Biosocial Theory And The Biosocial Theory Of Crime

I will be discussing essay #4. Biosocial theories are ideas that try to explain why a person commits a crime due to biological factors and also environmental factors. Early biological theories focused on how a person does not have free will because of their genetics and heredity. Some key features of this theory are criminals are born as criminals. Usually these criminals have certain types of physical abnormalities. The stigmata do not cause the crime but the symptoms of atavism do. The person who is born as a criminal does not have any choice to commit the crime unless they live under circumstances to where they cannot perform these crimes. The major difference between these two theories are that the biosocial theories are much more advanced and accurate than the early biological theories. The main reason for this is because the early biological theories didn’t believe that a person has the choice of free will, which we all …show more content…
Criminals also use a cost-benefit analysis to maximize their own rewards. The neo-classical theories of criminology focus on changing the environment to decrease opportunity of crimes rather than focusing on the actual offenders. Both of these theories focus on changing something to deter crime. Both of the biosocial and early biological theories focused on how to define a criminal and why a criminal commits crime. The schools focus on a more proactive approach to deter crime while the theories focused on a reactive approach to figure out why and who. Both styles of learning a very important in the learning process because we need to figure out how to prevent the crimes but if we can figure out why a person commits it as well and possibly even figure out what kind of person would commit the crime we can take a proactive approach to these ideas and prevent more crime than we originally could have if we didn’t focus on either of these studies of