Criminal behavior: types, forms, situations and causes

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Don't condemn those who set foot on the "crooked path". Perhaps at a certain moment they did not see another way out of the current situation, or maybe they just wanted to know what kind of criminal behavior it is. Feel the taste of freedom and adventure. In any case, a person has reasons for such actions, we will talk about them today.

Criminal activity

Criminal behavior is nothing more than an external manifestation of criminal activity. This activity consists of two steps:

1. Motivational. The emerging needs become motives for illegal behavior. Here the main role is played by the personal characteristics of the subject and the choice of the object of the criminal act. At this stage, researchers can predict the possible outcomes of criminal behavior.
2. Implementation of the solution. The subject chooses ways, means and tools to achieve the goal, thereby realizing criminal intentions.

In criminal behavior, the result of actions and intended goals are notalways match. This can be explained by both objective (not dependent on the person) and subjective reasons. Therefore, we can say that criminal activity is a combination of subjective and objective aspects of actions.

In every criminal situation, there are always unobservable (i.e. psychological) elements that greatly influence illegal actions.

Not a person, but actions

Criminal behavior has always aroused undying interest in various scientific fields. The efforts of researchers were mainly aimed at studying the criminal personality. In many psychological directions, attempts have been made to explain the premises of criminal behavior. The only thing they agreed with each other was the thesis that criminal actions appear due to the painful outcomes of conflict situations, crises in the process of individualization (K. Jung), socialization (E. Erickson), construction of a life scenario (E. Berne). Simply put, a criminal personality is a person with an unsuccessful process of forming personality and life guidelines. True, today this direction is recognized by many researchers as non-constructive for several reasons:

1. The concept of "criminal personality" is convenient if you have to study an already formed (accomplished) criminal, and not a potential deviant.
2. The definition of "criminal personality" is not constructive in itself, since it implies the existence of an impregnable personality,and this contradicts the idea that the basis of illegal behavior (lie, aggression) is present in every person.
3. Personality cannot be an object of knowledge. Of course, a person can be studied partially, but a person should not be the existential center of the world.

Therefore, it is most logical to study not the personality of the criminal, but criminal behavior, which was originally laid down in the basis of human existence.

Fear of death

Criminal (criminal) behavior is often destructive. Bertalanffy believes that deviant forms of behavior exist in a person from the very beginning. These forms are due to the ability to abstract thinking. Thanks to this ability, a person can realize the finiteness of his life. Of course, he is not able to consciously determine the fear of death, but it is there and has a great influence on life.

The fact that existence has a finish line makes life meaningless. The anxiety of death leads to the anxiety of the meaninglessness and emptiness of existence. But since anxiety is a diffuse and pointless experience, a person cannot understand what he is actually afraid of. Therefore, he tries to find the source of his fears, subjectively interpreting harmless things as threatening. This is one of the reasons for criminal behavior. Simply put, the willingness to break the law is determined by the nature of human existence.

Formation and implementation of criminal intentions

The fundamental factor of criminal behavior is the interaction of the individualwith habitat. Separately, the mental status of a person should be considered. Psychologists have created this causal chain:

1. Alienation.
2. Increasing anxiety.
3. Formation of a motive.
4. Criminal act.

Alienation was understood as a withdrawal from interpersonal interaction with other people. In turn, this can lead to a lack of any ideas about how people should behave in a given environment.

As a result of alienation, internal anxiety increases. A person feels anxiety, and the environment seems to him cold and aggressive. This condition can cause aggressive responses. Social norms and rules begin to be perceived as belonging to a group to which the alienated person does not attribute himself. The lack of empathy, when a person is not able to empathize emotionally, also has a criminogenic value.

Varieties of Alienation

In psychology, there are two types of alienation:

• From society and its values. As a result, the individual begins to adopt negative moral ideas and examples of parental behavior. An adult person reacts to any event according to the pattern that he learned in childhood, and, as a rule, the child borrows this pattern from the adults that surround him.
• Psychological alienation. The reason for this phenomenon is the emotional rejection of the parents of their child.

If there is no warm emotional relationship in the family, thisoften becomes the cause of deviant (criminal) behavior.

The absence of such relationships gives rise to the development of tendencies that underlie illegal behavior. Of course, they do not affect by themselves, but, when faced with human nature, they increase the anxiety factor, forming a special worldview.

Alarm

According to recent research, all criminals suffer from high anxiety, which consists of anxiety, self-doubt and a sense of impending danger. Such states are stable, but from time to time they can rise or fall. In any case, the motives of the crime are dictated precisely by this quality. By committing crimes, a person tries to preserve himself as a person and recreate his integrity. He's just trying to assert his right to exist.

Destroy threat carriers

Usually criminals claim this right at the expense of others. If an individual feels that he is in an environment that threatens him, then you can remove your unconscious fear by moving other people away from you, and even better, by destroying the carriers of the threat. It is the latter option that is subjectively considered more beneficial, because if there are no such carriers, the individual will immediately solve all his psychological problems and existence will finally make sense.

Also a common cause of crime is the lust for power, although the underlying meaning is the same - by controlling the carriers of the threat, a person partially removestake off the tension. Therefore, in general, we can say that the main part of crimes is subjective in nature - a person protects himself from, as it seems to him, threatening factors.

Types of criminal behavior

Today it has a fairly large number of varieties:

• Professional. The main purpose of the crime is to obtain the necessary means for subsistence. The criminal prepares for the offense in advance, and for him a criminal career is the main life goal.
• Criminal. These include dangerous state crimes, currency counterfeiting, premeditated murder, and vehicle theft.
• Housekeeping. Typically, “economic criminals” evade paying taxes, sell raw materials from enterprises underground, carry out large-scale banking scams, etc.

• Self-interested. The main goal of the criminal is to get rich at the expense of other people's property.
• Organized. Crimes are carried out by a group of people, this group has its own hierarchy, each participant is responsible for his "zone of action".
• Political crime. Abuse of power, elimination of political rivals, organization of terrorist acts and contract killings.

Form of degradation

Behavior in criminal situations can be of several types. In the first case, the offender treats the victim with excessive cruelty, his violent actions cannot be predicted, the objects and subjects of the attack are scattered, and the motive for the crime is difficult to predict.identify.

In the second case, violent crimes arise from the shift of aggression towards frustration. For example, the offender was dissatisfied with something in life, and he had a suicidal tendency. But this behavior was transformed into aggression directed at a certain object, and the one who initially had nothing to do with the discontent of the criminal turned into “the scourge of his life.”

Another form of criminal behavior is a lack of motivation or an unmotivated offense committed through negligence.

Thus, it can be said that the propensity to delinquency is part of human nature. It's just that someone is able to suppress his anxiety with interesting activities, meeting new people, having fun, and it seems to someone that the whole world is against him.