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52 Fed. Probation 18 (1988)
Crime, Popular Mythology, and Personal Responsibility

handle is hein.journals/fedpro52 and id is 20 raw text is: Crime, Popular Mythology, and Personal Responsibility BY GLENN D. WALTERS AND THOMAS W. WHITE* RIME HAS been with us since the dawn of civilization. From the time society first established standards by which to govern behavior, there have been those individuals who have elected to disregard these rules, laws, and dictates; yet, we remain largely ignorant about the causes of norm-violating behavior. It is our intent in writing this article to present a perspective that differs markedly from the majority of approaches tradi- tionally used to explain crime and understand criminals. Our data, as well as our experience, sug- gest that without a more meaningful, rational ap- proach to understanding serious criminality, any at- tempts we make to control and remediate criminal behavior will be ineffective, if not counterproductive. Defining Criminality Before proceeding it is important that we discuss how criminality will be defined in this article. For the most part we will be focusing on individuals who com- mit crimes as part of an overall lifestyle. According to our definition, a criminal is someone who has developed a lifestyle characterized by irresponsi- bility, self-indulgence, interpersonal intrusiveness, and a propensity for social rule-breaking. In this con- text, a single arrest or conviction, even if serious, is not necessarily viewed. as indicative of criminality since it does not reflect a continued pattern of viola- tion. While not minimizing the seriousness of individual crimes or the problems created by individuals who do not exhibit lifestyle criminality, we would like to focus our attention in this article on individuals who commit the types of crimes which are of greatest concern to society (i.e., those in which there is clear victimization of others). Any individual may exhibit, to a greater or lesser degree, one or several of the characteristics associated with lifestyle criminality (irresponsibility, *Dr. Walters is a staff psychologist and Dr. White is chief of Psychology Services at the United States Penitentiary, Leaven- worth, Kansas. The assertions contained herein are the private views of the authors and should not be construed as reflecting the views of the Department of Justice or Federal Bureau of Prisons. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Glenn D. Walters, Psychology Services, United States Peniten- tiary, Leavenworth, Kansas 66048. self-indulgence, interpersonal intrusiveness, social rule-breaking) and, as a result, find himself in a prob- lematic life situation, to include conflict with the criminal justice system. However, when we speak about criminality we are referring to a lifestyle characterized by all four of these factors interacting in a manner which is multiplicative, rather than additive, in nature. The end result is an individual who is qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different from his noncriminal counterpart. A Survey of Perceptions It is our view that not only has there been a fundamental misunderstanding about criminals, but that our acceptence of the unverified lore on crime and criminals is preventing us from making much progress in the area. We feel that these erroneous beliefs are rather consistently held by many people, influencing their attitudes about the law-breaking behavior of criminals. To obtain an objective understanding of what people perceive to be the primary causes of crime, we asked university-based criminal justice experts and adults taking a com- munity college psychology course (general population group) to list the factor or factors they viewed as causing criminality. Analyzable responses were received from 27 criminal justice experts and 32 general population adults. Additionally, to provide a base for comparison, 97 consecutively sampled criminal offenders incarcerated in a maximum security Federal prison were asked to describe their views on the cause(s) of criminality in their own lives. Results for all three groups can be found in table 1. Although several very interesting differences sur- faced when these three groups were compared, only two of these differences were statistically significant (i.e., biopsychosocial model differences between experts and subjects in the inmate and general population samples) when the rather conservative Bonferroni procedure (Larzelere and Mulaik, 1977) was used, suggesting, as we suspected, that there is a fair amount of agreement as to the causes of criminal behavior when divergent groups are com- pared. Of the various explanations, the sociological ones were by far the most popular, with particular emphasis on family and social class variables. This

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