I am a Criminologist

I am, or at least I was at one time a criminologist.  By education, with increasingly larger sheepskins also known as diplomas, I am a criminologist.  By employment I am unemployed.  More specifically, I am retired.

I loved sitting on airplanes.  Well, actually I never really did enjoy sitting on airplanes.  I'm not afraid to fly.  I just don't like having to undress in front of crowds at security gates and I detest being herded like cattle.  But, I loved sitting on airplanes next to people who would invariably ask the employment question.  You know the one I'm talking about.  "What do you do for a living?"  I've always wanted to tell people that I was a spy or maybe a hit man on my way to do my next job, but I figured that if I said I was a spy that I would have to tell people what I did as a spy and that I would then have to kill them.  Claiming to be a hit man raises all sorts of red flags.  And, telling people that you are a police officer (when I was a police officer) always brought up the next question: Are you carrying a gun now?  That is an answer that you really don't want to reveal while sitting on an airplane.  Admitting that you are a criminologist sidesteps all those issues, but creates other problems.  Occasionally when you tell people that you are a criminologist you get the same look that you would expect to get if you said that you were an English or a speech professor.  But, most of the time they ask the only other question they can think of.  You also know that question. it is the why-do-people-commit-crimes question.

The honest answer to that question is, "It's complicated," which draws the same response that you would expect to get if you were to answer that you are an English or speech professor.  In order to avoid that "look" and the silence that follows, when I am asked that question I tend to turn the question around on the person and ask in return, "Why do you believe people commit crimes?"

It is amazing to me how people become experts in human behavior and crime when they can hardly tie their own shoes. Just like how everybody is an expert on police work, EVERYBODY is an expert when it comes to crime.  However, a person could say just about anything to explain criminality and be correct.  There is not one single explanation for criminal behavior.

There are some things that may be of interest regarding criminology, though most people, students in particular would disagree about that last statement.  People really don't find hard core criminology interesting.  First, there are two major types of criminologists.  There are those who are engaged in theoretical criminology and the others who are applied criminologists.  Theoretical criminologists work to explain why people commit crimes.  Many of them are in search of the Holy Grail of explanations.  Applied criminologists look to solve the Holy Grail of crime prevention, reduction, and mitigation.  In a way they feed off of each other.  Unfortunately, both camps tend to heavily rely upon research based on prison inmates--those who have already committed crimes.  People like me believe that if we want to prevent and mitigate crime that research should be conducted on those who do not commit crime.

Just as there are two major camps of approach to criminology, there are sub-specialists of criminologists.  For example, there are those who specialize in penology and others who specialize in vitimology.  My good friend Susan Korsgren is a victimologist.  She knows things about victimization that if she told them openly that she would likely be victimized herself.  What she knows is not politically correct.  Nonetheless, it is correct.

Then there are those who study the effect of law on crime.  For example, they look to see how ever increasingly numbers of laws makes criminals one day when the exact same behavior a day earlier was lawful.  For example, New York's Safe Act, which made certain types of semiautomatic guns illegal made criminals out of a whole class of really good, honest, law-abiding citizens with the simple stroke of a pen.  There are also those who who specialize in the study of delinquent behavior.  To this criminologist, delinquent behavior is behavior that consists of acts which if committed by an adult would be classified as a crime.  It comes from the idea that children under a certain age are incapable of committing a crime and another idea that was popularized by a person by the name of Edwin Schur who said that we do more harm to children by putting them through the criminal justice system than if we did nothing at all to them.  The study of juvenile delinquency can be broken down even further by asserting that the reasons for committing crimes by girls and the treatment for girls engaged in delinquent behavior is different from boys.  My daughter Nanon Talley falls into this area of expertise.

Others study the justice system while other criminologists study the justice process.  Some criminologists are the functional equivalent of bean counters or number crunchers.  They are the crime accountants.  They look at numbers.  Statistics.  They make statistical predictions based on data collection.  Other number crunchers report the numbers on countless reams of paper showing all the sorts of criminal demographic data.  They tell us what crime is like in large metropolitan areas, small villages, and everything in between.  They look at crime by state and by region, by gender and age and ethnicity and specific crime classification.  And more.  And more.  And more.  Their reporting is so massive that it would take years for one person alone to digest a single year's worth of data.

Other criminologists look at police response to criminal behavior.

Criminologists also teach.  no, they don't teach people how to commit crime.  Well, not directly anyway.  They teach about crime either in a general sense or in specific topics or even sub-tobics.

The area that people think they are most fascinated with is that of theoretical criminology.  The problem is that there is no one general theory that identifies why people commit crime.  Theorists have tried but the best they can do is to add to the body of knowledge about why people commit crime.  Such sharing of knowledge is done through publishing in professional journals, and if you are curious (and even you aren't curious), yes, I have published in professional journals.  When theorists publish they publish in areas that are of specific interest to them and use the resources of poor graduate students to help them with research and writing.

There is little agreement among criminologists as to the reason why people commit crime; however, there is agreement in one specific area.  This one area of agreement is the universal rejection of a particular theory.  In layman's terms, the rejected theory is "The Devil Made Me do it Theory".  This theory was the prevailing theory during the Dark Ages and was rejected during the Age of Enlightenment.  It was rejected because we cannot prove through the scientific method the existence of the devil or God.  I reject it for an entirely different reason.  I reject it because I believe that God and Satan can and do invite, persuade, entice, encourage, and tempt people into their camps, but because of a little thing we call agency--our freedom to choose--neither God nor Satan can force us to be good or bad.

Theoretical criminologists fall into one of two major camps.  There are those who champion the cause of Choice or Rational Choice Theory and the other camp is composed of positivists.  Positivists claim that crime is brought on by social, economical, psychological, genetical, medical, or even dietary causes (to name only a few of the causes they espouse).

Most positivists stick to their individual camps and rarely consider other explanations for crime causation.  The opportunities for research in any of the positive camps are so rich that it would be easy to spend a lifetime exploring their own individual ideas.

I guess there is another area that choice theorists and positive theorists agree upon and that is the necessity to continue research and to report findings.  That is why they are constantly writing and why you find them at major universities.  I am grateful that I was never in a publish or perish environment even though I found satisfaction in publishing.

As a criminologist I adopt both camps.  I lean toward Rational Choice over Positive Criminology at about a 60-40 to 80-20 ratio.  In other words, I believe people for the most part choose to commit crimes, but that choice is influenced (not controlled) by those factors I previously mentioned.  I tend to reject the notion that there is only one of those factors at a time that influence choice.  There could easily be social and economic reasons that contribute at the same time to a person's choice to commit crime.

Applied criminologists are grateful for the work of theoretical criminologists, but they take a much more practical approach to crime.  They focus on crime prevention and mitigation.  They look at the "why" answers and then ask, "Therefore, what?"  They ask, "Given everything we know about crime, what can we do to keep an individual from being victimized?  What can we do to keep a person from offending?"  They realize that no social fix exists.  They know that no amount of midnight basketball or removal of Twinkies from grocery store shelves will stop a person from committing crime.  And, so they focus on the obvious.  As a result, applied criminologists have identified a very simple formula to aid us all in crime prevention and mitigation.  They simply say that in order for a crime to occur that you need three things that all come together at the same time.  For crime to occur you must have (1) a motivated offender, (2) a suitable target, and (3) the absence of a capable guardian.  I'm not going to spend a lot of time elaborating on the formula mainly because by now you cannot see straight.  But also, I figure anybody still reading this is smart enough to figure out the implications on their own.  But, to help you out just a little, in order to understand the full effect of these three parts of the formula you need to consider each of the three on a sliding scale.  For example, you can reduce the motivation of an offender by ramping up the areas of capable guardians (guard dogs, NFL linebackers--just don't get an abuser, alarm systems, etc.) and by not presenting yourself as a suitable target.  Don't be walking alone at night in darkened parking lots around bars, stay sober, walk in a crowd of friends, walk to your car with keys in hand, look in the back seat of the car before you get in it, keep valuables locked in your trunk and out of sight, lock the doors to your house, put in motion sensor lighting, keep shrubbery trimmed around your house so people cannot hide behind it.  You know, all the common sense stuff.  Oh, and you should listen for the intense music in the background that is always playing just before somebody jumps out of hiding and grabs you and says, "Gotcha!"  All of these things help to de-motivate offenders.

And so, if you have actually read this far you may have learned something, which by definition makes me a teacher relative to crime, which makes me a criminologist.  Still.

I am a criminologist, or at least at one time I was a criminologist.