When I began working as a clinical research psychologist, I believed that people

turned to crime largely because of factors outside of themselves. I regarded cr

iminals mainly as victims. Working with my mentor, Dr. Yochelson, we eventually
found this view to be completely in error. We became increasingly skeptical of s
elf-serving stories in which criminals justified what they did by casting blame
on others. As we challenged their accounts and interviewed those who knew them w
ell, they became more forthcoming. We modified some ideas, discarded others comp
letely, and discovered new topics for investigation. The evidence that we accumu
lated by spending thousands of hours interviewing criminals from a variety of ba
ckgrounds compelled us to take our sacred theoretical cows to pasture and slaugh
ter them. We called ourselves the reluctant converts because we were so hesitant t
o abandon our theories, beliefs, and what we had learned in our professional tra
ining about why people turn to crime. Once we ceased perceiving the criminal as
a victim, a new vista opened. Unfettered by why questions, we turned to developing
an understanding of how criminals think.
We took a scratch-on-the-table approach. You do not have to know why a table is
scratched. Rather than be concerned about how it was damaged, you need to examin
e the table to determine what it is made of and assess its condition in order to
determine whether it is restorable. How does a criminal make decisions? What ar
e his expectations of himself and of other people? How is it that he can pray in
church at ten o clock but, two hours later, terrorize a homeowner during a breakand-entry? Behavior is a product of thinking. By focusing on thinking patterns r
ather than causes, we eventually laid the foundation for a method to help offend
ers change their thinking and behavior
The search for the causes of crime is unending and is somewhat comparable to sci
entists efforts to understand the causes of cancer. We think that if we discover
the cause of what baffles and terrifies us, whatever the scourge is, it can be e
liminated. Unlike with cancer, there should be no expectation that even if we su
cceed in identifying the root causes of criminality, we will discover a cure. Rath
er than generate successful strategies to confront and combat crime, the preoccu
pation with a search for causes has served as a distraction from understanding w
ho the criminal is.
A view that has persisted for more than a century is that criminals are victims
of sociological, psychological, or biological factors over which they have littl
e or perhaps no control. Some sociologists maintain that crime is an understanda
ble, adaptive, and even normal response to conditions of grueling poverty that d
eprive people of opportunity and hope. They also cite the stressful, competitive
life in the suburbs as contributory. Some attribute criminality to misplaced va
lues in society that alienate citizens from communities, the workplace, and the
government. Psychologists emphasize the role of early experience in the family a
nd point to parental deficiencies as causative of criminal conduct. In the ninet
eenth century, the theory was advanced that criminals were born constitutionally
inferior. Now, in the twenty-first century, scientists are returning to that idea
as research findings point to a biological basis for criminal conduct.