Criminal Behavior: Definitions, Measurement, and Theories of Offending
Criminal behavior covers how crime is defined and measured and the theories that explain why people offend. DSST items in this domain usually give a short scenario or name a theorist and ask you to match the correct explanation, so learn each theory's mechanism rather than only its label.
Defining and measuring crime
- A crime requires a prohibited act or omission (actus reus) joined with a culpable state of mind (mens rea).
- UCR/NIBRS: FBI-collected police data. The UCR's hierarchy rule counts only the most serious offense in an incident; NIBRS is incident-based and more detailed.
- NCVS: a national victimization survey that captures crimes never reported to police, the "dark figure" of crime.
- Clearance rate: share of offenses cleared by arrest or exceptional means; lower for property crime than for violent crime.
- Correlates: offending peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood; males are arrested disproportionately; race and class patterns are confounded by policing and opportunity.
Explanations of offending
- Classical/deterrence: Beccaria and Bentham - offenders choose; certainty of punishment deters more than severity.
- Biological/psychological: Lombroso's "born criminal" is discredited; modern biosocial work links temperament and neurochemistry to risk.
- Strain/anomie: Merton - society stresses success goals while blocking legitimate means; adaptations are conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion.
- Differential association: Sutherland - techniques and definitions favorable to crime are learned in intimate groups; Akers added reinforcement (social learning).
- Social control: Hirschi's bonds - attachment, commitment, involvement, belief; weak bonds free a person to offend.
- Labeling: Tannenbaum and Lemert - official reaction to primary deviance produces secondary deviance and a deviant identity.
- Conflict/feminist: law reflects power, and class and gender shape both offending and enforcement.
- Routine activities: Cohen and Felson - a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian.
Worked example
A 16-year-old starts shoplifting after older friends show him how and praise the proceeds; he is barely attached to school or family. The best explanation is differential association, because the technique and favorable definitions are learned from intimates. Weak bonds would fit Hirschi's control theory, but control explains the absence of restraint, not the learned method. Strain would require blocked conventional goals.
Traps that cost marks
Confusing strain with control theory; saying labeling causes primary deviance; treating Lombroso as current science; mixing UCR police counts with NCVS self-reports; assuming deterrence turns on severity rather than certainty.