Factors would be more accurate
Symptoms.
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" "Using traditional epidemiological methods, we found that low income in one's family of origin was indeed associated with higher risk of violent offending and substance misuse during adolescence," says Sariaslan. "However, the excess risks became marginal or disappeared completely when we gradually adjusted for familial risk factors." "
Simply put not everyone will be a criminal, different circumstances or factors encourage actions. Even then it comes down to a person's willingness to do a crime.
And where do you suppose one gets that internal willingness from?
Still just a factor. A good upbringing doesn't prevent someone from doing a crime.
It's not just a factor.
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This is The Atlantic - only slightly to the center compared to Salon:
"The 1987 "Survey of Youth in Custody" found that 70% did not grow up with both parents. Another 1994 study of Wisconsin juveniles was even more stark: only 13% grew up with their married parents. Here's the conclusion of Cynthia Harper and Sara McLanahan, the doyenne of researchers about single parenthood: "[C]ontrolling for income and all other factors, youths in father-absent families (mother only, mother-stepfather, and relatives/other) still had significantly higher odds of incarceration than those from mother-father families."
...
Moreover, the charts ignore social science truism that correlations existing on the individual level—i.e. children of single mothers and criminal actions—do not necessarily translate to the aggregate, i.e. children of single mothers and official crime rates. Consider this other example: Crime did not increase during the Great Recession; in fact, violent crime in the United States fell to a 40-year low in 2010 even while poverty was on the rise. Yet we know that poor are more likely than others to commit crimes. We could design a chart demonstrating that crime rates and poverty rates are unrelated and ask for an apology from the many pundits who have insisted they had to be, but those pundits would rightly object that on its own, the chart can't prove that poverty doesn't cause crime.
The bottom line is that there is a large body of literature showing that children of single mothers are more likely to commit crimes than children who grow up with their married parents. This is true not just in the United States, but wherever the issue has been researched. Few experts, including Cohen, dispute this. Studies cannot prove conclusively that fatherlessness—or any other factor—actually causes people to commit crimes. For that, you'd have to do the impossible: take a large group of infants and raise each of them simultaneously in two precisely equivalent households—except one would be headed by a father and mother and the other by a lone mother. But by comparing criminals of the same race, education, income, and mother's education whose primary observable difference is family structure, social scientists have come as close as they can to making the causal case with the methodological tools available. "
Emphasis, my own.
Not necessarily. There are children whose parent(s) is/are never around yet the children are always in school with good grades and haven't committed a crime. But again parent involvement is another factor to crime.
These children are the exception and are generally observed within a population where 'complete' families are the vast majority of examples the child has outside of his/her home.
In some cases, I could argue that the parent not being around to **** up their child means the child's main influences come from outside the family - therefor the child attempts to mirror what they see in the community as opposed to the behavior of their parent who is unavailable for imitation.
Not necessarily still. You can have a adult who was raised properly, never committed a crime, and was an outstanding citizen. However one day they lose their job/career for x reason, and can't afford their needs/wants/comforts of life they were used to. Things like robbery to get the medication for their child, or tax fraud to pay for their mortgage they couldn't afford becomes an option; an option that would have never been considered when everything was fine. Some may take this option more quickly, others may take longer, while some may never still do it which is directly related to these factors or circumstances.
Again, these are the minority of the cases.
Most people sell homes, sell possessions, and down-scale their life to something they can manage to support. Friends and family tend to assist or to act as a sort of fall-back position.
Further, even if these people do commit to crime, it is very rarely a form of violent crime. Shoplifting food is considerably different than armed robbery.
Generally speaking, most of the people who end up being prosecuted for fraud, tax evasion, etc are people like Al Sharpton, Hillary Clinton, and other very wealthy individuals who have never truthfully held a regard for the law in the first place and see themselves as standing above it.
They are not people in dire straits in desperate times who committed fraud, evasion, etc - they are people who establish a pattern of lawless behavior as a means to expedient gains of power and capital.
Take your typical morning drive. When people are speeding (yes speeding is a crime irc), are they speeding because they're late (factor/circumstance) which is encouraging them to go 80 instead of the 50 speed limit?
Don't bullshit me.
I drive the interstate a lot. You can't tell me that every single person flying 90 down a highway with a speed limit of 70 is late for something. They drive 90 because they can and because the police either aren't there or have better things to do than try to pull all 30 cars drafting each other like it's NASCAR over.
Yes children do need to be taught things, if this is what this quote is referring to by "civilized".
Children are like newborn neural network learning programs. They don't know much about the world and figure the world out through a system of positive reinforcement/punishment and negative reinforcement/punishment. Behaviors that produce desirable outcomes are strengthened and repeated. Behaviors that produce undesirable outcomes are weakened and become infrequent.
At first, desirable and undesirable outcomes are simple stimulus. Pain is typically undesirable. Food is typically desirable - though certain flavors may be appreciated more than others.
Children don't inherently know what is good or bad; right or wrong. While some of them left to their own devices may come to many of the same conclusions about what is and isn't good in terms of social behavior - the goal of parenting is to produce individuals who are capable of surviving within their environment and interacting with other human beings. Thus - it's important to make sure that they understand and appreciate the same values.
A child left to his own devices has no reason to value the lives of others.
If I whack someone else over the head with a stick, it isn't me who feels the pain. In fact - it may even be a desirable outcome, depending upon what I've established as being 'good.' Seeing that kid stop what he is doing and listen to my commands when I raise the stick at him is certainly increasing my status and power - so why shouldn't it be a good thing?
If there is nothing else in that child's life to introduce experience to the contrary - then it's perfectly fine and acceptable to do what it takes to get others to listen to the child's commands.
Eventually, it gets very difficult to challenge this attitude. It isn't impossible - but this concept begins to reinforce other patterns of behavior that build up a separate framework of logic that assigns radically different values to things you and I recognize as being of greater or lesser importance. We call this "perspective" or "rationale."
At a later date, if I attempt to punish this young adult for behaving unacceptably - I am now a challenge to his authority that needs to be broken or destroyed. I'm not an authority or valid perspective - but a peer who needs to be made to obey.
It's unfortunate, but the quickest and most sure way to eliminate the threat these individuals are to society is to kill them. Reasoning with them is not a guaranteed method and their rationale so disconnected that it requires a hell of a "come to jesus" experience for them to consider that the foundation upon which they have built their logic is not acceptable. These experiences are not the norm.
That isn't to say that people won't 'cheat' when they think they won't get caught. People will. However, it is the nature of most people to over-estimate the risks associated with their behavior:
"Oddly, teens’ information-processing style seems to rely on the uniquely human “rational” parts of the brain. Reyna’s work has shown that adolescents carefully think about risks most adults wouldn’t even consider taking — like, say, playing Russian roulette — using their prefrontal cortex. They use quantitative reasoning and take about twice as long as adults do before responding, while adults immediately have a negative reaction to such risks, stemming intuitively from the insula, and almost automatically say no.
So why might the teenage brain be wired this way? Their greater tolerance for uncertainty and the unknown — and an increased desire for and focus on rewards — probably helps them leave the nest. Such explanations are speculative, Reyna cautions, but notes that “in rats, for example, adolescent rats are more likely to explore a new environment. You don’t know what you’re going to find: that’s sort of the definition of a novel environment. If you are more ambiguity tolerant, that would enable that sort of exploration.”
In other words, it takes some acceptance of uncertainty and comfort with not knowing in order to learn and to be open to new knowledge. “We come into the world with limited knowledge about what kind of consequences we will experience after making decisions and also about how likely these different outcomes are,” says Tymula. “But, of course, we want to learn, so this tolerance for unknown risks might stem from an underlying biological feature that makes learning about the unknown less unpleasant for adolescents than it is for adults.” "
So, yes - children are little barbarians who must be taught what is and is not acceptable in society, or they will kind of make it up as they go along.
Adults are, more so than teenagers, geared towards rejecting risks with known consequences out of hand. Thus - people who are taught and who see that crime has a real consequence are very unlikely to engage in it, ever.
Of course - we over-estimate the risk. Most crimes are not prosecuted and many times the criminal is not caught or there is insufficient evidence to prosecute. So, in a sense, criminals are those who 'call the bluff' and learn that they can get away with far more than others realize.
Until they are caught - but at that point, their experience suggests that there is absolutely no reason to reject the notion of criminal behavior if it can convey a personal advantage. They may simply modify their routines to be more compliant with what society expects to avoid getting caught again, or so as to provide a means that allows them to be more selective in their risk taking.
Would just be more factors to add to the equation
It's really not that complicated of an equation.
The brain operates on very, very simple principles.
"Does this get me what I want, or closer to what I want?"
If the answer is yes, then repeat this behavior and include it in other actions.
This is how we learn to walk. This is how we learn to talk. It is how we learn to behave at all levels of our existence. Some of these do not require much input from our parents, other things must be administered by our parents or the other adult figures around us.
[video=youtube;qv6UVOQ0F44]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44[/video]
Children are much the same way.
While our capacity is different when we are born - our overall function is the same. We are born with an inherent concept of 'fitness' or 'desirable' and 'undesirable' in the form of pain and pleasure. Even that relationship can be 'reprogrammed' given time and effort (or just the right circumstances).
There are some things that are quite possibly genetic - but the vast majority of who we are and how we behave is a product of a very similar process to how a very simple AI learns to play through a game. The structure of these programs is built off of the analysis of how neurons in our brains work and how they respond to learning experiences. It would follow that they are capable of modeling our learning behaviors, if on a much simpler and constricted scale.
