7. Psychological Theories of Crime
7.8 Integrative Models of Criminality
Dr. Jennifer Mervyn and Stacy Ashton, M.A.
Theories under the umbrellas of individual psychology emphasise personality, cognitive fallacies, psychopathology, and brain structure. Evolutionary psychology looks at ancient survival pressures and their impact on the human genome. Cultural psychology looks at how individual behaviour is constructed by society. Biopsychosocial criminology, on the other hand, is a multidisciplinary perspective that views criminal behaviour by considering the interactions between biological, psychological, and sociological factors. This section describes three models that integrate theories from individual, evolutionary, and cultural approaches in their application to criminal behaviour.
- Moffitt’s Developmental Taxonomy: explains the development of antisocial behaviour as affected by biology, socialisation, and stages of development.
- General Aggression Model: explains the biological, personality, cognitive and social learning factors influencing an aggressive act.
- Risk Needs Responsivity Model: provides a method for offender assessment and treatment by examining the needs underlying criminal behaviour.
- Trauma-informed Systems of Care: combines the neurobiology of trauma with an analysis of the trauma-inducing aspects of the criminal justice system.
Developmental Taxonomy
The developmental taxonomy (Moffit, 1993, 2018) describes two types of offenders differentiated by their biology, parenting, personality, and socialisation: life-course-persistent offenders and adolescent-limited offenders. Life-course-persistent offenders are rare and have externalising behaviour from an early age continuing into adulthood. Neurological differences causing impulsivity and reactivity are believed to underlie their behavioural problems. Without intervention, difficulties with peers and school result, snowballing into later problems such as early school leaving and criminal activity. Early social rejection from peers is a major risk factor for later antisocial behaviour (Cowan & Cowan, 2004), and these individuals often eventually associate together (Laird et al., 2009). The individuals following this life-course trajectory are considered the smallest group of offenders, but they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime (Piquero et al., 2012).
Conversely, adolescent-limited offenders engage in minor antisocial behaviour during a developmentally normative stage in the teenage years but have an otherwise normal early childhood. Adolescent-limited offenders determine the benefits of a criminal lifestyle are not worth the risk, and they change in their early adulthood. According to the developmental taxonomy, these individuals are capable of easily changing because they have well-developed social and educational skills.
General Aggression Model
The general aggression model (GAM; DeWall et al., 2011) explains how various factors, including biology, pe