I was doing some driving today and was listening to some old crim theory lectures on my Ipod (yeah I know, I'm a nerd). The lecture on social learning theory got me to thinking. It seems to me that the problem of some criminological theories is that they don't address a first cause (or "original cause") of crime. For example, one critique of social learning theory is that it treats humans as simply reactors and not as actors with agency and volition. Social learning theory has a particularly strong emphasis on "peer pressure" and on the learning of criminal/deviant behavior in the context of peer groups. But saying that someone has become a criminal as a result of spending a disproportionate amount of time hanging out with bad friends just pushes the problem of causal explanation one step backwards and does nothing to answer the question of original cause. Where did these bad friends learn to commit crimes or to hold to values supportive of criminal behavior? From other bad friends? If so, then where did these other bad friends learn to commit crimes or to hold to values supportive of criminal behavior? You can see how the search for an explanation can keep getting pushed backwards. If we pushed it back intergenerationally, we could push it all the way back to the first known crime- the Biblical account of the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. Where did Cain "learn" that it was acceptable to murder? According to the Biblical account, there was only one family in existence on the face of the earth at that time, so there were no peer groups. There was no media or entertainment to learn from. Why did Cain murder? Social learning theory seems to me to be a wholly inadequate theory for ultimately explaining this first known murder, and as a logical extention every murder (or crime) thereafter.To me, the best solution to this problem of "original cause" is the one taken by most of the theories that form the classical school of criminological thought. These theories would include social control, deterrence/rational choice, and routine activities theory. According to these theories, motivation towards crime (or at least towards pleasure maximimizing) is constant, is a part of human nature, and thus does not need to be explained. Therefore, the original cause of crime is something intrinsic to human nature. What needs to be explained by these theories then, is why all human beings do not act upon this human nature. Social learning can only fall back on human nature as an original cause if the only learning that occurs in life is in a positive direction, away from crime. Otherwise, learning is completely unnecessary if criminality is a part of human nature.
My favorite study in support of this viewpoint is the study by Dan Nagin and Pierre Tremblay on the shape of what I call the "age-aggression curve". I know I've blogged about this study before; it's one of my favorities to talk about. In their study, Nagin and Tremblay challenge the conventional wisdom concerning the age-crime curve peaking in the late teens to early 20's, which has been a sturdy finding in criminological research. The problem is that most criminologists have only examined crimes that are officially subjected to state sanctions. What Nagin and Tremblay find is that an aggregate plot of aggressiveness across age categories reveals that aggressive behavior actually peaks somewhere around age 2. While infants and toddlers don't go to jail for doing so, they spend a lot of time kicking, punching, hitting, pushing, taking toys, etc. And yet this happens before they even get to pre-school. It's all downhill after age 2. How can social learning theorists account for this finding? It seems that very little learning of aggressive behavior can possibly happen within the first two years of most infants' lives. Thus, this would strongly suggest to me that criminality is something we're all born with but that most of us grow out of.
