Inside Criminology: What Drives Criminals to Crime?

Abstract

Despite the fact that crime is an issue that continues to plague our nation, the amount of research regarding causes of crime and ways to prevent crime is severely lacking. This paper divides the main causal factors of crime into three subdivisions--sociological, psychological, and biological--in hopes of finding more effective methods of preventing crime by analyzing the root causes. The theories that define these factors are described with examples of real-world scenarios, statistics, and information from a personal interview with Dr. Sonja Siennick, criminology professor at Florida State University.

Reflection

In recent years, the rate of crime has started to rise again, despite having previously made drastic improvements. If this trend were to continue along the rate they did from 2015 to 2016, our streets would be as crime-ridden as they were over half a century ago within a little over a decade, at least based on the data Maryville University provided. Before our country's hit rock-bottom and descended into anarchy, I think taking measures to prevent and reduce crime would be a worthwhile investment of our community's and our government's time and resources. I wanted to choose a research question that I knew little about, so that I could maintain an open mind going into my research and have my personal viewpoints regarding the motivating factors of crime influence my paper as minimally as possible. Having said that, I also wanted to research something that I genuinely felt passionately about, and anyone that knows me well knows how deep my hatred for the criminal justice system runs. Unsurprisingly, my opinions on the prison system have not changed in the slightest--I still find it to be largely ineffective and I feel that the justice system as a whole is largely broken. In the future, ironically, I hope to go into forensic psychology so that I can further dissect the psyches of criminals and hopefully make a positive change in the way that both victims and offenders are treated. Although my term paper has come to a close, it seems that this may in fact be the start of a much longer journey.


The full paper with an annotated bibliography is available here.