So, what are some of the major reasons for why people commit crimes? The answers are numerous, but they seem to fit into a few different general categories. Here are six major reasons:
1. Losing control of one’s emotions or physiology
There are many stories, very diverse from one another, all of which seem to derive from the lack of control of one’s emotions. Your girlfriend or wife wants to leave you, so you physically assault them, or even kill them in your rage. Someone is arguing with you over issues as mundane as a sporting event, and tempers fly out of control, and before you know it, a fight has broken out, and someone is left in the hospital, and someone is left dead. You don’t think you were treated right, or fairly, at your workplace, and so you decide to take matters into your own hands. Someone keeps harassing you, or bullying you, so you also take the matter into your own hands.
Whatever the case may be, whether it leads to hatred, anger, impatience, revenge, ambition, pride, or other emotional states, losing control of one’s emotional state can lead to reactions that end in crime.
There’s also lack of sexual control – you get extremely sexually aroused, and don’t have someone to take care of your needs, and instead of realizing that it might be better to take care of yourself, you force it on someone – you rape some woman rather than practicing self-control.
Poor judgment may also be included in this category, because if you were better able to practice risk-benefit-consequence analysis, you might have better controlled your behavior.
2. Connections with drugs and alcohol
Perhaps the person is impaired because of too much alcohol, and ends up doing something that they wouldn’t have done without that impaired judgment, which would have left them in a state to more clearly see consequences to their actions, and developed the mindset to fight the feeling or thought. We have, of course, heard many times the story of an abusive father and husband, who are in that state because of being an alcoholic.
Or, there are the people who are addicted to hard street drugs, and don’t have any more money to pay for their next ounce of whatever it is they’re taking, so, in desperation, they rob someone at gunpoint, or rob a store, or attack someone for their money, or burglarize a house, in the hopes of getting that cash they need for that next hit, so as not to go through the pain of withdrawal.
Then, of course, there are the street venders and the more powerful drug lords who, in order to maintain control of their territory, or gain control of someone else’s, decide to perform violent acts, such as murdering their competition, in order to keep their upper hand.
3. Bad influences
We find that many times a person, especially people who are habitual criminal offenders, commit crimes because that is all they know, from the environment that surrounds them, and/or because of the peer influence around them. Perhaps they’re from a bad neighborhood, and the only people they see getting ahead in life, or getting out of the misery of poverty and hopelessness, are the people who do some sort of illegal, or criminal activity. They learn the techniques for burglarizing a property, or stealing a motor vehicle, and get all the “encouragement” they need to go into such endeavors from the people around them.
There are also the young people that feel very threatened by their surroundings, or may have even been attacked or hurt before, maybe on many occasions, and feel they need some protection, and the only protection they seem to find is offered in street gangs, many of which go about committing a plentitude of crimes.
4. Wrong Moral Choices
A good number of the crimes committed by people who aren’t influenced by substance abuse or losing control of their emotions, particularly when it comes to property crimes like theft, larceny, and motor vehicle theft, do so, out of deliberately choosing to do that act, even though it is considered unethical and immoral. Making the wrong moral choices is closely linked to the bad influences mentioned above. In these cases, the person knows that they shouldn’t steal or perform other violent acts, but don’t care, and decide to do it anyways.
5. Mental Disorders
There is no telling how many crimes are done by people who have some kind of mental disorder, one which is difficult to control, even with proper medications or psychological treatments. We are often seeing stories in the news about people who commit violent acts because of a mental illness they have.
Of course, there are different factors that confound the information, distort the numbers, don’t account for different things such as the effects of medications on those people, and substance abuse. One study suggests that it is substance abuse, the abusing of alcohol and using of drugs that lead to much of the mental illness that we see today; this study showed that if we accounted for this substance abuse, the effects of mental illness on causing crime would be minimal.
6. Poverty and Homelessness
There are those that believe that there is a strong connection between poverty and homelessness, and the amount of crime in an area. This theory is known as strain theory, in that social strains on individuals, to achieve upward financial mobility, are causing those individuals to act out in ways that are illegal, since legal means to achieve that upward mobility are not available to them. It was this strain theory of crime that supposedly motivated the Great Society welfare programs to be developed, that eventually became policy under the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960’s.
There seems to be some evidence to suggest that poverty is not a cause of crime, but is reflective of the kind of social behavior that also leads a person to want to commit crimes. In other words, criminal activity has more of a correlation to poverty and homelessness rather than being caused (causation) by it.
Conclusion
These are the six major reasons why crime is committed. Losing control, connections to drugs or alcohol, bad influences, wrong moral choices, mental disorders, or poverty and homelessness, are all reasons why crime is committed. Perhaps focusing on these six reasons can help us to reduce crime rates among those most vulnerable to these six reasons.
