7. Psychological Theories of Crime
7.7 Cultural Psychology
Dr. Jennifer Mervyn and Stacy Ashton, M.A.
Cultural psychology looks at how individual behaviour is constructed by society. It examines flaws in society to better understand criminal behaviour through the lens of culture and cultural processes. Culture is not just one’s nation or ethnicity. Cultures organise around concepts like “masculinity” and “organised crime,” asserting their own ways of understanding social interaction and setting behavioural norms (Staub, 1988; Westen, 1985). Crime is socially determined by our collective beliefs, many of which are cultural.
Subcultures can create norms that contradict those of the society they live in, allowing complex and ongoing crime to be maintained over generations. Societies with inequitable access to resources needed for survival and inequitable experiences of trauma and criminalised behaviour are more likely to allow the emergence of deviant subcultures that have problems with crime than more equitable societies.
Culture also impacts how a society responds to crime. A “theistic” culture considers crime a violation of laws set by God, while a “law and order” culture considers crime a violation of law as mutually agreed upon by members of a nation. In both these types of cultures, the correct response to crime is removal of the lawbreaker from society, which functions to punish the behaviour, provide an example to others to discourage lawbreaking, and keep the general public safe from the lawbreaker. An alternative to both these framings is much more restorative in nature and appears in many Indigenous cultures: criminal behaviour is considered a breakdown of community relationships, and the solution is to repair relationships with neighbours and the community, not impose exile through excommunication or incarceration.
As highlighted by cultural psychologists, poverty is a societal condition that increases vulnerability to criminality. Neighbourhoods with higher rates of poverty have higher rates of crime, and people living in poverty are far more likely to be victims of crime than those above the poverty line. The impacts of adversity, including the trauma of growing up in a home that struggled to make ends meet in a disadvantaged community, increase the likelihood of experiencing a number of different health and social impacts, including a higher chance of encounters with the criminal justice system. In fact, low-income Canadians significantly outnumber wealthier Canadians in the criminal justice system. They are more “at-risk” of participating in crime because of the social and economic challenges they face. They are also more likely to face significant barriers in accessing legal defence if they become involved in criminal justice processes.
Moreover, low-income individuals are more likely to be detained when they are arrested (especially if homeless), to be denied bail, to plead guilty and to be convicted. They also have fewer social an