Sunday e-mail14 January

Events Crimeways magazine; what to expect this week; what causes crime?

Big news this week at your favourite newsletter! I’m delighted to welcome our 100th subscriber! Thank you, Lirpa, and welcome!

We are not resting here, though. In fact, we are just getting started… Please pass on our details to anyone you know who may be interested, and let’s get to 200, 300, more!

My sincere thanks to everyone who has shown their support for this newsletter. I’ll hope to keep on repaying your faith in me with more rambunctious reports from the front line of Crime & Psychology.

And now the news…

Different universities reconvene at different times, but this week sees a quorum. Your humble correspondent is now teaching no fewer than eight undergraduate courses in Psychology, along with one in Statistics, as well supervising a Masters in Criminology. And they ask me why I don’t do much research any more… That is where you, the wonderful Substack community, come in. Every week, when I prepare something new for your delectation, it helps me feel as if I am doing a bit of research and finding things out. Hell, I am finding things out – and passing them on to you, Crime & Psychology fans! If that fact makes you happy, please remember to Like and Subscribe. It makes a big difference to me, just knowing that my newsletter makes a small difference to you.

Of course, not even the start of term is going to stop this psychologist from scurrying about town in his secondary role as editor of Crimeways magazine, oh no. This week was more furiously frantic than ever before: my boss, the publisher, charged me with tracking down a shadowy fellow seen emerging from his mistress’ apartment late one night. He put all the magazine’s resources at my disposal. You can imagine my difficulty as I tried to look as though I was following orders, while, at the same time, hiding the fact that our half-hidden hallway hobo was no one else but…myself!! Luckily, a film crew was on hand to make a documentary of the entire scandalous affair, and I heartily recommend checking out their efforts in The Big Clock (1948) – an  outstanding, exciting noir available on Amazon Prime. You’ll be glad you did.

You’ll be relieved to learn that I found time during all this pulse-pounding pandemonium to write what you demanded – another scorching screed, destined for immortality. ‘The Causes of Crime’ will be with you at noon, UK time, on Wednesday. You may find there is a  pleasingly Psych 101 quality about this newsletter. I love sharing the word about my subject!

On Tuesday, you’ll be excited to receive the much-expanded second edition of this newsletter’s best-loved feature, the Dictionary of Crime! This edition is about twice as long as the first, and contains even more of the bizarre, tongue-twisting, palette-pounding, weird and wonderful terms you love!

In honour of this week’s theme, then, let’s have five bullet points on the causes of crime:

1.      The Classical School of Criminology dates back to Enlightenment Europe. In keeping with the spirit of those distant times, it sees crime as the result of a conscious, wilful choice on the part of the individual. The criminal is a person who has weighed up the possible outcomes of two different courses of action – one law-abiding, one not so much - and decided in favour of the latter. The purpose of punishment is to make this rational recidivist decide that the righteous path is the rewarding one.

2.      The Positivist School dates back to the great Century of Science – that is, the 1800s - when it seemed that science could solve all of humankind’s ills. Simply find the cause of crime, thought the positivists, eliminate it, and all would be hunky-dory. Early positivists pointed to biology – today we’d speak of the ‘criminal gene’, perhaps. For the positivists, there was no point in trying to deter a criminal from committing a crime that he or she was doomed, by the laws of science, to commit. Rather, the best thing to do with criminals was to lock them away where they couldn’t hurt us. Positivist Criminologists called it ‘Social Defence’.

3.      The modern biopsychosocial model is essentially an update and retread of the Positivist School, but, as you’d expect, infinitely more sciency and subtle. It hauls in elements from various disciplines, but what they all have in common is a scientific approach. Once we’ve accounted for a criminals’ genetic inheritance, upbringing, early learning experiences, brain structures, and perhaps IQ, there’s little left to explain.

4.      The Chicago School, meanwhile, emerged from a background in Sociology. It saw the origins of crime not in the individual, but in the social fabric. Crime, the Chicago School argued, was a response to prevailing social conditions. Certain parts of big cities were naturally criminogenic (meaning that they gave birth to crime). Crime grew like a weed inside a ‘human ecology’ of these areas. The city of Chicago itself made an egregious early example. You can see it above in my wife’s sunglasses.

5.      Marxist criminologists are perhaps poorly named. Their theories come more from Karl Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, than from Marx himself. Be that as it may, Marxist criminologists have, of course, seen crime as an product of the power exercised by the capitalistic system itself, which produced it in the same way that a furniture factory produces furniture or a cheesery produces cheese. Under a capitalist system, property and goods always become concentrated in the hands of the few, and crime is the response of the multitudes to their mechanical marginalisation.

Thank you for reading this Sunday e-mail! Please Like, Share, Subscribe. It helps keep me going, and makes it all worthwhile.

Until next time!