Describe the basic features of psychological explanations for crime. What are the shortcomings of this perspective?
What will be an ideal response?
Early psychological theories generally focused on behavioral conditioning or personality. The basic features of psychological explanations of crime are:
• The individual is the primary unit of analysis.
• Personality is the major motivational element in individuals.
• Crimes result from inappropriately conditioned behavior.
• Defective or abnormal mental processes may have a variety of causes.
This perspective does have some shortcomings. Psychological theories tend to be mainly individualistic, focusing on ways of treating individual offenders to overcome that person’s propensity for crime. Additionally, many psychological explanations of explanation of crime are dependent on the ability to predict future behavior based on past behavior, with allowance for the effects of therapeutic intervention—an inexact science, at best. Profiling is incredibly challenging, but the very best profilers can reliably describe an offender’s social and psychological characteristics. It is, however, very difficult to predict the future dangerousness of an individual.
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