What are the four general approaches to explaining criminal behavior? Provide a basic description of each approach.
What will be an ideal response?
Answers may vary.There are four contemporary theories that attempt to explain criminal offending. We group these theories as sociological, biological, psychological, and social-psychological. There are important distinctions among them. Crime may appear to result from an individual's experience with his or her environment. This belief is explained through sociological theories, which maintain that crime results from social or cultural forces that are external to any specific individual; exist prior to any criminal act; and emerge from social class, political, ecological, or physical structures affecting large groups of people.Alternatively, criminal behavior may appear to result from an individual's biological characteristics. Biological theories of crime stress genetic influences, neuropsychological abnormalities, and biochemical irregularities. However, there is little empirical evidence that either sociological or biological theories independently predict criminal behavior. Instead, current theories of crime incorporate a combination of environmental and biological factors to understand the causes of offending behaviors.Some psychological theories emphasize that crime results from personality attributes that are uniquely possessed, or possessed to a special degree, by the potential criminal. For example, some psychological approaches have focused on patterns of thinking-particularly with respect to recognized risk factors such as pro-criminal attitudes or certain kinds of personality disorders. Others focus on intellectual functioning or cognitive and social development.Social-psychological theories bridge the gap between the environmentalism of sociology and the individualism of psychological or biological theories. Social-psychological theories propose that crime is learned, but they differ from sociological and psychological theories in about what is learned and how it is learned.
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