Crime As A Social Problem Essay Example

Since the dawn of recorded history on earth, crime has been and continues to be a huge problem that citizens, law enforcement, governing bodies, and country leaders have not been able to immobilize. Ranging from simple traffic stops that end in warnings or citations to mass genocidal war crimes, the war on crime the world over has remained an at large issue that has yet to be solved. Many question the motives of all crimes, and the answer likely lays deep in the suspect’s mindset, emotions, or conditioning based on the environment they were raised in or the on that the criminal concurrently resided in. Other factors that could be attributed a crime of any substantiality, including any sort of debilitating mental illness or the intoxication levels of the suspect at the time of the crime. Whatever the case may be, psychology and the state of an individual’s mind during the committing of a crime often play a large role on the motives and actions of said individual. 

The first of a few attributing factors to crimes and activities related to crimes is the biological factors that play into the feelings of aggression or anger leading up to a crime being committed. In the social psychology section of the textbook, there is a section that takes deep search into the neurobiological and biological factors contributing to altruism and aggression alike. These readings attribute the aggression factor in human/criminal behavior to various subjects, ranging from genes decided before birth that produce an overwhelmingly vicious offspring through selective breeding, to neurobiological factors including currents passing through the limbic system of the brain, all the way to certain hormones present in high stress situations like testosterone that can come to the forefront and influence behavior into an aggressive manner. These biological factors, whether they be predetermined before birth or overwhelmingly present during an impulse situation, have the ability to and certainly do play a role in various crimes across the world. 

Social and personality factors also play a major role in the influencing and overall committal of crimes. The personality that is worst fit for any frustrating or stressful situations that could have the outcome of violence or any other sort of escalation runs along the lines of having low agreeableness, low conscientiousness, and high neuroticism. Low agreeableness could cause an unnecessary altercation to erupt from nothing but a harmless conversation. The low conscientiousness portion plays into the hand of not knowing one’s surroundings, how their actions will affect others, and how their actions will affect themselves and their near futures. This basically boils down to someone who is nearsighted and self-centered, but also quick-tempered with low self-control. These ingredients of a negative personality mixed with an aversive experience or situation, whether that be hot temperatures, a crowded environment, etcetera can create a concoction that is bound to go nuclear. 

The development of a person from adolescence to adulthood is another interesting process to watch when considering the shaping of criminals and crime as a whole. In some situations, a person can be brought up and developed with a mental illness effecting their behavior and the way their mind works. However, this is only in rare cases, as, according to results found from a study performed by WebMD, only 7.5% of all crimes can be attributed to mental illnesses. Some circumstances find that the suspect of any alleged crime was brought up in an unhealthy environment for the suspect, which could include violence in the home, living in unsafe or an unstable location, or any situation that could cause the hinderance of the kid receiving proper education. But something more out of the ordinary and more in the face of children in households nowadays is the overwhelming effects of television and video games. The recent uptick in violence in both of these expository forms of information and entertainment have many theorizing and researching the topic of whether or not it actually affects children enough to become criminals in the later stages of their lifetime. This brings up a meta-analysis which finds that, indeed, children who experience this fake violence in video games or on TV are more likely to engage in violence, as the tests find that the children in question would have been far more desensitized to real life violence. All criminals possess a mindset or motive that they fault for their committal of a crime, and sometimes the only place to look for answers is into the suspect’s past to see how they were raised and developed.