Fitting the Facts of Crime An Invitation to Biopsychosocial

Criminology

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Chad Posick, Michael Rocque,
and J. C. Barnes

Fitting the Facts

of Crime
An Invitation to
Biopsychosocial Criminology

Foreword by John Braithwaite

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Philadelphia • Rome • Tokyo
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
tupress.temple.edu

Copyright © 2022 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System

of Higher Education
All rights reserved
Published 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Posick, Chad, author. | Rocque, Michael, author. | Barnes, James C.

(James Christopher), author. | Braithwaite, John, writer of foreword.
Title: Fitting the facts of crime : an invitation to biopsychosocial
criminology / Chad Posick, Michael Rocque, and J. C. Barnes ; foreword
by John Braithwaite.
Description: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book applies
findings from neuroscience, behavioral sciences, and evolutionary
biology to persistent issues in criminology to show how the
biopsychosocial approach extends and complements traditional
sociological theories of crime and approaches to crime. John
Braithwaite’s facts of crime serve as a longstanding agenda for
macro-issues in criminal behavior”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021023007 (print) | LCCN 2021023008 (ebook) | ISBN
9781439919804 (cloth) | ISBN 9781439919811 (paperback) | ISBN
9781439919828 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Criminology. | Biopsychosocial criminology. | Criminal
behavior—Psychological aspects. | Criminal behavior—Genetic aspects.
Classification: LCC HV6025 .P646 2022 (print) | LCC HV6025 (ebook) | DDC
364—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023007
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023008

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of

the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Foreword by John Braithwaite vii

Preface xiii

1 Introduction: The Promise of Biopsychosocial

Criminology for Explaining the Facts of Crime 1
2 Sex Differences in Criminal Behavior 18
3 Age Differences in Criminal Behavior 44
4 Class Differences in Criminal Behavior 65
5 Peer Associations and Social Learning Influences
in Criminal Behavior 84
6 Social Relationships, Control, and Criminal Behavior 97
7 Stress and Strain in Criminal Behavior 111
8 Criminal Justice and Law in Criminal Behavior and
Crime Rates 132
9 Concluding Remarks on the Future of Biosocial
Criminology 148

References 163
Index 195
 Foreword

W
hen I was invited to write this foreword, my first reaction was
that it was an easy task to decline because what I know about
biological criminology can be written on the back of an aspirin
with a crowbar. Yet that is also somewhat true for experts in biological
criminology because the unknown is so vast compared to the known.
And it is true for me with respect to macrocriminology, in which I con-
sider myself well read. Few things are more complex than the neuro-
physiology of human brains. While I genuinely admire the brilliant
people who do research on brains, my practical philosophy has tended
to be that a deeply valuable understanding of how human brains work
is not something that will be accessible to me in my lifetime.
This goes to the first strength of this book that it is very accessible. I
did learn a lot from it, and I expect this will be true of other nonexpert
readers. Criminology is richer for it. This is evocative writing that
challenges readers with clarity of analysis. Chad, Michael, and J. C.
successfully persisted and overcame my resistance because they used
the same method I used in the 1980s when writing Crime, Shame and
Reintegration. They persuaded me because I was pleased to see col-
leagues do this. I still think that when we work in a field where most
questions are unsettled, unknown, or unknowable, there is virtue in
 viii \ Foreword

asking what are some of the consensually known facts of the field.
And then we must keep modifying the theory to improve the fit of
the theory to that list of facts. Of course, that is far from the only
good method for theory development, but it is a useful method for
shaping the process with explanatory discipline. That discipline is
impressive in this book.
You do not have to be a feminist to think it is a weakness of a crimi-
nological theory when it fails to give an account of why, in all times
and places we know about, men commit much more of most kinds of
crime compared to women. We learn from the book that in mammals,
but perhaps not in bees, mother/infant bonding is an adaptation nec-
essary for survival. Moreover, “certain protective behaviors of moth-
ers toward infants ‘appear to be hard-wired and not at all learned.’”
We learn that the human brain evolved to facilitate important inter-
personal skills that are useful for relationships.
There are big implications for understanding how our work can
contribute to a better world by grasping those deep structures of hu-
man beings as relational animals—indeed, as storytelling animals. For
me, for example, it motivates an interest in restorative relational justice
and a decentering of the formalistic in justice. It can help us understand
why men do the majority of the talking in formally legal courtrooms
while, in restorative justice circles, according to Sherman and Strang’s
(2007) Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE), the actors who oc-
cupied the most speaking time were mothers of the defendants.
This book teaches us that work on mammals reveals a neurologi-
cal component to “pair bonding” in adults as well. Life-course crimi-
nology, in the hands of practitioners like Robert Sampson and John
Laub, suggests that marriage may be a primary factor in encourag-
ing desistance from crime. For feminists, this goes to why biological
criminology—indeed, why any criminology—is a dangerous game.
Whatever we think about these biological foundations, mothering
and marriage are burdened by gendered social and political overlays
that enable one sex to dominate the other. Marriage is patriarchally
structured in so many ways that privilege men. Men cannot breast-
feed, but that becomes a foundation for lumping women with an un-
fair share of all manner of caring obligations toward children that
need not be sexed.
 Foreword / ix

Biological criminology here becomes a dangerous game from a

feminist perspective. Yet feminism and biological criminology do a
service in this because all criminology is normatively dangerous. The
risk of biological essentialism simply makes that more visible. The
law is always dangerous because it bans certain activities, including
certain kinds of marriages, and because it provides for serious sec-
ond-order deprivations of liberty in the way it responds to breaches of
the law. So good theory in criminology must be integrative of norma-
tive and explanatory considerations. Another strength of this book is
that it does this, and does it deftly.
This book is appropriately cautious—normatively—about the bio-
logical. Not only is it normatively hedged, but it is hedged in the explan-
atory sense by being a book on biopsychosocial criminology rather
than biological criminology. That is, the book brings the biological back
in (as it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) instruc-
tively for illiterates like me while not excluding psychosocial expla-
nations. Chad, Michael, and J. C. do not set out to privilege biology
or argue it is a better lens than others. Too much emphasis on the bio-
logical is as limiting as too much emphasis on the psychological or
sociological. A great strength is the way the book introduces interac-
tions among biological, psychological, and social explanations. It also
considers toxins like lead that shape class variation but are not purely
biological, psychological, or social; rather, they shape and are shaped
by all three.
The book does not test a theory in the sense of an ordered set of
propositions against the 13 “facts.” Rather, it persuasively explores
the framework that a combination of the biological, the psychologi-
cal, and the sociological will do better than one of these alone. It does
not go far on applying the framework to crimes by organizations like
states or corporations, as opposed to crimes by individuals. It does
not consider the relevance of the biopsychosocial to even more macro
questions, such as that raised in Robert Reiner’s 2020 book that social
democratic societies perform better at crime control and justice than
neoliberal capitalist or authoritarian capitalist societies.
The book’s discussion of the work of Terrie Moffitt (1993) and Ger-
ald Patterson (2016) reveals the practical and liberating use of biopsy-
chosocial explanation. For example, neurological difficulties help us
 x \ Foreword

understand why some infants do not bond early with their parents,
thus engendering thorny personalities. Parents become exasperated,
relationships with the infant become strained, and multiple problems
follow from the strained bond. Explaining this interactive complexity
to mothers can help liberate them from their own, their family’s, or
their friends’ simplistic explanations, such as “I am a bad mother” or
“He is a bad child.” We learn that meta-analyses of relational parent-
ing programs show that interactions between parents and children
can be improved, thereby improving well-being and self-regulation.
While most all of my 1989 “facts” have stood the test of time well,
I look back on one as ill founded even then. This is that “crime rates
have been increasing since World War II in most countries, devel-
oped and developing. The only case of a country which has been
clearly shown to have had a falling crime rate in this period is Japan.”
Within three or four years of that being written, as this book points
out, most developed economies had falling crime rates. Also, most
former communist countries and most of Latin America and the Ca-
ribbean had rising crime rates during the ensuing decades.
Through the work of historical criminologists like Manuel Eisner,
we see that England, the United States, and other countries have peri-
ods in their history where the homicide rate is 100 times as high as it
is at other times. At any one point in time within one country, there
are spaces that have crime rates 100 times as high as in other spaces.
Biological differences give a poor account of why different spaces
and times in the same country can have hundredfold differences in
crime rates—and, indeed, why one country can have 100 times the
homicide rate of some other countries when intercountry biological
profiles (by sex, for example) are more similar than different. Ac-
tually, not only does biological criminology make a poor fit of this
explanatory challenge, but so do all extant criminologies. The facts of
variation across time and space are not as clear as I posited them in
1989. If we are to build a more potent biopsychosocial criminology, it
must look the challenges and complexities of these facts more clearly
in the eye than it currently does in the Global North.
The book also makes a good case for adding some new facts for
which the evidence has become ever stronger in the past 30 years,
such as that child maltreatment is associated with subsequent crime.
 Foreword / xi

This book was a pleasure to read and a treasure of learning for this
reader. I congratulate the authors and wish you, in your reading, this
treasure and this pleasure.

John Braithwaite
Australian National University
 Preface

B
ack in 2009, two of us (Posick and Rocque) entered graduate
school at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. We
became fast friends. One of the things we had in common was
our love of criminological theory (some of the others were scotch and
baseball—but theory always seemed to come up). Nights were often
spent discussing different theoretical perspectives, their strengths and
weaknesses, what we liked and did not like. We both leaned toward
control theory perspectives—likely furthered by our relationship
with Chet Britt, who had become the chair of our department. But while
we saw much in the control perspective, we also discussed, at length,
what might be missing in those theoretical approaches. One of our go-
to books to start to fill in these gaps was The Criminal Brain by North-
eastern faculty member Nicole Rafter. We quickly grew to advocate
for a biosocial perspective to the explanation of crime and were hon-
ored to help Nicky write the second edition of that book. What we re-
ally honed in on was how biosocial perspectives did not “replace”
theories of criminality but enhanced them, made sense of them, and
directed interventions.
As we integrated biosocial perspectives into our theoretical dis-
cussions and into our academic writing, we became familiar with the
 xiv \ Preface

major theorists working to promote biosocial criminology. We were

fascinated by the work Anthony Walsh was doing on evolutionary
perspectives on crime and justice (Walsh, 2000). Adrian Raine’s work
on the brain and behavior was groundbreaking and opened a whole
new world for criminological thinking (Raine, 2013). The molecular
and behavioral genetic work being done a few years before we got to
graduate school by Terri Moffitt, Kevin Beaver, and John Paul Wright
gave us a new way of approaching explanations of violence and anti-
social behavior (see Beaver et al., 2008, 2010; Moffitt, 2005).
Along with these leaders in the biosocial field, there also appeared
to be a new cadre of young criminologists doing innovative work in
biosocial criminology. In particular, we began reading the work being
conducted by J. C. Barnes (at this time, for example, Barnes & Beaver,
2012; Barnes, Beaver, & Boutwell, 2011). His work sparked our interest
in biosocial topics even more than it was already, and we continued to
pursue biosocial criminology in our own work. And as we came to find
out, while J. C.’s work was strong and interesting, he would also be-
come a great friend of ours.
When one of us (Posick) began to discuss the idea for this book with
Temple University Press and Ryan Mulligan, it was clear that collabo-
rating with Mike and J. C. would be the best approach—if they agreed
to it. Luckily, both did and were enthusiastic about the project. Thus,
Mike, J. C., Ryan, and Chad began to develop this book. We are proud
of our final product, which is really a collaboration not only between
the three of us authors but others as well whom we would very much
like to acknowledge and thank.
We owe a lot to Ryan for being patient as we completed the book.
Mike and Chad went up for (and thankfully received) tenure during
this time. J. C. became the interim director of the School of Criminal
Justice at the University of Cincinnati. And we all went through—and
continue to go through, as of this writing—the global COVID-19 pan-
demic. We thank Ryan for continuing to push and have faith in the
project.
We also want to thank others who influenced us and assisted us
on various parts of the book. First, we are thrilled that John Braith-
waite, a foundational criminological scholar whose work is used ex-
tensively in the book, has written the foreword and added richness
 Preface / xv

to the setup of our project. John provided very thoughtful comments

and has added more than he knows to our final product.
We want to thank K. Ryan Proctor, who provided very useful com-
ments on parts of the book and also discussed with us his work on
mechanistic criminology, which was incorporated into several chap-
ters. We are certain his work will be integral to a biopsychosocial
perspective in criminology.
A set of anonymous reviewers commented on our work through-
out the process. While we do not know their names, they all deserve
to be thanked and acknowledged for their peer review, which has
undoubtedly strengthened our work.
This book, no matter how rich the source material, could not have
been completed without the support and love of our families. Chad
would like to thank Lulu, Silas, and his “COVID-19 pod family.” Mike
would like to thank Andi, Teddy, and Cam. J. C. would like to thank
Sara and Trey.
Fitting the Facts of Crime