Biological Evaluation - Inherited Criminality Flashcards
Evaluate research support from adoption studies…
Line of evidence for inherited criminality comes from adoption studies
Raymond Crowe (1972) found that children with biological parents that were criminals has a 38% greater risk of having criminal records, compared to 6% of those with non-criminal biological parents
Suggest inherited genes are a more significant factor
Evaluate explaining non-violent crime…
Most research relates to the association between criminal and violent or aggressive behaviour
Suggested that the explanation may not account for all types of crime as Lynn Findlay (2011) suggested that crime is not a ‘natural’ category and that it doesn’t exist apart from how we choose to define it i.e., it is a social construction
Difficult to argue that such a behaviour can be simply explained in terms of genetics and its interaction with the environment
Evaluate brain differences - cause or effect…
For genes to cause criminal behaviour they must be linked to a physical or psychological effect
Observation is that criminals have differences in their brains, with most criminals having a head injury - 8.5% of the US population compared to 20% of the US prison population
Brain differences may be due to nurture not nature
Evaluate problems with determinist explanations…
Presented as if the genes a person is born with determine later behaviout
Tiihonen et al (2015) found that those with defective genes were 13 times more likely to have a history of violent behaviour, but not everyone with the genes had become a criminal
The law asks the question about whether the cause of behaviour is out of a person’s control however, a determinsit view of criminal behaviur cannot be totally ruled out
