An overview of Psychological Theories of Crime

Criminal behavior has a multitude of theories attempting to explain its origins ranging form the bizarre to the mundane. These include everything from tattoos causing crime, to crime being caused by poor parenting. There are a large number of theories attempting to explain crime through empirical methods from a multitude of disciplines - sociology, biology, and the area of specificity for this paper - psychology. Psychological methods beginning in Aristotle's Nichomachean ethics all the way …

…thought on law and society. Early thought operated off of a principle of moral education in which parents were to provide a basis for the child to be a productive member of society. More modern theories are based cognitive analysis or social psychology. Generally speaking though psychology defines crime through other maladaptive behaviors. But those psychology based theories that attempt to describe criminal behavior have a reasonably strong empirical base when compared to other theories.