Is Crime Caused by an Individual’s Natural Temperament or by Environmental Circumstances?

This article analyzes the importance and methodology of crime prevention through various cases and approaches to the question of whether crime is caused by an individual’s temperament or environmental circumstances.

 

“Everyone has heard the story of Jean Valjean at least once in their childhood. The story of Jean Valjean, who suffered from hunger and was unable to buy bread due to poverty, ended up stealing bread, which led to his imprisonment. Afterward, he escapes from prison and, under a new name, does good deeds and builds a reputation in society. The question we have to ask is, did Jean Valjean steal the bread because he was inherently evil? If he hadn’t been poor and had enough money to buy bread, would he have committed the same crime? If not, we shouldn’t just look at the crime as an individual problem, but look for the root cause of why he was forced to commit such a crime, so that similar crimes won’t happen again.
The approach that attributes the stealing of the bread to Jean Valjean’s personality is called the temperamental approach, which traditionally attributes behavior to a person’s character or nature. Conversely, the situational approach attributes the cause of a crime to the situation. Let’s apply this concept to everyday life, not crime. For example, if a woman who doesn’t smoke develops lung cancer, it’s easy to assume that she got it because it runs in her family and she has DNA that predisposes her to the disease, which is called a temperamental approach. On the other hand, a situational approach would not attribute the disease to genetics, but to secondhand smoke from a spouse or family member who smokes.
A classic example of how criminal behavior can be caused by temperament is the Ted Bundy case. “Ted Bundy was a handsome, well-liked man with a good reputation, but he was a murderer who killed dozens of women. These people are called psychopaths because they have frontal lobe damage or neurological disorders and lack the ability to empathize with other people’s feelings.
An example of a situationally driven crime is the genocide in Rwanda. The Hutus brutally murdered the Tutsis, a different tribe, men, women, and children, including rape and killing their neighbors who had been friendly until yesterday. The Hutus were not particularly evil because they were killing their neighbors who had been friendly until yesterday. Before this happened, the Hutus were probably just ordinary people. If the situation had changed and the Tutsi were in this situation, we can’t say for sure that they wouldn’t have killed differently than the Hutu.
But before we get to the question of how to approach crime, there’s a question that needs to be asked. The first question is whether we can distinguish between crimes committed as a result of temperamental issues and crimes committed as a result of situational issues. “In the case of Ted Bundy, we can’t say that his childhood environment didn’t play a role in how he became a psychopath, and there are certainly people who were Hutu and didn’t commit murder. However, personality is innate, so there’s only so much you can do to change it. Rather than focusing on causes that are difficult to change, it would be much more effective to look at crime in context and address the underlying causes.
We can see the effectiveness of this by looking at examples where crime has been interpreted in terms of context rather than temperament. A classic example is the “broken window theory”. This theory states that a car with a broken window is more likely to be looted or vandalized than one without. The idea is that small crimes, if left unchecked, can lead to big crimes. In one successful application of this theory, simply removing graffiti from the subways in the United States plummeted crime rates. Just as people are more likely to litter on a dirty street than a clean street, cleaning up the subway environment has led to fewer violent crimes and fewer felonies. This shows that improving the environment can be enough to reduce crime rates.
It is tempting to assume that the reduction in crime from a situational approach is minimal and that changing temperament is the only way to reduce crime. In particular, one might argue that if damage to the frontal lobe is inherited in cases such as psychopathy, then the crime rate in the same family will be higher, so eliminating the gene will not reduce crime. However, as mentioned earlier, even crimes that are caused by temperamental issues such as psychopathy are often caused by situational factors such as poor childhood socialization. Therefore, a situational approach to crime prevention is the best approach.
If you can’t be sure that a person won’t commit a crime in the same situation, you can’t be sure that they will. This raises the question of whether the cause of a crime cannot be attributed to circumstances. Consider the case of a criminal who commits theft in a disadvantaged environment. Since theft is a clear criminal offense, he will go to jail, and he will reflect and vow to never steal again. But if his behavior doesn’t improve after he gets out, no matter how hard he tries, he’ll eventually steal again. To prevent this person from committing crimes again, it’s not enough for him to reflect and work on his own; he needs help at the national level to improve his poverty. As you can see, the reason why criminal behavior should be approached from a situational rather than a temperamental perspective is not simply to determine whether the cause of crime is temperamental or situational. It is to go beyond the traditional temperamental approach and analyze the causes of crime from a new perspective to find fundamental solutions to reduce crime rates.
If crime is more influenced by circumstance than temperament, you might think that individuals shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. However, two conditions are necessary to avoid holding an individual responsible for a crime when handing out punishment. First, the circumstances must be exactly the same for the same offense. Second, everyone must have committed the same offense under the same circumstances, without exception.
However, there are limitations to these conditions. The first limitation is that there can never be exactly the same circumstances. This is because even if the circumstances that led to the crime are the same, the circumstances that preceded them can influence the current crime. Therefore, it is not clear where to start considering circumstances, and if we consider circumstances prior to a certain point in time when the crime occurred, it is virtually impossible to have perfectly identical circumstances. The second condition is that we cannot determine the truth or falsity of the proposition. This is because we cannot put everyone in the same situation, and even if we did, if there is a single exception, the proposition would be false.
Because of these limitations, changing the current legal system can be problematic. Furthermore, the ultimate goal of punishing criminals is to reduce the likelihood of reoffending through rehabilitation. When Professor Philip George Zimbardo, the creator of the Broken Windows Theory, conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment, he was unaware of the violence of the experimenters, even when he was acting as a guard. It was the intelligence of an outsider who happened to witness the experiment that made the professor realize his mistake and stop the experiment. In situations like this, a person can commit a crime, but it may take outside interference to realize that it is a crime. This is the role of the police, and why they punish criminals and put them away in jail. But it’s not enough. Crime is not an individual problem, it’s a situational problem. If the environment doesn’t change, the same crimes will continue to happen, and nothing will change. We need to look at crime from a situational perspective and work to change that situation. This is welfare, and this is what the state should do. This is welfare, and this is what the state should do, because we are all responsible for creating the circumstances that lead an ordinary person to commit a crime.