Quotes XVI

Quotations about
CRIME and CRIMINALITY


CAN CRIME BE TRACED TO SUCH OFTEN-MOOTED PERSONALITY FEATURES AS EXTRAVERSION AND LACK-OF-CONSCIENTIOUSNESS? ARE GENETIC FACTORS INVOLVED-IN WHATEVER INTERACTION WITH THE ENVIRONMENT? AND CAN ANY THERAPEUTIC OR PREVENTIVE STEPS BE RECOMMENDED?


Crime is a compelling subject for the social scientist. It is important, widespread, and normally on the increase. It has plainly resisted the explanatory efforts of half a century of 'criminology' and allied taxpayer-funded endeavours. One big attraction of the subject is presumably that crime and criminals are practically unfamiliar to most tenured social scientists-at least until these intellectuals have their own homes burgled; but perhaps the key feature of crime for academics is that crime is a relatively 'objective' social fact.
Population problems of psychopathology, ignorance and political extremism are sometimes said to be 'in the eye of the beholder.' In so saying, these problems are thus envisaged to be products of 'labelling', reflecting the prejudices of other individuals (especially of 'experts' and officials wearing white coats or peaked caps). However, the vast majority of crime comes to light because of reports from the general public. What is a crime, what should be a crime, and what is proper punishment for a crime are actually all matters on which good agreement is found between the general public, the police and criminals themselves. The objectivity of judgments as to whether person X has committed Y number of crimes meriting punishment Z is further enhanced by having such matters tried in public courts and determined by highly experienced and well-paid judges, and by alarmingly socially representative juries. To cap it all, crime and criminal justice are under constant press scrutiny - unlike the secretive operations of social work tribunals, university examination boards and many other classificatory procedures of the welfare state. Here, then, there is little possibility of that hypothetical collusion between psychiatrists, social workers, relatives and even potential patients themselves that might indeed inflate the numbers of the 'mentally ill' or determine in some 'socially constructed' way the apparent frequency of other types of 'deviance' in particular ranks of society.
Despite such gifts to the empirical inquirer into crime, it is still far from obvious where the explanatory breakthrough for psychology and allied trades is likely to occur. The majority of crime is committed by a small percentage of males of ages 15 to 40 whose propensities are already familiar to the criminal justice system from their previous convictions. Of further assistance to investigators, drink is involved in about three-quarters of all crime. [The enormous post-1950 rise in alcohol consumption largely explains rising crime-rates-for lower taxes lead inexorably to more drinking (Spring & Buss, 1977, Nature).] Nevertheless, agreement on the importance of underlying traits of extraversion, sensation-seeking and impulsivity, or of psychoticism, hostility and aggression, has proved hard to establish to everyone's satisfaction; and whether-deriving from such partly heritable traits-criminality is of genetic and constitutional (vs social-environmental) origins has remained even more controversial. Undoubtedly crime is attributable to multiplicative 'interaction effects' between a number of variables-for that is how causation must occur for any variable that has a highly skewed distribution in the population, as crime does; but, despite much verbal support from criminologists for what was actually an early theoretical initiative of Cyril Burt (1925, The Young Delinquent), actual identification of especially critical 'interactions' remains to be accomplished.
Perhaps because of unwillingness to think in terms of criminals and delinquents being constitutionally crime-prone (till age 40, anyhow), progress in 'treatment' and prevention has been modest. Transportation, the Victorian 'silent system' and 'preventive detention' for recidivists have all been abolished; but few seem content with the arrangements that have taken their place, and the reconviction rate-itself lower than the re-offending rate-for recidivists is around 75% within three years of discharge (for young adults with more than one conviction already behind them). One way forward would be to visit the full costs of crime and criminal justice on offenders themselves and simultaneously to oblige everyone to insure against such costs-just as people must have motor vehicle insurance. As with other insurance, premiums would be individually tailored to different people, and this might focus attention on life-style alterations that could be made by particular individuals so as to keep their premiums low. Yet even such practical arrangements for charging crime more largely to criminals will appear unsympathetic to those who romanticize the criminal as involved in quasi-revolutionary protest against social injustice. By and large, 'criminologists' have moved from their 1960's position of considering criminals to need psychotherapy, through their 1970's position of seeing criminals as victims of reactionary, reductionist 'labelling', to their 1990-ish position of wanting urgent police action to help Britain's remaining Council scheme tenants against the vandalism, intimidation and racism from which-rather contrary to Class War theories-state protégés suffer at the hands of their immediate neighbours. However, the apparent insolubility of crime in Africa and the West (especially the USA) today will always tempt some to entertain 'conspiracy theories' that boldly make the criminal the real victim-of society.



For more coverage of intelligence and deviance, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.

"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern "educationalists". This short book provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.

The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn from bookshops, in April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed doctrines of 'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May 2, 1996, p. 33).

For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html

For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html






INDEX to QUOTES XVI
Page

(i) The concepts of crime and wrong-doing. 5
Relativism?

(ii) Is there a trait of 'criminality'? 7

(iii) How are crime and criminality related to personality? 11
Extraversion? Psychoticism? Age? IQ?
Attitudes and motives? 'Dual personality'?
The overall picture.

(iv) Might genetic factors play any part in criminal propensities? 23

(v) Which environmental factors
might be of causal significance? 30

(vi) Genetic-Environmental Interaction (G x E)? 35

(vii) What advice can psychologists and allied professionals
give about sentencing and about the prevention and treatment options available to the criminal justice system? 37
History. Deterrence. The Future?

(viii)The politics of crime and criminology. 44
A forthcoming consensus?




(i)The concepts of crime and wrong-doing.


Relativism?

"In those old slave-holding days, the whole community was agreed as to one thing-the awful sacredness of slaved property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime; but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, and carried with it a moral stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away.... It shows that strange thing, the conscience-that unerring monitor-can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early and stick to it."
Mark TWAIN. Cited by W.Blair & V.Fischer, Mark Twain: Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1985.

"It was only in 1917 that Margaret Sanger was given a jail sentence for disseminating birth-control information.... Yet [in 1960] an international gathering in New York paid tribute to Margaret Sanger as one of the great women of her age."
Sir Julian HUXLEY, 1962, The Eugenics Review 54.

"Dig! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, and they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach. Wild!"
Bernardine DOHRN (leader of Students for a Democratic Society),
1968, on learning of the murders by Charles Manson and his
'family'. Recorded by D.Caute, 1988, The Year of the Barricades.

"Strictly speaking, crime has no "objective reality" but is a "negotiated product of formal responses to deviant actions".
Susan J. SMITH, 1986, Crime, Space and Society.
Cambridge University Press.

"There are some moral certainties. It is wrong, for instance, in all circumstances, to torture children. But most areas of moral perplexity do not yield such simple principles."
The Archbishop of York, 1987, The Times, 24 x.

"The Bishop of Manchester [who had criticised the proposed 'Poll Tax' in Britain as 'inherently unjust'] was joined....by the President of the Baptist Union, who said that the tax was against Biblical teaching, and by the President of the Methodist Conference, who said it was 'contrary to Gospel values'."
Noel MALCOLM, 1988, The Spectator, 14 v.

"....mercifully the Church now disbelieves in Hell-otherwise we might have to contend with {the Church requiring} collective Cabinet damnation."
Rodney LEACH, 1988, letter in The Times, 31 v.

"In the 1970's and into the 1980's, the superiority of the world-view of the criminal over that of the law-abiding citizen became the stock-in-trade of the dominant New Criminology and Critical Sociology. The fate of two-year-old James Bulger, abducted [and killed] by two ten-year-old boys from the New Strand shopping centre at Bootle on 12 February 1993 caused a world-wide sensation and probably dealt the death blow to [such thinking]."
Norman DENNIS, 1993, Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family. London : Institute of Economic Affairs.

"[During 1993, in Britain,] women of eighty-four, seventy-one and eighty-three were robbed, raped, trussed up and placed in their own wardrobes to prevent them giving the alarm. In June 1992 a sixteen-year-old was convicted at Norwich of raping a woman of one hundred."
Paul JOHNSON, 1994, Wake Up, Britain!
London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson.



(ii) Is there a trait of 'criminality'?


"Official records show that juveniles who have committed one kind of delinquent act also tend to have committed other kinds."
D.P.FARRINGTON (criminologist, University of Cambridge), 1980.

"Not only did six per cent of the men [in a London research cohort] account for half of all the men's convictions, but four per cent of the families accounted for half of all the convictions of family members."
D.FARRINGTON, 1985.

"As with aggression (D.Olweus, 1979, Psychol.Bull.), the continuity of troublesome, delinquent, deviant and criminal behavior from childhood to adulthood seems striking.... Taking into account evidence about the validity of self-reported delinquency measures, the most plausible conclusion is that the continuity of [such] behavior from childhood to adulthood is real rather than artefactual."
D.P.FARRINGTON, 1986, in D.Olweus et al., Development of
Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior. Orlando : Academic.

"It is notable that persons who commit one type of offense tend also to commit other types, and that delinquency tends to be versatile rather than specialized (M.W.Klein, 1984, Brit. J. Criminology)."
D.P.FARRINGTON, 1987, in H.C.Quay, Handbook of Juvenile
Delinquency. New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"The Cambridge Study found little evidence of specialization in criminal careers, at least to age 21. The vast majority of youths convicted of violence or vandalism or drug offenses also had convictions for dishonesty.... The most sophisticated investigations of offense specialization were carried out in Philadelphia (Wolfgang, Figlio & Sellin, 1972; Thornberry & Figlio, 1978). They showed that the probability of committing the same type of crime twice in a row did not change with the number of previous offenses, and that the probability of committing any type of crime did not depend on the type of crime committed on the last occasion."
D.P.FARRINGTON, 1987, in N.Morris & M.Tonry, Crime and Justice:
An Annual Review of Research. Chicago University Press.

"In general, the best independent predictor of offending at any age [in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, involving longitudinal study of 411 working class boys] was the measure of offending at the immediately preceding age, showing considerable continuity in offending over time.... Over and above this behavioural continuity, four factors were independently important predictors:
(a) economic deprivation, including low income and poor housing;
(b) family criminality, including convicted parents and siblings;
(c) parental mishandling, including poor supervision and poor child-rearing behaviour;
(d) school failure, including low intelligence and attainment."
D.P.FARRINGTON, 1988, in W.Buikhuisen & S.A.Mednick,
Explaining Criminal Behaviour. Leiden : E.J.Brill.

"As has been repeatedly documented, criminals commit a variety of criminal acts, and specialization, even among adult offenders, is virtually non-existent {three references given}."
T.HIRSCHI & M.GOTTFREDSON, 1988, in W.Buikhuisen & S.A.Mednick, Explaining Criminal Behaviour. Leiden : E.J.Brill.

"....antisocial behaviour is highly concentrated, both in a British and a Finnish sample.... A small number of people accounted for half of all criminal convictions (5.5% of males in England; 4.1% of males and 1.2% of females in Finland)."
L.PULKINNEN, 1992, European Journal of Personality 6.





"It must be admitted that the present state of research into criminal behaviour offers some encouragement to those who oppose any attempt to construct a formal theory of criminality."
Gordon TRASLER (forensic & criminological psychologist), 1973.

"The fallacy of regarding 'crime' as a homogeneous social phenomenon which could conceivably have a unified explanation should be as plain as the naivety of seeking a single explanation of 'disease', 'poverty' or 'illiteracy'."
Professor Nigel WALKER CBE, D.Litt., LL.D., 1985.

"[In c.1985]....one third of [British] 28-year-olds had been in some sort of trouble with the police, not counting traffic offences. The vast majority go on to lead respectable and honest lives."
L.ALLISON, 1987, New Society 79, 6 ii.

"Hirschi [et al.] were correct that a general tendency towards deviance could explain the positive correlations between different deviant behaviors.... Nevertheless, a latent variable of 'general deviance' falls far short of explaining all the reliable and stable variance of the separate behaviors (criminality, alcohol use, marijuana use, other illicit drug use, dangerous driving).... [For example] marijuana use during the high school senior years had significant impact on use of other illicit drugs one or two years later."
D.W.OSGOOD et al., 1988, 'The generality of deviance in late adolescence and early adulthood'. American Sociological Review 53.




"....[eighty-seven per cent of our heroin addicts] admitted having become involved in regular criminal activity [normally shoplifting or housebreaking] some time before their first use of heroin (at a mean age of 16.3 years).... the issue of whether heroin use turns users into criminals is unclear - J.Kaplan (1983, The Hardest Drug) suggesting an alternative explanation, that criminality causes heroin use or, more precisely, that both heroin use and criminality are caused by the same thing. The case for such an association is supported not just from the current data - the majority of users reporting criminal involvement prior to heroin use - but by nearly all other investigations of heroin use and criminality, which show that the heroin user is likely to have been a criminal before using heroin, with a conviction preceding heroin use by, on average, 1.5 years."
J.R.ROBERTSON & A.B.V.BUCKNALL, 1986,
Heroin Users in a Scottish City. Final Report of Project
No.K/OPR/2/2/C688, Scottish Home & Health Department, Edinburgh.

"From regression analyses [of interviews with heroin users in Glasgow] two different patterns emerge. [There is] a general delinquent pattern, with associations between poly-drug use, theft from family cars, and disruptive behaviour. There are also independent professional criminal patterns, based on burglary or theft from strangers, each associated mainly with heroin- and occasionally cocaine-use. It is concluded that, even amongst heavy heroin users, heroin need is not the sole cause of criminal activity."
R.HAMMERSLEY & V.MORRISON, 1987, Bull.Brit.Psychol.Socy.40 (A14).

"[In our research]....the correlations among the behavioural sub-scales [of self-reported delinquency] are uniformly positive and in all but one case significant. The impression provided by these correlations that delinquency is unidimensional rather than multidimensional was confirmed by a principal components analysis of the correlation matrix. Only one principal factor was extracted, accounting for 62% of the total variance. The Theft (.92), Aggression (.90) and Vandalism (.88) scales had the highest loading on this factor; Drugs (.47) and Minor Nuisance (.51) [had] the lowest."
N.EMLER et al., 1987, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 28.

"....in both sexes there is a strong association between childhood conduct problems and adult externalizing disorders-such as antisociality and intoxicant abuse."
D.J.WEST, 1987, Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry 28. (Reviewing D.Olweus et al. (eds), Development of Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior.)

"The bulk of the findings of [our] particular study indicates that personality more often predicts changes in drug-using behaviour [in late adolescence] rather than the reverse. These results support the findings of Labouvie and McGee (1986, J. Consult. & Clin. Psychol.) who also found more evidence that personality attributes served as antecedents rather than as consequences of alcohol and drug use."
Judith A. STEIN et al., 1987, Personality & Individual Differences 8.

"As expected, strong associations were found among the various measures of deviant behavior [in a longitudinal study of 595 American adolescents]. This supports findings of strong covariation among such diverse adolescent behaviors as licit and illicit drug use, precocious sexual behavior, criminal behavior, and such deviant attitudes as low religious commitment and negative attitudes toward law abidance."
M.D.NEWCOMB & Linda M. McGEE, 1991,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61.

"....antisocial behaviour is highly concentrated, both in a British and a Finnish sample.... A small number of people accounted for half of all criminal convictions (5.5% of males in England; 4.1% of males and 1.2% of females in Finland."
L. PULKKINEN, 1992, European Journal of Personality 6, 2.

"For twenty years [after his convictions as a 16-year-old for 'lewd and libidinous practices' and assault, and at 20 for indecent assault], Robert Black avoided any further court appearances [until his final arrest in 1990, and conviction in 1994 as a serial child sex killer]. But he did collect a whole series of traffic convictions. In all, between 1983 and 1988, his varying offences brought him to the attention of courts in Scotland and England on nine separate occasions."
The Scotsman, 20 v 1994.



(iii)How are crime and criminality related to personality?


Extraversion?

"It would seem....that the absence of conscience in criminal and psychopathic persons may be due to the fact that they form conditioned responses very poorly, if at all, and even when these responses are formed, they extinguish very rapidly."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1964, Crime and Personality.
London : Routledge & Kegan Paul.

"Ronsard described [James V of Scotland] as having le regard vigoureux; James certainly possessed the cyclical high spirits and gaiety of the Stewarts -another quality which he handed on to his daughter [Mary, Queen of Scots] -and the ability to fire the imagination of his subjects, an attribute generally described in monarchs as 'possessing the common touch'. Unfortunately there is no doubt as to the reverse side of this golden coin: the evidence of the debauchery of James V is unanimous. 'Most vicious we shall call him', wrote Knox with relish, relating how he spared neither man's wife nor maiden, no more after his marriage than he did before."
Lady Antonia FRASER, 1969, Mary Queen of Scots.
London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

"Dr E. Nelson showed 'blue' films to groups of extraverts and introverts (one person at a time of course!).... It was predicted and found that extraverts showed the phenomenon of habituation during the showing of each film, from film to film, and from occasion to occasion; in other words, their erection showed progressive lessening from the peak value obtained at the beginning of the first film. Introverts did not habituate at all."
H.J.EYSENCK & G.WILSON, 1975, Know Your Own Personality.
Harmondsworth, Mddx : Penguin.

"Somebody called Charles Williams, who used to write thrillers about God and the Devil, said it was frightfully difficult to make good characters come alive on the page; they're simply more boring than the nasty ones."
Humphrey CARPENTER, 1986, The Spectator, 3 v.

"....criminality is the form of abnormality most consistently related to extraversion."
L.W.MORRIS, 1979, Extraversion and Introversion.
New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"Subjects' scores on the Extraversion scale....were inversely related to punctuality for most types of appointment."
D.JAMES & J.FLECK, 1985,
Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 38, A95.

"....as Burgess (1972) has shown, it is the combination of Neuroticism and Extraversion which according to theory is the crucial is the crucial factor in promoting antisocial conduct...."
H.J.EYSENCK & Sybil B.G. EYSENCK, 1976, Psychoticism as a
Dimension of Personality. London : Hodder & Stoughton.

"The general recipe for inexcusable acts is neither madness nor a bizarre morality, but a steady refusal to attend both to the consequences of one's actions and to the principles involved."
Mary MIDGLEY, 1986, Wickedness. London : Ark.

"The results of the present study indicate that....stable {low-emotionality} extraverts display superior electrodermal conditioning to appetitive (sexual) stimuli of high rated affective intensity {viz. pictures of nude females - all subjects were male}; while introverts display greater improvement in motor avoidance performance with accident victim stimuli of high rated affective intensity.... Our model is quite simple.... Some aspects of stimulus-preference may be predicted from personality, i.e. extraverts typically prefer arousing, appetitive stimuli, introverts find arousing aversive stimuli distressing, while others may be idiosyncratic."
T.J.PAISEY & G.L.MANGAN, 1988,
Personality & Individual Differences 9.

"[The present] studies provide direct evidence that individual differences in impulsivity are associated with [faster response times and higher error rates in all but the final, response-execution stage of information-processing]."
S.J.DICKMAN & D.E.MEYER, 1988,
Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 54.

"[Our results, comparing 86 prisoners with 343 non-imprisoned adult males in Finland] lend support to the assumption that criminals are sensation-seekers, especially in the 'disinhibition' and 'experience-'seeking' ways. Criminals like to have fun and try various drugs. They are eager to get new experiences."
Jaana HAAPASALO, 1990, Personality & Individual Differences 11.

"....there has been a failure to demonstrate consistent differences between introverts and extraverts with either EEG measures or measures of skin conductance level under relaxed, resting conditions.... [However] the electrodermal research that has manipulated tonic skin conductance level with stimulant agents such as caffeine is particularly impressive. This work demonstrates predictable interactive effects of arousal level and response to stimulation and, in general, endorses the view that introverts are more sensitive to stimulation than extraverts."
R.M.STELMACK & R.G.GEEN, 1992, in A.Gale & M.W.Eysenck, A
Handbook of Individual Differences: Biological Perspectives.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.

"The P3(00) event-related brain potential (ERP) [has been] used to study the development of alcoholism by comparing [young] males who have a positive family history of alcoholism with control subjects.... Meta-analysis [of about 20 studies indicates] that, overall, smaller P3 amplitudes were obtained.... [such P3 amplitudes are probably associated with] lower scores on neuropsychological tests of cognitive abilities related to [allocation of attentional resources when immediate memory is updated....and to DSM III Axis II disorders (i.e. personality features [e.g. being categorized as extremely introverted or extraverted])."
J.POLLICH et al., 1994, Psychological Bulletin 115.




Psychoticism / hostility / aggression? {See also Quotes XV, XVIII.}

"Offenders tend to be impulsive and anxious - or, in Eysenck's terms, generally neurotic; they have lowered scores on measures of verbal intelligence; and the more aggressively psychopathic of them might be thought to have a perceptual-cognitive style of structuring experience that helps them resist ordinary environmental pressures. This may result in what Eysenck has measured as "psychotic" traits of a paranoid kind."
C.R.BRAND, 1973, New Society, 18 i.

"....Psychoticism may be simply the obverse of super-ego mentality."
H.J.EYSENCK & Sybil B.G. EYSENCK, 1976, Psychoticism.
London : Hodder & Stoughton.

"Psychoticism is also called 'tough-mindedness', reflecting unusual ways of thinking, asocial attitudes, cruelty, indifference to the feelings of others, and some paranoia."
Sybil B.G. EYSENCK & M.ZUCKERMAN, 1978,
British Journal of Psychology 69.

"Aggressive Hostility and Delinquency [as reported via the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory] were....negatively related to peer-rated Agreeableness. [Using] the standard M.M.P.I. scales, both self-reported and peer-rated Agreeableness are significantly inversely related to the [M.M.P.I.] Psychopathic Deviate and Mania scales."
P.T.COSTA & R.R.McCRAE, 1988/9, in A.Siegman & T.M.Dembroski,
In Search of Coronary-Prone Behavior.
Hillsdale, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

"....recently we completed a 22-year longitudinal study in New York State that confirmed the predictability of adult aggression from childhood aggression. In this comprehensive, 632 children were tested and interviewed at age 8, and again at age 30. Many were also interviewed at age 19. Using structural modelling we have estimated the stability of aggression from these data to be about .46 over 22 years.... Moreover, early childhood aggression in school significantly predicted adult criminality and a variety of other adult antisocial behaviours."
L.R.HUESMANN & L.D.ERON, 1989,
European Journal of Personality 3.

"....in Norwich Crown Court....a youth was sentenced to nine years in a young offenders' institution for raping a 100-year-old woman.... The 100-year-old-victim was resting after a day out with relatives and reflecting on what a wonderful day it had been when she became aware that Laurence McI...., a 16-year-old from Great Yarmouth, had climbed through her tiny bathroom window. He threatened to kill her and raped her using considerable force and inflicting serious injuries. In his defence, the beast....claimed only that he had no idea she was as old as she turned out to be. Under the circumstances, victim forgave the teenager, saying that he appeared to have 'some good in him'."
Auberon WAUGH, 1992, The Oldie, 26 vi.



Age?

"....many erstwhile offenders find little difficulty in breaking out of the 'vicious circle' of repeated convictions once they reach the age of 40."
C.R.BRAND, 1973, New Society, 18 i.

"We must explain not why young people commit delinquent acts, but why they stop doing so."
L.WALDEGRAVE, 1980, to the Council of Europe.

"The traditional explanation regards the decline in crime with age as evidence of "maturational reform". This explanation suggests that there are changes in behavior that accompany maturity along with such life-course events as entering the labor force, marrying, having children, and the like. Unfortunately, competent research suggests that these events are unable to explain the decline in crime with age because crime declines with age whether or not these events occur."
T.HIRSCHI & M.GOTTFREDSON, 1988, in W.Buikhuisen & S.A.Mednick, Explaining Criminal Behaviour. Leiden : E.J.Brill.




IQ?

"There were two children in the family: a girl of ten I will call Maria, and Susie, who was three. The police had raided the home in the early hours of the morning and found pornographic pictures of Maria with a number of adult males. This child had been prostituted by her parents since her earliest day. The parents and several other men were subsequently brought to trial and imprisoned. How does anyone digest the emotional impact of this? The social worker expressed one reaction that many of us [at the Tavistock Clinic, London] felt: the parents should be locked up and the keys thrown away.... As time went on {however}, our anger towards the parents was modified by learning of their extreme and pathetic childishness. The mother was severely retarded, and unable to understand the damage that she had done. The father, also intellectually limited, even seemed to enjoy the notice everyone was taking of him."
Margaret HUNTER, 1986, Journal of Child Psychology 12.

"Substantially lower IQ alone, but especially in combination with risk-zone factors such as impoverished communities, race, socially deprived families, parental criminality, parental occupation and-most of all-school problems, seem to characterize a great many juvenile delinquents studied longitudinally during the last two decades. Low IQ seems to be a factor in criminality even after matching for socio-economic status."
Howard REICHEL, 1987,
The Intelligence - Criminality Relationship: A Critical Review.
Dept Psychology, Univ. Stockholm : Supplement Series, No.66.

"In this article I demonstrate that black-white differences in rates of juvenile delinquency are explained successfully by a model based on IQ and that familiar socio-economic variables do not perform as well as IQ in that model.... It is time to consider the black-white IQ difference seriously when confronting the problem of crime in American society."
R.A.GORDON, 1987, International Journal of Sociology & Social Policy 7.

"Danish longitudinal data indicated there was a significant though weak [r = .29] relationship between teacher ratings of attention problems in males at ages 10-13 and their cumulative arrest frequency eight years later. However, the child's IQ [r .64 with attention problems, r -.32 with arrests] and maternal reports of the father's problems controlling alcohol intake moderated this relationship: once the variance in antisocial behaviour due to these factors was removed, childhood attention problems did not account for any additional variance."
J.L.WALLANDER, 1988,
Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry 29.

"It was predominantly school children scoring between [IQ 70 and IQ 100] on Full Scale intelligence tests who were responsible for the bulk (74%) of registered crimes"A study of African-American boys in New York found that IQ at age 7 was predictive of conduct disorder at 17 (Schonfeld et al., 1988, Child Development 59). The alternative hypotheses that early aggression causes later IQ deficiency and that third variables such as parental psychopathology and social disadvantage were responsible for the IQ - conduct disorder link were not supported."
H.YOSHIKAWA, 1994, Psychological Bulletin 115. in our cohort [of 518





Attitudes & motives?

"Low intrinsic religiousness. I have studied this variable and found a consistent and extremely significant difference in religiousness between non-delinquent and delinquent boys. Of all the 55 factors we studied studied, this was the most discriminating one."
J.B.CORTES, 1982, in W.R.Gove & G.R.Carpenter, The Fundamental
Connection between Nature and Nurture. Lexington Books.

"....there has never been any general demonstration that the 'authoritarian' is a noteworthy acceptor of authority in any very interesting sense.... The Berkeley researchers themselves established that the highest scores for authoritarianism were obtained by the inmates of Federal penitentiaries."
C.R.BRAND, 1981, in R.Lynn, Dimensions of Personality.
Oxford : Pergamon.

"That is the trouble with society today. - People are motivated by greed and there are no moral values at all."
'The Yorkshire Ripper', 1983.

"A great deal of evil is caused by quiet, respectable, unagressive motives like sloth, fear, avarice and greed."
Mary MIDGLEY, 1984, Wickedness. London : Ark.

"It is a phenomenon (often noticed by sociologists) of self-destructive and antisocial behaviour that Catholics tend to be heavily over-represented in the statistics; and this is true both of drink-abuse itself and of drink-related crime. The reason is not clear, and some of the most obvious explanations do not stand up. It has even been suggested that fewer Catholics in despair commit suicide, and so more of them stay alive to engage in less direct self-destruction.... Semi-official Catholic toleration, even encouragement, of regular drinking must be a major contributing factor."
Clifford LONGLEY (Religious Affairs Correspondent), 1987,
'Catholics confront the demon drink'. The Times, 23 ii.

"The comments of one man exemplify the difficulty one can expect with the more extreme psychopathic clients. When this man was known to me, he was incarcerated on a drug smuggling conviction after having served time on several previous occasions. He was about to be tried on the charge of first-degree murder and kidnapping. He spoke about his crimes matter-of-factly. He jested at the idea that he could receive the death penalty if convicted of the new charge. Finally, with a look of certainty on his face, the sound of defiance in his voice, and the expression of challenge in his words, he stated: "They can do what they want with me, but they'll never break me. I'll never surrender to the system." I expect he never will."
Dennis M. DOREN, 1987, Understanding and Treating the Psychopath.
New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"I used to steal a lot when I was younger so my parents would have to talk to me and I could tell them what I thought of them. I think of all my family as strangers because there is nothing between any of us."
An adolescent runaway in London, 1989, speaking to
T.MILES, The Observer (Review), 8 x.




'Dual personality'? {See also Quotes VI.}

"It was not the real me."
'The Fox' (Bedfordshire felon, convicted in 1985 of six rapes and
seven burglaries).

"Depicted variously as charming, vicious and a good organization man, Carlos Lender [sentenced to life imprisonment plus 150 years] was described by....the U.S. attorney as the brains behind the distribution of cartel cocaine. He is also said to have threatened that any judge or jury that executed him would be executed.... "Make love, not war", he would glibly tell journalists. Then he would switch to another of his idols-Hitler."
The Times, 20 v 1988.

"To his family, Duncan B. had all the qualities they wanted in a son. He loved sports and was generous and kind-hearted, they said. But yesterday an inquest at Preston, Lancashire, was told that the popular college student, aged 17, killed himself with a shotgun after a bungled supermarket raild in which shots were fired and a policeman injured. Police who called at his home....found the youth slumped across a bed.
His father....said his son showed no signs of worry, and there was no reason to suspect he was in trouble.... "He made mistakes of judgement, particularly in his choice of friends and in his alleged actions on that fateful night. But what a dreadful price to pay.""
The Times, 10 ix 1988.




The overall picture.

"Your counsel has said that psychiatric reports have disclosed personality disorders. I don't know what that means other than that you do things which ordinary people do not."
Lord WHEATLEY (Scottish High Court Judge, dispensing a ten-year
prison sentence in Glasgow). Daily Telegraph, 19 xi l974.

"Mercury was not only the god of merchants but also of thieves. Thief and merchant are created from the same fabric."
S.HURWITZ & K.O.CHRISTIANSEN, 1983, Criminology.
London : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

"....children with persistent conduct disorders come most often from families notable for their disharmony and quarrelling, for an absence of affection, and for inconsistent discipline which is ineffective and eilther extremelyu severe or lax."
Martin HERBERT, 1987, Conduct Disorders of Childhood
and Adolescence, 2nd edn. Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.

"The data consistently suggest that parenting practices and family interaction are associated wilth the development of antisocial and delinquent behavior.... Parents of recidivist offenders, both during childhood and concurrently with the actual delinquent behavior, are less skilled in discouraging antisocial behavior and in encouraging skilled behavior than parents of one-time offenders [eight references given].
[However,] neither longitudinal nor cross-sectional designs unambiguously establish the causal nature of family and parenting variables in the development of delinquent behavior. The association of parenting and family variables with delinquency may simply reflect their prior association with some third (causative) variable.... Inept parenting and delinquency may both be the result of residing in high-stress, poor, high-crime environments.... Another possibility is that genetic rather than environmental (family) variables are important. In this case, the inept family management practices of the parents and the antisocial behavior of the child are expressions of a genetically shared predisposition which, under stress, is evident in the parents and the child."
J.SNYDER & G.PATTERSON, 1987, in H.C.Quay, Handbook of Juvenile Delinquency. New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"....a general factor has emerged in some studies which is defined by traits such as egocentricity, impulsivity, hostility, and lack of warmth, and which has been labelled as psychopathy or sociopathy (Presly & Walton, 1973; Quay, 1978; Tyrer & Alexander, 1979; Hare, 1980; Blackburn & Maybury, 1985). While this may appear to validate the concept of psychopathic personality, it is a dimension of personality, not {merely} social deviance."
R.BLACKBURN, 1988, 'Moral judgments and personality disorders'.
British Journal of Psychiatry 153.

"[My results, from a survey of 275 male prisoners in Georgia, USA] support the contention that criminal dangerousness can be predicted from antisocial personality combined wilth low intelligence.... [However} this index cannot be expected to serve as a basis for individual prediction with anything approaching satisfactory results."
A.B.HEILBRON, Jr, 1990, Journal of Personality Assessment 54.

"[We studied] a group of 199 male subjects (age range 32 - 40) [of whom 133 had committed one or more 'early crimes', during the age period of 11 - 14 years].... The early 'high criminal'[>1 crime] and 'low criminal' [1 crime] groups had significantly lower socialization scores and higher Psychopathy Check List impulsivity (measured in adulthood).... [According to Terman Merrill testing at 11 - 14] there was a significant difference between the controls and the two crime groups on intelligence. [Mean IQ's were: control group 113, 'low criminal' 106 and 'high criminal' 102.].... the present high early 'criminal activity' group subjects obtained significantly higher scores than the early 'low criminal activity' and the control groups on the Detachment scale. On [Eysenck's] Psychoticism scale there were....no differences between {the three groups}."
Britt AF KLINTEBERG, Kristina HUMBLE & Daisy SCHALLING, 1992,
'Personality and psychopathy of males with a history of early
criminal behaviour'. European Journal of Psychology 6.

"This study investigates male and female delinquent and non-delinquent samples [matched for demographic area] in the city of Valencia.... Neuroticism is found to be the best predictor for discriminating female delinquents from non-delinquents; while [low] intelligence and [high] 'criminal propensity' [Allsopp & Feldman, 1975 - using the Junior Eysenck Personality Inventory] are good predictors at discriminating both male and female delinquents... For both sexes, delinquents are more dogmatic [Diaz & Baguena, 1989, Delinquency 1].
Amelia DAZ et al., 1994, Personality & Individual Differences 16.

"[Al] Capone had no more vicious a purpose than to have a good time (he liked broads and gambling, though he kept out of the bull market of the Twenties because, he said, the stock market was 'a racket') and eventually to retire to Miami. The Miami mob fingered him because they thought he was muscling in, but they might have done better to play cards with him. He was as addictive a gambler as he was inept. Humbled in Alcatraz and infantilised by the syphilis from which penicillin came too late to deliver him, he was dead before he was pensionable. His myth has made more money for film-makers than ever stuck in the hands of his pathetically petit bourgeois family...."
Frederic RAPHAEL, 1993, The Spectator, 22 v.
Reviewing R.J.Schoenberg, Mr Capone, Robson.

"I'm an alcoholic and I tended [when homeless] to be in the company, which was very violent at times.... I think you're so angry with yourself for being in that situation and you're carrying a lot of anger about with you.... I've seen people getting hit with bottles, glasses, baseball bats, all kinds of violence. I remember one occasion I was in a bar and I'd actually been staying with a cousin of mine for about two or three days, so I was reasonably clean and tidy and well-dressed, but I had a bright yellow jersey on. And I went into a bar and ordered a drink and a guy said to me, "I have a budgie that colour", and I never thought much of that. And then he says, "But my budgie's better built than you." The guy was with two or three pals, and I waited till they were playing pool and I hit the guy with a tumbler, a glass, well, looking back on it, it was just ridiculous, it was so unnecessary - a total over-reaction, but I had no feelings of sorrow or remorse about it, it was just very matter-of-fact. The frightening thing about the violence is that it becomes matter-of-fact, it just becomes a nightly occurrence." Stuart McDONALD, 1993, 'You want somebody else to suffer'.
New Statesman & Society, 2 iv.

"The findings {of a U.K. survey, N = 20,000} link risky sex lives with smoking and drinking. Smokers and drinkers, regardless of age, sex, and social class, have sex more often and with more partners than non-smokers and teetotallers."
British Medical Journal (News), 29 i 1994.

"[Napoleon Chagnon studied the Venezuelan Yanomamö over twenty years and] proves beyond doubt that men who kill other men (unokais) have more wives, independent of their social standing, than men who do not become murderers. Among the Yanomamö, war and violence are both primarily about sex."
Matt RIDLEY, 1994, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. Harmondsworth, UK : Penguin.

"[In 115 twin pairs] correlations between testosterone and the sensation-seeking scales were found to range from .17 to .19 for men and women."
J.A.HARRIS, P.A.VERNON & D.I.BOOMSMA, 1995, from the abstract of an address to International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, meeting in Warsaw.







"It takes all sorts of people to make an underworld."
DON MARQUIS.

"....although the mass killer often may appear cold and show no remorse, and even deny responsibility for his crime, serious mental illness or psychosis is rarely present.... in background, in personality, and even in appearance, the mass murderer is extraordinarily ordinary."
J.LEVIN & J.FOX, 1985, Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace.
New York : Plenum.

"Earlier reviews of the personality and delinquency literature have generally concluded that the data are inconclusive, at best, and that the combined results of several decades of research have failed to demonstrate systematic associations between personality variables and delinquent behaviour {4 references given}. With few exceptions, the research of the past twenty years reviewed here does little to change these conclusions."
J.ARBUTHNOT & D.A.GORDON, 1987, in H.C.Quay,
Handbook of Juvenile Delinquency. New York : Wiley DePublisher.


(iv) Might genetic factors play any part in criminal propensities?
{See also Quotes V and XXIV re 'nature/nurture' arguments and human group differences.}


"From the head of {one American} family, Max Jukes, a great drunkard, descended, in seventy-five years, 200 thieves and murderers, 280 invalids attacked by blindness, idiocy or consumption, 90 prostitutes and 300 children who died prematurely. The various members of this family cost the state more than a million dollars."
Cesare LOMBROSO, 1891, The Man of Genius.

"Although Lange's notion (c. 1930) of criminal destiny must now be seen as a dramatic overstatement, there is probably a kernel of truth underlying his speculations: we have to conclude that genetic influences are probably among those factors which confer a liability to the more common-or-garden transgressions of the law."
Editorial in The Lancet, i 1983.

"The strong genetic component in criminality has already been proven up to the hilt."
R.B.CATTELL, 1984, Eugenics Bulletin.

"We conclude that some factor transmitted by criminal parents increases the likelihood that their children will engage in criminal behaviour."
S.A.MEDNICK et al., 1984, Science 224, 25 v.

"S.A.Mednick and his associates (1984, Science 224) studied some 14,000 adopted children and obtained the criminal records of their natural parents, their adoptive parents, and of the children themselves. The results showed that the adoptive children were more llikely to become criminals when their natural parents had been criminals; and they resembled their natural parents more closely than their adoptive parents in this regard. This effect can only have been due to hereditary transmission of criminal propensities."
Richard LYNN, 1988, in D.Anderson, Full Circle.
London : Social Affairs Unit.

"[In our study of 14,427 adoptions in Denmark] male adoptees whose biological fathers are chronic offenders comprise 1% of the male cohort; they are responsible for over 30% of the convictions in the cohort."
W.BUIKHUISEN & S.A.MEDNICK, 1988, in their book
Explaining Criminal Behaviour. Leiden : E.J.Brill.

"The more 'K' one is, the more one is {ex hypothesi} likely to be from a smaller-sized family, with a greater spacing of births, a lower incidence of dizygotic twinning, and more intensive parental care. Moreover, one will tend to be more intelligent, altruistic, law-abiding, behaviourally restrained, maturationally delayed, lower in sex drive, and longer lived.... Asians are hypothesized to be more K than Europeans, who, in turn, are hypothesized to be more K than Africans."
J.P.RUSHTON, 1985, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 8.

"[Gottesman et al., 1983] found median identical twin and fraternal twin concordance rates for adult criminality of 61% and 18% respectively, consistent with a genetic component for adult criminality."
L.WILLERMAN et al., 1986,
Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry 27.

"Broadly speaking, the methods (strategies) used by gene sets (collections of genes within an organism) to fulfil their purpose has been shown to fall along an r/K continuum. At the r end of the continuum are life forms that devote a very high proportion of their time and energy to leaving as many new 'gene carriers' (offspring) in the next generation as possible throughout what are typically short lifetimes.... virtually all of the traits used to identify r-selection were [found to be] more typical of persons who engage in serious, victimful, criminal behavior with the highest probabilities and frequencies. Specifically, serious victimful criminal behavior (property and, especially, violent offences) appears to be associated with:
(a) large family size;
(b) prematurity and low birth weight;
(c) early sexual activity;
(d) greater promiscuity;
(e) broken homes;
(f) child neglect and abuse; and
(g) short life expectancy.
The r/K concept was also shown to be of apparent help in explaining why race and socio-economic status (SES) are related to serious victimful criminal behavior.... Regarding the inference that genetic factors account for some of the variation in propensities towards serious victimful criminal behavior, supportive evidence is strong {fourteen references cited}."
Lee ELLIS (sociologist at State University of North Dakota, at Minot),
1988, 'Criminal behavior and r/K selection: an extension of gene-based evolutionary theory'. Personality and Individual Differences 9.

"....low monoamine oxidase activity appears to be associated with restless and uninhibited behaviour patterns, and may reflect some of the mediating effects of serotonin and sex hormones on criminal behaviour. In addition, lower MAO activity is more characteristic of males than of females, of blacks than of whites, and tends to be most pronounced during the second and third decades of life, suggesting that this enzyme may help to explain why certain demographic variables have been persistently associated with criminality."
Lee ELLIS, 1989,
Personality & Individual Differences 10 (Conference Abstract).

"I suggest that a determinant of (male) heterosexual promiscuity is high androgen levels. Schiari et al. (1988, Arch.Gen.Psychiat.45) noted that high testosterone levels in men are associated with dissatisfaction with marriage, many sexual partners and early age at first intercourse. High testosterone levels in men also seem associated with aggression (Christiansen & Knussman, 1987, Hormmonal Behav. 21) and impetuosity (Zumoff et al., 1984, Psychosomatic Medicine 46)."
W.H.JAMES, 1990, Journal of Biosocial Science 22.

"The present finding of a relationship [-.37] between childhood aggressiveness and adult self-reported psychopathy-related traits [especially impulsivity] is in line with a series of studies, both animal and human, showing an involvement of serotonergic mechanisms in aggressive behaviour {4 references given}."
B.A.KLINTEBERG, Daisy SCHALLING & D.MAGNUSSON, 1990,
European Journal of Personality 4.






"Treason is not inherited, my lord."
'Rosalind', in SHAKESPEARE's As You Like It.

"As often in physical disorders, so in moral, contagion is too often mistaken for heredity."
Cyril BURT, 1925, The Young Delinquent. London University Press.

"It is certainly great nonsense to speak of criminal and non-criminal races. Such things do not exist and are not even to be imagined."
Willem BONGER, 1943, Race and Crime.
New York : Patterson Smith, 1969.

"....the notions that criminal tendencies are innate and that personality traits are transmitted through the blood have been rejected by modern researchers."
R.L.KELLOGG, 1982, Psychology Today.

"Everything we know about criminal behaviour indicates that it is learned."
M.E.WOLFGANG, 1975, in W.S.Field & W.A.Sweet, Neural Bases of
Violence and Aggression. St Louis, Missouri : Green.

"Our experience [following up boys having an extra Y chromosome] gives no support to the thesis that the XYY karyotype predisposes to violent or anti-social behaviour in childhood, but reveals an unexpected shift towards a depressive reaction to environmental stress."
Shirley RATCLIFFE & M.FIELD, 1982,
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

"[Gottesman et al.(1983) found that] for juvenile delinquency the MZ and DZ concordance rates were 82% and 75% [respectively]. The high DZ concordance rate for juvenile delinquency (exceeding the degree of gene overlap) implicates a much stronger effect of common environment and a negligible effect of heredity. The large 'common environment' effect may be biological and/or social in origin. Elevated rates of shared biological insults during pregnancy, for example, could explain the concordance."
L.WILLERMAN et al., 1986,
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 27.

"There is presently great vagueness as to the characteristics being transmitted genetically, and there is no reliable evidence implicating abnormal chromosome complements, or damage or malformation, with increased risk of crime in general, or of violent crime in particular.
Attempts to demonstrate that delinquents (or, in more general terms, offenders) are poor learners, or are resistant to conditioning, have not been successful."
Gordon TRASLER, 1987, in H.C.Quay,
Handbook of Juvenile Delinquency. New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"Some....studies suggest a familial link between criminality and schizophrenia, but there are many negative results. [Other] possibilities are:
(1)No genetic relationship exists. Anti-social behaviour in the relatives of schizophrenics is due to the environmental stress of familial relatedness.
(2)The apparent association between criminality and schizophrenia is a function of cross-assortative mating of schizophrenics with criminals."
Leigh SILVERTON, 1988, 'The genetifc relationship between
antisocial behaviour and schizophrenia: a review of the
literature'. In W.Buikhuisen & S.A.Mednick,
Explaining Criminal Behaviour. Leiden : E.J.Brill.

"Ethnic minorities form only four per cent of Britain's population, but make up fourteen per cent of the total prison population (a disparity, incidentally, which is more or less reproduced for native Indians in Canada, blacks in the United States, and Aborigines in Australia). Could it be because these people are inherently more criminal or uncivilised, or that (the benign view) they just find it inexplicably hard to cope with modern life? No, says a new report - 'Race and Criminal Justice', published by the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. The causes lie in the disturbing level of discrimination and institutionalised racism in the criminal justice system."
Editorial, New Statesman & Society, 3 iii 1989.

"....even if the extra Y has now gone the way of physiognomy and sin, predestination still lies at the heart of the argument.... [R.J.Herrnstein & J.Q.Wilson's (1985)] Crime and Human Nature....focused on the porposition that violent crime in the US is the prerogative of the poor and black and that its origins lie in failure in their biological constitution. Now there are many obvious objections to such a proposal. Some point to the fact that these discussions always seem to focus on working-class crime; no one seems to study the heritability of the tendency to commit business fraud, or the biochemical correlates of wife-beating among middle-class men. Others worry about the complex and sometimes contradictory web of meanings involved in the very concept of violence.... Among child psychologists the key word has become "temperament". This nebulous property is, they claim, to a significant degree heritable.... [Modern genetic research on crime] is framed within a reductionist and determinist paradigm which seeks the causes of social problems in individual biology, fostered by a political philosophy-on both sides of the Atlantic-which rejoices in the privileges which come with inequalities in wealth and power and rejects steps to diminish them.... Can it really be that there is something unique about the genotype of the US population which so dramatically predisposes it to violence?"
Steven ROSE, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 10 ii.

"Twin studies in Nazi Germany confidently placed the heritability of criminality at between sixty and seventy per cent, and that became part of the rationale for sterilizing criminals."
Lawrence WRIGHT, 1995, 'Double mystery.'
New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.





"According to American, Danish and Swedish adoption studies, children who were adopted in infancy were at greater risk for criminal convictions if their biological parents had been convicted than if their adoptive parents had been (Mednick et al., 1988, Aggressive Behaviour 14).... In a study by Rowe (1986, Criminology 24)....the heritability of self-reported antisocial behavior was about 50%. A unique study comparing sets of identical and fraternal twins raised together and apart on the same tests has confirmed the typical heritability of .50 across diverse traits, including....aggression, behavioral restraint, and traditional morality (Tellegen et al., 1988, J. Personality & Social Psychol 54)."
J.P.RUSHTON, 1990, Canadian Journal of Criminology 32.

"There is now a substantial body of data from both twin and adoptee studies demonstrating a substantial genetic component for both criminality and antisocial personality disorders in adults.... It appears that genetic factors are most influential in the case of chronic minor antisocial behaviour.... they also appear to be stronger in females than males.... At first sight, the apparently weak genetic effect on juvenile delinquency, compared with that on adult crime and antisocial personality disorder, seems puzzling.... However, the majority of juvenile crime does not persist into adult life...."
M.RUTTER et al., 1990, 'Genetic factors in child psychiatric
disorders'. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry 31.

"....nicotine facilitates CNS serotonergic function.... In line with the notion that nicotine would inhibit Psychoticism-related behaviour by increasing serotonergic function, the literature clearly indicates that acute nicotine inhibits aggression in rats as well as cats.... The literature pertaining to smoking and aggression in humans is woefully scant.... increased levels of restlessness and irritable behaviour seen following smoking cessation, rather than being "withdrawal symptoms", more likely represent pre-existing behavioral tendencies that had been held in check by the situational smoking of cigarettes."
W.S.PRITCHARD, 1991, Personality & Individual Differences 12.

"In early adolescence [in a large Swedish study], definite differences were found between girls whose biological maturation was early and late, respectively, with respect to various kinds of social behaviour. This concerned various types of problem behaviour in the home environment (running away, ignoring parental bans, etc.), in school (truancy, cheating), and in leisure life (using marijuana and alcohol, shoplifting, and hanging around town). Early-maturing girls had cheated, been truants, got drunk, tried marijuana, etc., far more often than late-maturing girls. At the age of fifteen, 35 per cent of the early-maturing girls had been drunk on multiple occasions, whereas this was only the case for 6 per cent of the late-maturing girls. With respect to parental relationships and contacts with teachers, conflict-laden contacts with adults were far more common in the early-maturing girls. The early-maturing girls were also less interested in school and less interested in any long-lasting future education.... The early-maturing girls entered pair relationships earlier, married earlier, had children earlier, and entered the labour market before their late-maturing contemporaries. Major differences in the level of education in adulthood were found. At the age of 26, only 28 per cent of the early-maturing girls had completed three years of upper secondary school, whereas this was the case for 60 per cent of the latge-maturing girls. This difference persisted after adjustments for differences in intelligence and domestic background. The circumstance that differences in the level of education could be traced to the influence of maturity during a few teenage years is surprising."
David MAGNUSSON, 1992, 'Individual development: a longitudinal perspective'. European Journal of Personality 6.

"[Eight twin studies since 1929] all] consistently show greater concordance rates for criminality in MZ as opposed to DZ twins, with average concordance of 67.2% (MZ) and 31% (DZ) indicating a substantial role of genetic determination.... [Eight] well-executed adoption studies have been carried out into antisocial behaviour in recent years {e.g. Cadoret et al., 1987, J.Studies on Alcohol 48} and also without exception support the conclusion drawn from twin studies of a substantial genetic component. Typical of these studies are the findings of a 13% rate of diagnosed antisocial personality in the adoptees of female offenders as compared with 2% in in control adoptees of non-offenders (Crowe, 1974, Arch.Gen.Psychiat.31)...."
A.RAINE & P.H.VENABLES, 1992, 'Antisocial behaviour',
in A.Gale & M.W.Eysenck, Handbook of Individual Differences.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.

"Most 'crimes' are relatively trivial acts committed by teenagers who grow up to be unexceptionable citizens in adult life. But some anti-social behaviour begins early in childhood, is associated with widespread social malfunction and persists into adult life as some kind of personality disorder. Research findings available so far suggest that the former is mainly environmental in origin, whereas genetic factors are much more important in the latter, probably through their role in early onset pervasive hyperactivity."
Sir Michael RUTTER (psychiatrist), 1995,
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 10 ii.

"Kenneth Blum and his colleagues [in Texas] have [identified] a genetic sequence they believe underlies cocaine dependency, a phenomenon integral to the issue of black criminality as it is currently conceived. Genetic markers associated with the neural receptors in question are, it has been suggested, differently distributed among blacks and whites. And another group of researchers has claimed an association between the supposed alcoholism marker and 'criminal aggression'."
Marek KOHN, 1995, The Race Gallery: the Return of Racial Science. London : Jonathan Cape.




(v)Which environmental factors might be of causal significance?


"Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed."
Jean Jacques ROUSSEAU.

"Societies get the criminals they deserve."
Professor Lacassagne (University of Lyons), c. 1882.

"....prolonged separation of a child from his mother (or mother-substitute) during the first five years of life stands foremost among the causes of delinquent character development and persistent misbehaviour."
John BOWLBY, 1946, Fourty-Four Juvenile Thieves.
London : Baillere, Tindall & Cox.

"Criminal behavior is a function of norms which are discriminative for criminal behavior, the learning of which takes place when such behavior is more highly reinforced than non-criminal behavior."
E.H.SUTHERLAND & D.R..CRESSEY, 1960, Principles of Criminology,
6th edn. Chicago : J.B.Lippincott.

"The increased crime rate (e.g. vandalism on [British] buses) and deviancy generally is probably more closely related to feelings of relative deprivation than to any other single factor."
Report of National Association of Probation Officers, 1976,
The Times, xi.

"....delinquent breakdown is an escape from an emotional situation which, for the particular individual with the various conditionings of his background, becomes at least temporarily unbearable."
D.H.STOTT, 1980, Delinquency and Human Nature.
Baltimore, Md : University Park Press.

"....we understand deviancy to be a form of behaviour in which the affected person turns against conditions which he subjectively considers to be unreasonable."
W.HOLLSTEIN (W.German representative at Council of Europe), 1980.

"[According to H.Vacchs, former cab driver, Director of Boston's Andros maxilmum security institution, and attorney] there is a direct link between child sex abuse and juvenile crime. Children who have been profoundly abused are likely to become "your teenage suicides, your dope fiends, run-away kiddie prostitutes. This disease will out in some fashion." Recent statistics in America suggest that as many as four in five juvenile delinquents were sexually abused when children.... [Says Vacchs,] "Delinquents are not born; there's nothing genetic when it comes to crime. So we create our own monsters."
D.BROWNE, 1986, The Times, 25 viii.

"[When the next crisis of capitalism occurs, with a recession exacerbated by a fall in oil revenue] we shall almost certainly see the Health Service on the rocks, more and more of the old in an ageing population crying out for care, education in disarray, and crime still increasing because a large slice of the young will never have known work."
Brian MAY, 1988, New Socialist, x/xi.

"Liberal and Marxian theorists long have argued that the crime rates of Western industrial nations reflect the inherent instability of the market economy. With respect to property offenses, our findings do not contradict this claim."
J.A.DEVINE et al., 1988, 'Macro-economic and social-control
policy influences on crime rate changes, 1948-1945'.
American Sociological Review 5.

"Police faced more than 250 outbreaks of serious public disorder in Britain's once tranquil villages and country towns last year.... Drink was involved in 90% of the incidents."
Stewart TENDLER (crime reporter), 1988, The Times, 10 vi.

"Adolf Hitler was a victim of child abuse who suffered nightmares about beating from his father while he committed his owsn monstrous crimes, the British Association for the Advancement of Science was told yesterday [by the Medical Director of Broadmoor maximum security Special Hospital]."
T.PRENTICE, 1988, The Times, 8 ix.

"Media of mass communication generate moral panics as an inherent dynamic in the dramatization of news; the victims, cast as folk devils, may be terrified by their notoriety, or they may eagerly act out their ascribed roles. It is because football fans have chosen the latter option that the insistent moral outrage of the media can be seen as one of the causes of [soccer] hooliganism."
D.CHANEY, 1988, The Sociological Review 36.
(Reviewing E.Dunning et al., Football Hooliganism.)

"Social discontent, and in specified conditions, crime, arises where there are perceived injustices in the distribution of wealth and status.... H.J.Eysenck and G.H.Gudjonsson (1989, The Causes and Cures of Criminality, Plenum), with their obsession with the 'objective', dpresent us with a graph, indicating a narrowing of disparities accompanied by a rise of crime, as if it were an indictment of relative deprivation theory."
Jock YOUNG, 1989, Nature 342, 9 xi.

"The most widely canvassed explanation [of crime] has been that of relative deprivation.... It follows that society....must change if crime is to be eradicated. It is, however, difficult to envisage a society in which no individual perceives himself as underprivileged or just fatally unfortunate, if only in his personal relationships."
Elizabeth STILL, 1990, Journal of Biosocial Science 22.

"Criminal records show that step-fathers are 8 to 30 times as likely to murder an infant by a previous man as they are to kill their own [infant].... Among 508 homicides from Detroit, only 6.3% involved blood relatives, even though family interactions are frequent and intense.... [As M.Daley and M.Wilson, Homicide, observe,] "Cohabitants who are not blood relatives of the killer are more than 11 times as likely to be murdered than cohabitant kin."
M.POTTS, 1989, Biology & Society 6.

"A British Home Office study by Riley and Shaw (1985, Parental Supervision and Juvenile Delinquency, HMSO)....asked if [boys] had committed any one of 21 offences in the previous year, ranging from breaking a bottle in the street to arson and burglary.... ....they report that boys who said they were closer to their mothers than their fathers, or equally close to both, were almost three times more likely to be delinquent than those who were closer to their fathers."
Norman DENNIS, 1993, Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family. London : Institute of Economic Affairs.

"Adolescents are most likely to be delinquent because that is the age at which they are first defined as having failed academically."
From an Edinburgh University Final Honours Thesis,
1994, Department of Psychology.

"I am sure that {genetic} research on these issues must go on. I am equally sure that the links will turn out to be obscure, the effects of environmental influences incalculable."
Baroness Mary WARNOCK (philosopher), 1995,
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 10 ii.







"Man is what he chooses to be; he chooses that for himself."
Last words of John Spenkelink, before his execution in the USA, 1979.

"The observed relations between personality and antisocial conduct exist not only in capitalist but also in communist countries, and are therefore not a product of the particular modes of production adopted."
H.J.EYSENCK & Sybil B.G.EYSENCK, 1977.

"A majority of delinquents are, it would seem, hardly any more socially disadvantaged than non-delinquents."
D.MAY (crime researcher at the University of Aberdeen), 1979.

"Our surveys-in particular several studies on youth unemployment-show no significant and direct correlation between non-employment and delinquency."
J.ROUSSELET (reporting to the Council of Europe from the French
Ministry of Labour), 1980.

"....individual differences of long standing are associated with both criminality and employment difficulties so that....the effect of unemployment alone on the criminality of young men is not likely to be great."
J.Q.WILSON & R.J.HERRNSTEIN, 1985, Crime and Human Nature.
New York : Simon & Schuster.

"Joblessness did not seem to cause basically law-abiding youths to commit crimes."
The Times, 24 xi 1986, reporting a research paper appearing in
British Journal of Criminology.

"Inept family socialization practices like poor discipline result in high frequencies of relatively trivial antisocial behaviors by the child, like noncompliance, fighting, temper tantrums, petty theft, and lying.... The child's coercive and clumsy style "puts people off". This reduces the child's opportunities to develop skilled behavior. The rejected child is also likely to associate with other, unskilled, coercive children, thereby increasing his opportunities to acquire, perform, and hone antisocial behavior. This association appears to be the result of an actilve peer selection kprocess in which children graviltate towards peers with similar behavioral (as well as age, sexual and racial characteristics (D.B.Kandel, 1978, Amer.J.Sociology; W.W.Hartup, 1983, in Handbook of Child Psychology)... The antisocial child is a product and an architect of his environment."
J.SNYDER & G.PATTERSON, 1987, in H.C.Quay, Handbook of Juvenile Delinquency. New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"Among adults, differences [in criminal offending] between those with jobs and those without jobs are often small or non-existent (Berk et al., 1980, Amer. Sociol.Rev.)."
T.HIRSCHI & M.GOTTFREDSON, 1988, in W.Buikhuisen & S.A.Mednick, Explaining Criminal Behaviour. Leiden : E.J.Brill.

"If it is poverty that causes crime, then why were crime rates lower in the 1930's, when poverty, unemployment and inequality were all much greater than today?.... It was a Labour front-bencher, Tony Blair, who recently wrote that "This new lawlessness cannot be blamed on deprivation of a material sort.""
John PATTEN (later Conservative Minister for Education), 1988, New Society, 13 v.

"In the immediate post-war period there was a consensus stretching across a large section of informed opinion that the main cause of crime was impoverished social conditions.... [However] in Britain, for example, between 1951 and 1971 the real disposable income per person increased by 64%, while the crime rate more than doubled, with a rise of 172%."
Jock YOUNG, 1989, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 23 vi.

"For years it was fashionable to explain that economic deprivation was the main source of crime and violence.... In fact, crime and violence have increased with economic prosperity and progress."
Branko BOKUN, 1989, Stress-Addiction. London : Vita Books.

"We only 'it people for reasons, don't we? - Like if they look at us." Member of a skinhead gang, quoted by Jack KATZ, Seductions of Crime. New York : Basic Books.

"Many people are impressed with a claim that differences in socio-economic status, combined with the effects of racial prejudice, are responsible for high crime rates. Yet, as Whitney points out in his chapter [in L.Ellis & H.Hoffman, Crime in Biological, Social and Moral Contexts, Praeger], during the nineteen-sixties the Chinatown area of San Francisco had the highest unemployment rate, lowest income, highest proportion of families in poverty, lowest educational level, highest tuberculosis rate, and highest proportion of sub-standard housing of any neighbourhood in the city. With all these disadvantages, during 1965, only five individuals of Chinese ancestry were committed to prison in the entire State of California!"
H.J.EYSENCK, 1991, Personality & Individual Differences 12.




(vi) Genetic-Environmental Interaction (G x E)?

"[In their ingenious study, the American authors, Hugh Hartshorne and Mark A. May (1928-30),] summarize their conclusions by saying that the circumstances determining deceit [cheating, stealing and lying], in order of importance, are (1) the classroom association {e.g. whether teacher admired}; (2) general personal handicaps such as relatively low intelligence, poor resistance to suggestion, and emotional instability; and (3) cultural and social limitations in the home background {principally parental socio-economic status}."
C.P.BLACKER, 1952, Eugenics: Galton and After.
London : Duckworth.

"{Further to Hutchings and Mednick's (1977) adoption findings,} even stronger evidence for a Heredity x Environment interaction....is reported by Cloninger et al. (1982, Arch.Gen.Psychiat.39) in a cross-fostering analysis of "petty" criminality (infrequent minor property offences which are non-alcohol related).... A total of 862 Swedish adoptees were divided into four groups depending on the presence or absence of (a) a congenital disposition (i.e. whether biological parents were criminal) and (b) a post-natal disposition (variables concerned with rearing experiences and adoptive placement). When both predispositional factors were present, 40% of the adoptees were criminal compared with 12.1% with congenital-only present, 6.7% for post-natal-only, and 2.9% when both factors were absent.... Cadoret et al. (1983, Behavior Genetics 13) present data from three adoption studies which again confirm that when both genetic and environmental factors are present, they account for a greater number of antisocial behaviours than a combination of these two factors acting alone."
A.RAINE & P.H.VENABLES, 1992, 'Antisocial behaviour',
in A.Gale & M.W.Eysenck, Handbook of Individual Differences.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.

"Gene-environment interaction studies....can help explain how genotypes representing high or low risk for a specific behavior may influence behavior differently across different environments.... [In a large Swedish adoption study (Cloninger & Gottesman, 1987, in S.A.Mednick, The Causes of Crime),] the presence of both genetic and environmental factors increased the incidence of adult criminality more than threefold."
H.YOSHIKAWA, 1994, Psychological Bulletin 115.

"Many biological factors are caused by the environment, not genetics, and by changing the environment we can change the expression of the biological and genetic predispositions to violence. A recent large study of 4,269 males found that birth complications (i.e. forceps delivery, breech birth, lack of oxygen) combined with early maternal rejection (i.e. mother not wanting the pregnancy, child institutionalised in its first year) predisposes to violent crime 18 years later. Only 4 per cent of the sample had these factors, but they accounted for 18 per cent of all the violent crimes committed by the entire sample."
A.RAINE, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 10 ii.



(vii) What advice can psychologists and allied professionals give
about prevention, sentencing and about the treatment options
available to the criminal justice system?
{See Quotes XX re 'psychosocial engineering' in general.}


History

"{In the nineteenth century,} Alexander Maconochie's very successful elaboration and application of what would now be called 'Skinnerian principle' to the reclamation of convicted criminals in Australia led to his dismissal (Barry, 1958, Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island, OUP)."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1995, Genius: the Natural History of Creativity. Cambridge University Press.

"When we realize that there exist beings, born criminals, who reproduce the instincts common to the wild savages and....are destined by nature to injure others....we feel justified in demanding their extermination."
Caesar LOMBROSO, 1899, Le Crime: Causes et Remedes.
Montclair, New Jersey : Patterson Smith, 1968.

"There is precious little evidence that any type of treatment or punishment for delinquency has any long-term effects."
Professor J.TIZARD, 1976,
Bulletin of the British Psychological Society.

"The developing vogue for treatment in the community....is probably no more a panacea [for delinquency] than many other bright ideas which have occurred....to that type of penal reformer who reacts to unpleasant acts with superficial emotion."
Lord HUNTER (Scottish High Court Judge), 1976.

"....recent research findings are beginning seriously to undermine the basis of a purely 'reductionist' approach to sentencing and parole decision-making: there is very little evidence to assist a court to make a rational choice of sentence for instrumental purposes of crime-reduction."
A.K.BOTTOMLEY (criminologist), 1979, British Journal of Psychology.
(Reviewing Barbara Wootton, 1978, Crime and Penal Policy.)

"The reality of the limited capability of our society to do very much to control crime is depressing. But it can also be liberating. If there is little we can do, we can certainly stop wasting our time with extravagant claims that various actions can solve the crime problem."
Professor Seymour HALLEK, 1981.

"D.J.West (1982, Delinquency, Heinemann) discovered that marriage led to a decrease in offending, provided that a young man married a non-delinquent woman. If he married a delinquent woman, his offending seemed to get worse."
D.P.FARRINGTON, 1987, in H.C.Quay, Handbook of Juvenile
Delinquency. New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"Despite the lavishness of the facilities [at a Youth Treatment Centre where inmate places cost 33,280 pounds sterling per annum in 1981] and the fact that staff outnumbered inmates, education was neglected, with bored, inactive youngsters left in an apparent limbo devoid of anything which might have given some shape or purpose to their lives.... There was resort to a pot pourri of therapies, without comprehension of the rationale-however bogus-behind any of them: role-playing, bio-feedback, Gestalt, 'time-out', encounter therapy, doses of Largactil, family therapy programmes, etc."
Patricia MORGAN (social worker), 1983, in C.Brewer et al.,
Criminal Welfare on Trial. London : Social Affairs Unit.

"The staff have been encouraged by the sensible use made of the Day Care Centre. Some of the attenders alternate between caring for others and being cared for by other attenders, depending on their current state of mental health. The opportunity to oscillate between these two roles-for example, in and out of a drinking bout-without loss of dignity is one of the important provisions offered by the Day Centre..... The final annual budget was 8K sterling."
Judy GREENWOOD, 1985, 'Craigmillar Day Centre' [in Edinburgh],
Psychiatry in Practice 4.

"The second part of the study concerned change in personality trait scores which occurred between reception and discharge. The first point one notices here is that changes which do occur are not very great. Also, when changes do occur, they are confounded by individual differences; some trainees increase but others decrease so that the overall change is very small. The largest change occurred on the E[xtraversion] scale; here trainees increased their score by 2.75 points on average. This suggests that trainees on the whole were exhibiting more extravert behaviour at their discharge than when they arrived."
D.R.CLARK, 1989, 'A longitudinal study of custodial adjustment at
Feltham'. Directorate of Psychological Services Report,
Series 1, No. 32. London : Home Office, Prison Department.

"....for John Howard [the penal reformer who opposed execution, branding or flogging] criminals had "a capacity for remorse which could be awakened by carefully legitimated and scientifically inflicted pain". Subsequently, we have found the pains of confinement greater, and the rehabilitative potential far less than he could have believed."
Stephen SHAW, 1989, The Times (Review).
(Reviewing M.Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain.)

"Arguments and evidence are presented for the position that, although many factors such as parent criminality, social and economic disadvantage, child temperament and marital discord systematically affect the development of antisocial child behaviour, their influence is mediated by the extent to which they disrupt day-to-day parenting practices.... Webster-Stratten et al. (1988, J.Consulting & Clinical Psychol.) found that the use of self-administered videotapes [demonstrating effective parenting strategies] was effective in reducing the behaviour problems of children with conduct problems."
J.B.REID & G.R.PATTERSON, 1989, European J. Personality 3.

"Jeffrey Dahmer, a young Milwaukee man who was on "supervised probation" for sex offences, managed to kill, store and in part eat fifteen victims, without the knowledge of his probation officer and sometimes within hours of having seen him."
Theodore DALRYMPLE, 1994, The Times, 9 iii 1994.

"....a psychiatrist's report on Gary Heidnik, the American serial murderer and cannibal, stated that 'with continued psychotherapy, Mr Heidenik's prognosis is good.' That report was on 18 March 1987-the same day that Heidnik killed, cooked and ate one of his female victims."
Alistair PALMER, 1994, The Spectator, 28 v.



Deterrence

"....there are many studies based on both macro and micro models that find statistically significant deterrent effects."
J.M.HEINEKE, 1988, 'Crime, deterrence and choice: testing the
rational behavior hypothesis'. American Sociological Review 53.

"....Heineke cites the work of Ehrlich as an exemplar of macro models that find deterrent effects while adequately addressing problems of specification, identification, aggregation and measurement.... We find Ehrlich's treatment of these issues unconvincing."
R.L.MATSUEDA et al., 1988, American Sociological Review 53.

"During the summer months [in an English seaside resort (B.Jeffs & W.Saunders, 1983, Brit.J.Addiction 78)] selected premises [i.e. public houses] were....visited regularly. Two or three uniformed [police] officers amicably, but very conspicuously, checked for under-age drinking or the presence of persons who were the worse for drink.... crime was 20% less than would be expected from an extrapolation of [previous trends].... this result was not apparent in a control town within the same tourist region and....the reduction was greater for alcohol-related crimes...."
R.J.HODGSON, 1989, in D.Robinson et al., Controlling Legal
Addictions. London : Macmillan / Eugenics Society.

"Phillips (1980, Amer. J. Sociology 86) selected 22 heavily publicized executions that took place in England between 1858 and 1921. His analysis of the short-term fluctuations in the homicide rate in London revealed that the number of murders in that city dropped by an average of 35.7% in the week of the execution and the following week relative to the four-week control period just before the executions.... the consistency and stability of [such] results in impressive (Phillips & Bollen, 1985, Amer. Sociol. Rev. 50)."
R.K.LORE & L.A.SCHULTZ, 1993, American Psychologist 48.

"The article "Amputation the answer to crime" (1 April) identifies the major cause of the soaring crime rate. The cost of crime should be increased to outweigh its benefits."
P.COAD, 1994, letter to The Independent, c. 10 iv 1994.






The Future?

"I would be inclined not to demolish Christianity if it were proved that without it morality is impossible. I begin to see that our generation....owed a great deal to our fathers' religion. And the young....who are brought up without it will never get so much out of life. They're trivial: like dogs in their lusts. We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Christianity and yet had its benefits."
John Maynard Keynes, towards the end of his life,
recorded by Virginia Woolf. Quoted by Robert Skidelsky,
The Independent, 24 iii 1993.

"One way in which the much famed 'community' might be enabled to assert itself against the delinquent would be to make it easy for ordinary people to obtain (and enforce) compensation against an offender or his parents in civil law."
Patricia MORGAN, 1983, in C.Brewer et al.,
Criminal Welfare on Trial. London : Social Affairs Unit.

"What we have found is that there is a sub-set of the criminal population, perhaps as much as 30%, who have brain function disorders due to poor to nutritional status: they may eat poorly or have special nutritional needs. It's these people whom vitamin and mineral supplements can help; in fact we have found that their behaviour can be improved dramatically, by up to 90% in just a few days."
Stephen SCHOENTHALER (Californian criminologist),
quoted by Tony Edwards, 1988, 'The right food means brighter
children'. The Listener, 21 i.

"If it were no crime to take drugs, the price would fall, and crimes would fall with it. This does not imply approval. - The Government has extended drinking hours, but it does not approve of alcoholism."
Paul BARKER, 1988, Sunday Telegraph, 15 v.

"What does the young skinhead, who is allegedly, like Plato, 'disillusioned with society' do precisely? He cannot 'drop out' of society, as Aristotle's view on the impossibility of such a choice has remained uncontested for over two thousand years.... In fact, he will be on the dole, financed by taxes taken by coercion from the rich and poor alike. He will use society's sewer system, water supply, electricity distribution; its roads, parks, gardens; its buses, trains, its hospitals, shops and vast tracts of its culture; weights and measures for his drug supplies (which acutely depend on technological developments in chemistry), coinage; not to mention pornography (a product of the state of the art in marketing, photography and distribution) and, of course, a permissive value system which provides him with a clutch of semi-professionals - social workers, counsellors, out-reach workers, enablers, facilitators, resource persons and various co-ordinating personnel - all morally neutral and non-judgmental, who have formed a coalition to ensure his continued immaturity which has become the very basis of their profession and career development."
Errol MATHURA, 1988, in D.Anderson, Full Circle.
London : Social Affairs Unit.

"The activists of the Great Society [i.e. the USA's period of high welfare spending] insisted that welfare was a right, and they were zealous in communicating this in the ghettos. Society was the culprit, not the individual.... Poor youngsters growing up in the 1970's faced a world in which little was expected of them, in which it was easy to get away without studying or working, and in which moral restraint had broken down. This alone is enough to explain why many turned to crime. But it was compounded by legal reforms that weakened deterrence.... By the mid-1970's, a youth in Chicago, for instance, would be arrested an average of fourteen times before being incarcerated for the first time."
Ambrose EVANS-PRITCHARD, 1989, The Spectator, 8 iv.

"....most criminologists for the last 200 years have been operating within a meta-theory which can be traced back to Bentham and beyond which placed 'control' and 'custody' as the central response to crime and all other disposals as mere 'alternatives'. I believe we are just emerging from that historic period."
Mary TUCK, 1989, 'Is criminology any use?'
Home Office Research and Planning Unit Research Bulletin 26.

"A drug smuggler in a maximum security jail [for having smuggled 600,000 pounds sterling of cocaine into Britain] this week begins a legal battle to father a child while serving a sixteen-year sentence. George S., 41, believes it is his "fundamental right" to start a family, and the National Council of Civil Liberties has agreed to take up his case."
Deirdre FERNAND, 1989, Sunday Times, 5 iii.

"Longitudinal evidence [from U.S. pre-school Headstart projects] {typically involving frequent home visits by paraprofessionals and some 275 hours of family involvement annually} give some indication that early childhood intervention programmes may reduce juvenile delinquency and predelinquent behaviour.... [The programmes] offered comprehensive family support by providing health services and child care, and establishing linkages with community sources of assistance, and often by creating social networks through formal or informal group meetings.... Certainly one [necessary element] is parental involvement." E.ZIGLER, et al., 1992. 'Early childhood intervention: a promising preventative for juvenile delinquency.' American Journal of Psychology 47.

"[A U.K. poll by N.O.P./Independent,] shows 88 per cent support the death penalty. The main reason cited for jailing people is to show public disapproval of serious crimes-favoured by 93 per cent."
The Independent, 30 xi 1993, p.1.

"[A review of Headstart programmes, including four that found delinquency-reduction in 189 experimental subjects from low-income families suggest] a program with the following characteristics: (a) an intervention of at least 2 years
in length; (b) provision of a high-quality educational infant day-care or preschool program for children; (c) provision of informational and emotional support focussed on development and child-rearing issues; and (d) provision of pre-natal and post-natal care and educational and vocational counseling or training when otherwise unavailable.... In a country in which the average annual cost of incarcerating a minor has risen past $29,000 [1992 figures], it is crucial that all avenues toward prevention of juvenile crime be explored."
H.YOSHIKAWA, 1994, Psychological Bulletin 115.

"Mobeley [the 29-year-old pizza parlour murderer, in Georgia, who had taken to decorating his cell with pizza boxes], in an effort to mitigate his sentence to life, claims that his genes made him kill.... [Dutch] scientists claim to have identified a defective gene [regulation chemicals influencing] aggressive behaviour....[though one, geneticist Hans Brunner, says} "I think that what is going to happen is that once the genes have been found, people are going to realise that it is both genes and environment that contribute.""
Kam PATEL, 1995, 'Times Higher Educational Supplement, 10 ii.





(viii) The politics of crime and criminology.


"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
'John Tanner', 'Member of the Rich and Idle Classes', in his
'The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion'.
In George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman.

"....you [the public] declare....that the way to fight [looters] is to beat them to it and give one's wealth away. Then you wonder why your children....become half-crazed delinquents."
'John Galt', hero of Ayn RAND's Atlas Shrugged.
New York : Random House, 1957.

"[In the West today, soi-disants radicals believe that the criminal is a victim (of society), that the victim is a criminal (who lures others into committing offences against 'his' property), that crime is punishment (of the bourgeoisie) and that punishment is a crime (against the oppressed victims of social disadvantage.]"
Thomas Szasz, c. 1984.

"Conservatives reduce all illegal conduct to "crime", while radicals tend to elevate even selfish acts of individual will to the status of political protest and revolt."
P.A.J.WADDINGTON, 1986,
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 28 xi.

"Rising crime statistics, however embarrassing to a [Conservative] government that has vowed itself to reducing crime and to the relentless pursuit of criminals, have one great, unspoken advantage. They indicate the extent to which the poor fail to channel their energies into the struggle for political change.... The fact that the political alternatives have not been readily sought by the dispossessed can only strengthen the sense of security of the established order."
Jeremy SEABROOK, 1987, in S.Fineman,
Unemployment. London : Tavistock.

"On the one hand, [Roy Hattersley, Deputy Leader of the British Labour Party, in a radio broadcast] ascribed the soaring crime rates in inner cities to unemployment and called for a drive against youth unemployment. On the other, he blamed the "turmoil" and violence in rural towns on "rich yuppies" with "masses of money in their pockets"."
Ronald BUTT, 1988, The Times, 13 x.

"[Richard Sparks, Television and the Drama of Crime, finds criminologists] polarised between those who see the media as a pernicious cause of vastly exaggerated fear-deplored by the Home Office for reducing confidence in the criminal justice system and by radicals for creatilng a political climate conducive to lauthoritarian responses-and new "left realists" who see fear of crime as largely a rational response to risks of victimisation."
Robert REINER, 1992, New Statesman & Society, 21 viii.

""Blaming society" has too often become an apologia for behaviour that should not-and cannot-be tolerated in any social framework; and it has too often slipped over into a denial of personal responsibility and morality. But crime cannot be divorced from the sort of society in which it occurs. As shadow home secretary Tony Blair wrote in NSS on 29 January, "Any sensible society acting in its own interests as well as those of its citizens will understand and recognise that poor education and housing, inadequate or cruel family backgrounds, low employment prospects and drug abuse will affect the likelihood of young people turning to crime.""
Editorial, New Statesman & Society, 26 ii 1993.

"The tendency to make law-breaker and hero all but interchangeable terms in popular usage has been a common feature of societies clearly split into oppressors and oppressed, whether between Norman and Anglo-Saxon in England in the thirteenth century, or Serb and Ottoman Turk in the Balkans in
the nineteenth, or peasant and French settler in Algeria in the twentieth century. Only under modern conditions, however, does the temper of the times encourage a rich and parliamentary society's intellectuals to identify themselves on a large scale with the law-breaking of their own oppressed, and not only to champion lawlessness against tyrannous regimes abroad-a common national response in all societies-but also to advocate that it should be at least exonerated when used by or on behalf of the 'relatively deprived' at home."
Norman DENNIS, 1993, Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family. London : Institute of Economic Affairs.

"People in Britain are more frightened of crime than ever before, according to an opinion poll. The two most notable changes in modern crime are that so much of it is related to drugs and that criminals are so much more often armed. So the best thing to do, most people appear to think, is to make guns and drugs more difficult to obtain. Right-wing people feel this more strongly about drugs, and left-wing people about guns; but all are united in believing that the answer lies in banning objects with which people do bad things."
Charles MOORE, 1994, The Spectator, 26 iii.

"Crime rates show big group differences, with Japan and Switzerland the safest countries; and crime has increased enormously since 1950 in parallel with rising affluence and the number of criminologists."
C.R.BRAND, 1994, Nature 368.
|
"I work in a country of fundamentalist workaholics who have promoted the work ethic to fanatical extremes.... Long hours, stressful work rates, unpaid breaks, no bank holidays, no sick pay without a doctor's certificate, even for one day, summary dismissal, discipline by humiliation etc."
Harold BELL (Villmergen, Switzerland), 1994, The Idler , No.3.

"[In 1992] a $78,000 grant from the US National Institute for Health to support a University of Maryland conference on genetics and criminal behavior [was cancelled] under pressure from political groups, particularly the US Congressional Black Caucus and the National Association from the Advancement of Colored Peoples (Price, 1995, Washington Post, 22 ix)."
Roger PEARSON, 1996, Humanity and Heredity.
Washington : Scott-Townsend.








A forthcoming consensus?

"The bridge between the conventional socialist antipathy to 'law and order' and a new concern about crime is precisely the fragmentation of 'class' into separate communities. The shift for the Left has been led by the radical criminologists: Professor Jock Young, of Middlesex Polytechnic, is one of their leading voices. He says that feminism, with its stress on women as victims of crime, did much to change priorities. From women as victims, it was a short step to the idea that crime and fear of crime play havoc with the lives of the poor and the vulnerable. Not all the working class is poor and vulnerable; the black, female, elderly, very low income members are.... "I don't want racists to be nice to me," said Sivanandan, Director of the Institute of Race Relations, at the recent {meeting} 'Left Unlimited'; "I want them to be punished.""
Sarah BENTON, 1986, 'The left embraces law and order'.
New Statesman 112, 21 xi.

"There was no crime-wave in the USA, the Attorney General insisted [in the late 1960's], while Democratic intellectuals assured the public that the obsession with crime was, in fact, a metaphor for racism - an argument which was to re-appear in Constituency Labour Parties in Britain twenty years later. Radical criminologists embraced these notions wholeheartedly. In a scene worthy of Galileo, they viewed the inner cities from their campus sanctuaries and declared that the problem was with the measuring instruments and that nothing out of the normal was happening. They denied the evidence and blamed the telescope."
Jock YOUNG, 1989, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 23 vi.

"First I'd re-arrange his face a little with my fist. Then I'd talk to him about the socio-economic roots of poverty."
Julio ANGUITA (Spanish Communist Party supremo on being the
victim of a car thief). Reported in The Observer, 8 x 1989.

"It's no joke being mugged, having your place turned over or your car nicked. And if you're old, on the dole or have got sod all anyway, having what little you've got nicked from you is doubly gutting.
People who do this kind of anti-social activity are idiots and should be treated as such. We have no time for those who terrorise their own community, their own class....
Now don't misunderstand us, we are all for crime when it betters our communities, like the selling on of stolen goods that people couldn't otherwise afford, and the like.... {However} muggings, burglaries (especially against our old folk), mindless assaults - it all creates a climate of fear that undermines our communities and allows our rulers to say: "See, look what happens; what we need is a strong government and hard police."
It's clear that the cops won't do anything about stopping anti-social criminals from terrorising the rest of us.
The only way is to do it ourselves, to sort our own problems out: no, it's not easy and there are difficulties with it - but we must take the responsibility and drive anti-social criminals out, or educate them as to what's right, so they understand who the real enemies are."
Class War, No. 58, 1993. P.O.Box 772, Bristol BS99 1EG.

"I've been [in Paris] for about ten years now....I know lots of Americans say it, but you can't avoid the crime. There's only a very small chance of anyone shooting a gun off near me when I'm out at night in Paris. In San Francisco there is a far higher chance. I don't like it. I don't want to be shot or robbed with a gun."
Gilbert SHELTON (underground comic artist & writer, inventor of Fat Freddy's Cat and Freak Brothers strip cartoons), 1994/5, The Idler, No.7.

"I have surveyed the sociobiological arguments, the most interesting of which is that the human mind has evolved to possess an aptitude for justice."
Suzanne GIBSON (Fellow & tutor in law, Oxford University), 1995,
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 10 ii.

"I am proud to say that our Party has now replaced the Conservatives as the party of law and order."
Tony Blair (Leader of Britain's {New} Labour Party), addressing the Labour Party Annual Conference, 4 x 1996.






FINIS

(Compiled by Chris Brand, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh.)


For more coverage of intelligence and deviance, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.

"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern "educationalists". This short book provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn from bookshops, in April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed doctrines of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May 2, 1996, p. 33).

For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html

For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html




A reminder of what is available in other Sections of 'P, B & S'

Summary Index for PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY
& SOCIETY
(This resource manual of quotations about individual and group differences, compiled by
Mr C. R. Brand, is kept on the Internet and in Edinburgh University Psychology Department Library.)
Pages of Introduction
3 - 11 Full Index, indicating key questions in each Section.
12 - 14 Preface. - Why quotations? - Explanations and apologies.
15 - 51 Introduction: Questions, Arguments and Agreements in the study of Personality. - Some history, and a discussion of 'realism vs 'idealism.'
52 - 57 Introductory Quotes about the study of personality.
Sections
General problems
1 'Situational' vs 'personological' approaches to human variation.
2 'Nomothetic' vs 'idiographic', 'subjective' and relativistic approaches.
3 Personality dimensions-by factor analysis and otherwise.
4 'Superstructure' and 'infrastructure.' - The 'mind/body problem'.
5 Nature versus Nurture? - Or Nature via Nurture?
6 The role of consciousness in personality and 'multiple personality'.
7 The 'folk psychology' of personality components.
Intelligence
8 The measurement of intelligence. - Does g exist?
9 The bases of intelligence. - What is the psychology of g?
10 The developmental origins of g differences. - The nature and nurture of g.
11 The importance of intelligence. - The psychotelics of g.
12 Piagetianism: Kant's last stand?
13 Cognitivism: 'The Emperor's New Mind?'
Propensities
14 Neurosis, emotion and Neuroticism.
15 Psychosis, psychopathy and Psychoticism.
16 Crime and criminality.
17 Genius and creativity.
Popular proposals - psychoanalytic, phrenological and prophylactic
18 Psychoanalysis: 'Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'?
19 Hemispherology: a twentieth-century phrenology?
20 Psycho-social Engineering: therapy, training or transformation?
Group differences
21 Age and ageing - especially, the role of g in 'life-span development'.
22 Psychological sex differences. - Do they exist? Must they exist?
23 Social class. - Does it matter any longer?
24 Racial and ethnic differences. - Their role in 'lifestyles' and cultural attainments.
Ideological issues
25 The psychology of politics and ideological extremism.
26 The politics of psychologists and allied co-workers.
27 Equality and Community: the 'utopian' package of political aims.
28 Freedom and Responsibility: the 'legitimist' package of political aims.
Pragmatic questions
29 Carry on differentializing?
30 Carry on psycho-testing?
Appendix: Factor Analysis. - 'Garbage in, garbage out'?

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