What is crime (what is to be explained by a theory of crime causation)?

Crimes are actions that break the rules of law. The law is codified moral guidance for what we should and should not do in different circumstances. Explaining crime is ultimately a matter of explaining why some people perceive and choose to break a rule of the law as a response to a certain motivation in a particular circumstance. Focusing on explaining the rule-breaking rather than the criminalised act (e. g., using violence may be legal in some but not other circumstances and this may vary between jurisdictions and change over time) avoids the problem that what constitutes a crime can change from one day to the next through a political decision (because it is the rule-breaking – not the act – that is to be explained). It also means that its explanation applies to norm violations more generally since violations of the rules of the law is only a special case of violating rules of conduct^[7]. There is, in principle, no difference between explaining why someone is cheating on their partner or why someone shoots a member of a rival gang. The action process (motivation – perceived action alternatives – action choices) is the same, although, and crucially, its content varies greatly.

What moves people to action (and to commit acts of crime)?

People are the source of their actions, but their causes are situational. People act as they do because of who they are (propensities) and the setting (incitements) in which they take part. Since people are different and settings are different, their specific combination tends to favour the perception of certain action alternatives in relation to the motivations (temptations, provocations) experienced in the circumstance, against which background the person (habitually or deliberately) makes their action-choices. Acts of crime are ultimately a result of the perception and choice of crime as an acceptable action alternative in response to a specific motivation in the circumstance.

People are rule-guided creatures. People act in response to a motivation, but their choice of action is guided by their personal morality (their rules of conduct) as applied to the moral norms (sensed behavioural expectations) of the setting in which they take part, tempered by key inner and outer action-controls, their ability to exercise self-control (inner control) and the settings deterrent qualities (outer control). Whether an act of crime is perceived and chosen is ultimately the result of the actor’s application of their personal morality to the moral context of the setting, net of the influence from any relevant and effective actioncontrols.

Why do people vary in their crime propensity and exposure to criminogenic settings’?

People develop and act in response to the content of the particular environments in which they take part, as conveyed in their interactions with the people they meet and socialise with, the activities they take part in, and the media they consume. People vary (and change) in the environments in which they partake – the kinds of people, activities and media they encounter and engage with – and this is a central part of the explanation of why they develop different crime propensities (as an outcome of the formation of their crime-relevant personal morality and ability to exercise self-control) and are differently exposed to criminogenic settings in their everyday life (settings whose moral norms and lack of deterrent qualities may incentivise acts of crime).

What developmental processes affect stability and change in people’s crime propensity and exposure to criminogenic settings?

The psychoecological processes of moral education and cognitive nurturing form and shape people’s crime-relevant morality and capacity for self-control (affecting their crime propensity). Crucial to crime relevant moral education is the extent to which the content of the environments (people, activities, media) in which people takes part justify, excuse, tolerate or ignore crime, or particular kinds of crimes, and thereby contribute to their acceptability and normalisation (see further, Wikström et al., 2024, pp. 66–90); while central to cognitive nurturing is the extent to which the environments in which the person partakes (e. g., family and school environments) provide naturally occurring training in such things as problem-solving, concentration, patience and restraint, affecting their ability to self-control^[8] (see further, Wikström et al., 2024, pp. 90–93).

The socioecological processes of social and self-selection condition people’s exposure to criminogenic environments (settings incentivising or normalising crime, settings that sometimes overlap). Social selection^[9] refers to the age-graded cultural (rule-based) and structural (resource-based) social forces that favour or constrain people’s access to and partaking in particular kinds of environments (manifested in general patterns of age and social group differentiation in environmental exposure). The, so called, ›birth lottery‹ is the strongest (most deterministic) example of social selection, people have no influence on the environments into which they are born. As people progress in life, they will develop an increasing, albeit differently efficacious, capacity to influence the course of their own life through self-selection. Self-selection refers to people’s competence and preference-based active navigation of their broader environment within the imagined and real constraints of social selection. People’s differential exposure to criminogenic settings (settings that instantly incentivise or gradually normalise crime) may be seen as an outcome of the combined workings of processes of social and self-selection, explaining, for example, why some young people from the same family, living in the same neighbourhood and going to the same school, may develop different lifestyles and, relatedly, different experiences of being exposed to criminogenic settings (see further, Wikström et al., 2024, pp. 93–104).

The outlined psychoecological and socioecological processes may be viewed as (ecologically related) developmental causal pathways in which past experiences set the stage for present influences which, in turn, set the stage for future influences. The development of a career of serious and persistent crime involvement may commonly be characterised as a slippery slope, where one thing leads to another (e. g., a gradually increasing exposure to criminogenic environments and an amplified crime propensity causing an escalating level of crime involvement), highlighting the need for pre or early career intervention to be a central part of policy and prevention if one wants to counter the development of pathways of serious and persistent crime.

What is the role of social context for the developmental processes?

People do not act and develop in a cultural and structural social vacuum. The psychoecological processes (moral education, cognitive nurturing) are context-dependent for their content and efficacy. The same holds for the socioecological processes of social- and self-selection. Nations vary in their moral climate (shared behavioural standards and expectations and their social homogeneity) and structural conditions (the level and distribution of human, social and financial capitals). This constitutes the broader social context in which the developmental processes operate and draw upon for their content and efficacy, with clear implications for the general (and social segment specific) development of crime relevant content, its efficacy of influence and expression. Importantly, while the suggested developmental processes are supposed to be universal, their social contexts are not.^[10]

Motivation – goal directed attention.

People act for a reason (e. g., they wish to get, experience, or achieve something or they react to something). What motivates individuals in a circumstance may differ. People vary in their desires (wants, needs) and commitments and in their sensitivities. In their everyday life they confront opportunities to fulfil their desires or to honor their commitments which may create temptation (e. g., an urge to do something desired or promised). People will also encounter frictions (external unwanted interferences) in their daily life that may activate their sensitivities creating provocation (e. g., feelings of upset or anger that may favour confrontational responses). Temptations and provocations are the main motivational forces initiating goal-directed attention. Motivation is a necessary but not sufficient factor in the explanation of people’s actions (including their acts of crime). Motivation is the reason for acting, while morality affects its expression^[12].

Perception of action alternatives – the moral filtering.

What action alternatives emerge as acceptable responses to a specific motivation (temptation, provocation), and if that involves an act of crime (rule-breaking), depends on the moral filtering that spontaneously occurs when people apply their personal morality (rules of conduct) to the moral context (sensed behavioural expectations) of the setting in which they take part^[13]. If crime does not appear as an action alternative there will be no crime, with the important implication for crime prevention policy and practice that successfully attacking the processes that normalise crime (rule-breakings) as an action alternative in response to particular motivations is the most effective form of crime prevention (something that crime prevention rarely has as its focus). Importantly, people do not choose their action-alternatives (they just emerge), but they choose from among the action-alternatives they perceive.

The process of choice.

The fact that people choose their actions from the action alternatives they perceive in relation to a motivation suggests, that the perception of action alternatives is more fundamental to the explanation of their actions than the process of choice. The perception-choice process may be predominantly habitual (only perceiving one potent action alternative that is automatically chosen) or deliberative (perceiving different action alternatives that require some level of decision-making^[14]). When people act out of habit, their choice is pre-determined (they act as they normally do in the circumstance without giving it much thought), when they deliberate, they exercise (constrained) ›free will‹, i. e., actively choose freely among perceived action alternatives^[15]. Habitual behaviour is most likely when people act in familiar environments responding to familiar problems. A lot of human action is likely to be automated, although we know little about how important habits are for people’s crimes, and hence for their criminal careers, although it is easy to see that habit often may play a role in things like the occurrence of traffic crimes and partner violence (to mention a few examples). It is plausible that crime habit formation is most common among crimes (rule-breakings) that are committed regularly in similar circumstances.

Fig. 1: An outline of the basic situational model of SATs explanation of the occurrence of crime events and the key elements of its PC-process.

When people deliberate, action-controls may influence their decision, when they act out of habit they will not. People’s ability to exercise self-control, i. e., their executive functions based^[16] capacity to act in accordance with their own morality when externally challenged, is the prime source of (inner) control (peer pressure is a prime example of an external challenge). The deterrent qualities of the setting, its capacity (by creating fear or worry of consequences^[17]) to make people act in accordance with its moral norms when they consider a rule-breaking, is the prime source of (external) control. Importantly, action controls only affect people’s crime choices when they see crime as an action alternative and deliberate over whether or not to select this option for action (the SAT principle of the conditional relevance of controls). The main implication of this for crime prevention policy and practise is the importance of advancing strategy and methods with the aim (a) to counteract the emergence of, and to break existing, crime habits and (b) to affect people’s crime choices by influencing the efficacy of action-controls.

Fig. 2:

The Drivers of Criminal Careers (a series of crime events) illustrated.

Adapted from Wikström (2019b)

Summarising the proposed explanation of criminal careers and their drivers.

The SAT based explanation of criminal careers as a series of crime events discussed in this paper can briefly be summarised as follows (illustrated in Figure 2):

1. Explaining criminal careers. Stability and changes in people’s crime propensity – based on the crime-relevant content of their personal morality and their ability to exercise self-control – and in their criminogenic exposure – based on the crime relevant moral norms (behavioural expectations) and their enforcement in the settings in which they take part and experience – is what jointly and interactively explains peoples’ criminal careers (their crime trajectories) and its key characteristics.

2. Explaining the drivers of criminal careers (the causes of the causes). The psychoecological processes of moral education and cognitive nurturing – affecting stability and changes in people’s crime propensity – and the socioecological processes of social selection and self-selection – affecting stability and changes in people’s criminogenic exposure – are the drivers (the causes of the causes) of stability and change in the factors causing crime events, providing an explanation for why people vary and change in their crime propensity and criminogenic exposure.

3. Explaining the content and efficacy of the drivers of criminal careers (the role of social context). The general and age-graded content and efficacy of the discussed crime-relevant developmental processes depend on the broader social context in which they are situated and operate – the particular historically formed cultural (moral climate) and structural (resource distributive) features of society and its various social segments – and this explains why the content and efficacy of the crime relevant developmental processes may vary between countries and among their social segments.

The causes of criminal careers are best studied as matched (concurrent) developments of people’s crime propensity, criminogenic exposures and crime involvement

A common argument in DLC criminology is the need to lag explanatory factors to establish causal order. However, because crime event causation is situational and longitudinal data collection typically is done on an annual or longer interval basis it does not make much sense to use lagged data (crime event causation is rather a question of minutes than of years). In fact, it makes the causality problem worse. Given that the causes of crime events are situational and that a criminal career is a series of crime events it makes much more sense to study how well explanatory factors temporally match (mirror) the development of crime involvement rather than analysing them as lagged. Ideally one would like to match people’s crime propensity and criminogenic exposure at the exact points in time of the crime events but there is to my knowledge no longitudinal study that has effectively achieved this, and it would obviously be practically difficult and very costly to do so, especially over any longer period of time^[19]. The second-best solution, although not wholly unproblematic, is to study as closely as possible matched developments of explanatory factors and the outcome (which in practice often mean measured and matched on a yearly basis^[20]), preferably justifying the selection of explanatory variables by the findings from situational research demonstrating their likely causal relevance in the explanation of crime events (further on this problem and how we have handled it in the PADS+ longitudinal study, see, Wikström et al., 2024, pp. 8–9, pp. 156–162).

There is a need to better measure the crime relevant moral and cognitively nurturing content of the environments in which people develop and act, to better enable the study of the role of the psychoecological processes of moral education and cognitive nurturing for people’s crime propensity.

DLC criminology is generally strong in describing the social characteristics of people’s developmental context, e. g., the key social features of their family, school and leisure environments, such as their resources (e. g., disadvantage), relationships (e. g., cohesion) and functioning (e. g., monitoring) and its statistical associations with the subject’s crime involvement^[21]. What DLC criminology has been less good at is to capture the crime relevant moral and cognitively nurturing content of the social environments in which the subjects take part and develop, something that is crucial, I would argue, for the understanding of the processes of crime relevant moral education and cognitive nurturing and, therefore, for the understanding of the development of and changes to people’s crime propensity. Central to the crime relevant moral content of social environments (as transmitted by the people, activities and media encountered) is the extent to which they in the immediate term may incentivise, or in the longer-term may help to normalise, acts of crime (rule-breakings) by justifying, excusing, tolerating or ignoring their commission or intended commission^[22]. Some measures commonly used in DLC criminology, such as ›peer delinquency‹ and ›parent’s criminality‹ may be seen as markers of exposure to potentially crime relevant moral content^[23], but there is a need to more directly and comprehensively measure the crime relevant moral content of the environments to which people are exposed. When it comes to cognitive nurturing it is primarily a question of aiming to measure the extent to which people (and especially young people^[24]) experience natural training in their daily life (through their activities and person interactions) of such things as problem-solving, concentration, patience and restrain which may strengthen their ability to exercise self-control (on the basis of their inherited cognitive capability). While the study of the social characteristics of environments (e. g., resources, relationships and functioning) may say something about conditions potentially affecting the efficacy of processes of moral education and cognitive nurturing, they say little about their moral and cognitively nurturing content^[25], the latter being crucial to the understanding of environmental influences on people’s crime and criminal careers.

There is a need to better measure people’s exposure to different kinds of environments, its age-graded changes, and the socioecological process that are implicated in affecting people’s differential and changing environmental exposures.

The ecology of people’s lives and its age-graded changes (the people, activities and media they are exposed to, interact with, and are influenced by in their daily life) is crucial for the understanding of environmental influences on their actions and development, including their acts of crime and criminal careers. This is a very difficult area to properly investigate, especially longitudinally, but an area whose methodological improvement has a potentially high pay-off by providing new important insights in our understanding and testing of the role of the environment and its influences on the development and changes in people’s crime propensity and criminogenic exposure, and the socioecological processes that influence this exposure^[26]. In our PADS+ longitudinal research we made a considered effort to better measure the kinds of environments in which people actually take part and its changes by combining a city-wide small-area community survey with a space-time budget methodology^[27] (see, e. g., Wikström et al., 2010; 2011) and utilising ecometrics, measuring area collective efficacy to tap into some relevant (albeit restricted) aspects of area social and moral content (Oberwittler & Wikström, 2008). This in addition to collecting the kind of individual, family, school, work and neighbourhood data normally included in longitudinal research, enabling an improved investigation of the person-environment interaction and its changes than what would normally be the case (see, e. g., Wikström et al., 2012, pp. 44–106; 2024, pp. 115–146). Although I believe our data and research design is a significant improvement over what is currently available when it comes to exploring the ecology of crime and criminal careers, this being a virgin area of methodology, there is still much need for further innovation and elaboration for it to reach its full potential. The better we can explore people’s exposure to the different kind of environments in which they take part in their daily life, and their crime relevant content, the better the possibility to more effectively analyse and test the environmental impact on people’s crime involvement and criminal careers.