Do not blame those who set foot on the “crooked path”. Perhaps at some point they did not see another way out of the current situation, or maybe they just wanted to find out what kind of criminal behavior it was. Feel the taste of freedom and adventurism. In any case, a person has reasons for such actions; we’ll talk about them today.
Criminal activity
Criminal behavior is nothing more than an external manifestation of criminal activity. This activity consists of two stages:
- Motivational. Emerging needs become the motives for illegal behavior. Here, the main role is played by the personal characteristic of the subject and the choice of the object of the criminal action. At this point, researchers can predict the possible outcomes of criminal behavior.
- The implementation of the solution. The subject chooses methods, means and tools to achieve the goal, thereby realizing criminal intentions.
In criminal behavior, the result of actions and intended goals do not always coincide. This can be explained by both objective (independent of a 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 significantly affect illegal actions.
Not a person, but actions
Criminal behavior has always evoked undying interest in various scientific fields. The efforts of the researchers were mainly aimed at studying the criminal personality. In many psychological areas, 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 arise because of painful outcomes of conflict situations, crises in the process of individualization (C. Jung), socialization (E. Erickson), and construction of a life scenario (E. Berne). Simply put, a criminal personality is a person with an unsuccessful process of forming an individual and life guidelines. True, today this direction is recognized by many researchers as non-constructive for several reasons:
- The concept of “criminal identity” is convenient if you have to study the already formed (held) criminal, and not a potential deviant.
- The definition of “criminal personality” is not constructive in itself, since it implies the existence of an unlawful person, and this contradicts the idea that the basis of unlawful behavior (lies, aggression) is present in every person.
- A person cannot be an object of knowledge. Of course, a person can be studied in part, but the person should not be the existential center of the world.
Therefore, it is most logical to study not the identity of the criminal, but criminal behavior, which was originally laid down in the basis of human being.
Fear of death
Criminal (criminal) behavior is often destructive. Bertalanffy believes that deviant forms of behavior exist in a person initially. These forms are caused by 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 he is and has a great influence on life.
The fact that existence has a finish line makes life meaningless. The anxiety of death leads the alarm of meaninglessness and emptiness of existence. But since anxiety is a diffuse and pointless experience, a person cannot understand what he, in fact, is afraid of. Therefore, he tries to find the source of his fears, subjectively treating harmless things as threatening. This is one of the reasons for criminal behavior. Simply put, the willingness to break the law is due to the characteristics of human existence.
Formation and implementation of criminal intentions
A fundamental factor in criminal behavior is the interaction of the individual with the environment. The mental status of a person should also be considered separately. Psychologists have created such a causal chain:
- Alienation.
- Increasing anxiety.
- The formation of motive.
- Criminal act.
Alienation was understood as avoiding interpersonal interaction with other people. In turn, this can lead to the absence of any ideas about how people should behave in a particular 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 relate to himself. The lack of empathy, when a person is not able to empathize emotionally, is also of criminal importance.
Varieties of alienation
In psychology, two types of alienation are distinguished:
- From society and its values. As a result, the individual begins to adopt negative moral ideas and examples of parental behavior. An adult responds to any event that occurs according to a pattern that he learned in childhood, and, as a rule, a child borrows this pattern from adults that surround him.
- Psychological alienation. The reason for this phenomenon is emotional rejection by the parents of their child.
If the family does not have warm emotional relationships, this often becomes the cause of deviant (criminal) behavior.
The absence of such relationships gives rise to the development of trends that underlie illegal behavior. Of course, they do not affect on their own, but, when faced with human nature, they increase the anxiety factor, forming a special worldview.
Anxiety
According to recent studies, all criminals suffer from high anxiety, which consists in anxiety, self-doubt and a sense of impending danger. Such conditions are stable, but from time to time they can increase or decrease. In any case, the motives of the crime are dictated by precisely this quality. By committing crimes, a person tries to preserve himself as a person and recreate his integrity. He is simply 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 a threatening environment, then he can remove his unconscious fear by moving other people away from himself, or even better, by destroying the carriers of the threat. It is the latter option in the subjective sense that is considered more advantageous, because if there are no such carriers, the individual will immediately solve all his psychological problems and existence will finally make sense.
The thirst for power is also a common cause of crime, although the underlying meaning is the same - managing people who carry the threat, partially relieves themselves of tension. Therefore, in general, we can say that the bulk of the 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 of subsistence. The criminal prepares for the offense in advance, and for him a criminal career is his main life goal.
- Criminal These include dangerous state crimes, currency falsification, willful killings, theft of vehicles.
- Household. Typically, "business criminals" evade taxes, clandestinely sell raw materials from enterprises, carry out major banking scams, etc.
- Selfish. The main goal of the offender 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. The abuse of power, the elimination of political rivals, the organization of terrorist acts and contract killings.
Degradation form
Behavior in criminal situations can be of several types. In the first case, the offender is overly cruel to the victim, his violent actions cannot be predicted, objects and objects of attack are scattered, and the motive of the crime is difficult to identify.
In the second case, violent crimes arise due to a shift in aggression towards frustration. For example, the criminal was not satisfied with something in his life, and he showed a tendency to suicide. But this behavior was transformed into aggression directed at a specific object, and one who initially had nothing to do with the criminal’s discontent turned into a “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 for delinquency is part of human nature. It’s just that someone is able to suppress their anxiety by interesting activities, new acquaintances, fun pastime, but someone thinks that the whole world is against him.