theory)

8. Erik Erikson – (1950, 1963) proposed a psychoanalytic theory of psychosocial development comprising eight
stages from infancy to adulthood, namely: trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs.
inferiority, ego identity vs. role confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. stagnation, and ego identity vs.
despair.

DAY 29

Psychological Theories of Crime

1. Psychoanalytic Theory – attributes delinquent and criminal behavior to at least three possible causes:

 a conscience so overbearing that it arouses feelings of guilt

 a conscience so weak that it cannot control the individual’s impulses
 the need for immediate gratification

Sigmund Freud suggested that an individual psychological well-being is dependent on a healthy interaction among
the id, ego, and superego – the three components of the human psyche. The id consists of powerful urges and drives
for gratification and satisfaction. The ego is the executive of the personality, acting as a moderator between the
superego and id. The superego acts as a moral code or conscience. Freud proposed that criminality may result from
an overactive superego or conscience.

2. Moral Developmental Theory – moral reasoning develops in three phases:

1st – preconventional level – children’s moral rules and moral values consist of dos and don’ts to avoid punishment.
Ages of 9 to 11, children usually reason at this level.

2nd - conventional level – adolescents usually reason at this level. Individuals believe in and have adopted the values
and rules of society.

3rd - postconventioanal level – individuals examine customs and social rules according to their own sense of universal
human rights, moral principles and duties.

3. Theory of Attachment - studied both the need for warmth and affection from birth onward and the

consequences of not having it. He has proposed a theory of attachment with seven (7) features, namely:

a. Specificity – attachments are selective, usually directed to one or more individuals in some order of preference.

b. Duration – attachments endure and persist, sometimes throughout the life cycle.

c. Engagement of emotion – some of the most intense emotions are associated with attachment relationships.

d. Ontogeny (course of development) – children form an attachment to one primary figure in the first 9 months of
life. That principal attachment figure is the person who supplies the most social interaction of a satisfying kind.

e. Learning – though learning plays a role in the development of attachment, Bowly finds that attachments are the
products not of rewards or reinforcements, but of basic social interaction.

f. Organization – attachment behavior follows cognitive development and interpersonal maturation from birth
onward.

g. Biological function – attachment behavior has a biological function – survival. It is found in almost all species of
mammals and in birds.

4. Social Learning theory – this theory suggests that individual learn violence through behavior modeling. Children
learn how to behave by fashioning their behavior after that of others. Behavior is socially transmitted through
examples, which come primarily from the family, subculture, and the mass media.
5. Differential Association-Reinforcement theory – this theory suggests that the persistence of criminal behavior
depends on whether or not it is rewarded or punished and the most meaningful rewards and punishments are those
given by groups that are important in an individual’s life – the peer group, the family, teachers in school, and so forth.

6. Conditioning Theory – a theory refining the relationship between personality and criminality that considers more
than just individual characteristics. This theory has two (2) parts. First, Eysenck claims that all human personality may
be seen in three dimensions – psychoticism, extroversion, and neuroticism. The second part of the theory suggests that
humans develop a conscience through conditioning.

7. Psychosocial Theory – this theory comprises eight (8) stages of psychosocial development from infancy to
adulthood. During each stage, the person experiences a psychosocial crisis which could have a positive or negative
outcome for personality development.