The Multiple-Factor Approach to Crime Causation

Criminology faces an almost unsolvable difficulty because of the extreme diversity of the behaviour legislators have seen fit to make punishable as crimes. If a science is to explain a class of phenomena consistently, those phenomena must be reasonably homogeneous. Ask whether it seems logical that we should be able to explain, in terms of a common theory, behaviour as diverse as running stop lights, the raping of women, robbery, huge racketeering syndicates, treason, murder, and the white-collar crimes of some businessmen. Not all of these express the same attitudes of mind, not even a universal consciously antisocial attitude; not all are conflict behaviour, or exploitative behaviour, or either wholly rational or wholly emotional behaviour.

Facing that dilemma, criminologists have attempted three solutions.

1. Concentrate on particular kinds of crime. Valuable research has focused attention on professional thieving, embezzlement, murder, sex crime and white-collar crime. Cressey went further, believing he had arrived at sociologically meaningful subdivisions by isolating types of embezzlement — a plan that leads to theories about the causes of specific crimes rather than to any general theory of crime.
2. Find a single process or relationship explaining all crime despite its variety. This is the route of Sutherland and others, and it produced the theories of social disorganization and differential association, delayed maturation, economic exploitation, anomie or normlessness, and subgroup influence. But not all crime can be explained in terms of any given social process or relationship.
3. The multiple-factor approach.

Crime is produced not by single factors but by clusters of factors combining in a life, and the criminologist's task is to find which clusters repeat.

The method is this. Starting from evidence derived from case studies and many other sources, list the factors found in the life processes of criminals. Determine fairly well the interrelationship of those factors in individual cases. Then find the particular factors that repeat themselves in many cases — for example, gang membership, lack of status in constructive groups, tensions in homes, and a sense of failure in competition.

The crucial qualification, and the one that separates a good answer from a bad one: the discovery of such single repeating factors does not prove them causes of crime. The meaning of any life experience may be different for one criminal than for another, because one factor or experience is, in different cases, combined with different accompanying factors which give the total gestalt and meaning that expresses itself in criminal behaviour.

What is significant is the cluster, not the factor. It is very significant when clusters of factors repeat themselves in many cases. The standard cluster runs like this: a large proportion of children in our type of society whose fathers have deserted the home, who have lived in city slums, who have experienced a sense of failure in competitive relations, who have lost status in constructive groups and joined juvenile gangs, who have come to believe that everyone has a racket, and whose early misbehaviour has not been dealt with effectively either in the home or by schools and other social agencies — a large proportion of such children appear continually in the juvenile courts, and many of them later in the adult courts. The discovery of repeated incidents of such combinations enables us to develop approximations to theories of crime; and such specific life experiences may often be shown to be by-products of the culture of our society.

Without contending that they will inevitably cause crime, certain conditions are apparent as more favourable to crime than others: bad heredity, physical defect, mental imbalance, mental defect, emotional insecurity, a slum environment, poor education, criminal associates, extreme poverty, and an environmental stimulation to crime are obviously more favourable to crime than their opposites.

The qualification is stated with equal firmness in both directions. Any or all of these unfavourable conditions will not inevitably drive a given person to commit a crime under all circumstances; conversely, any one or all of the favourable conditions may not be gilt-edged insurance against a person committing a crime. Hidden factors that may tip the scale either way can never be eliminated from specific situations by all the theory in the world.

That is why the search for a packaged theory is doomed. It has been popular to attribute criminal behaviour to one cause or factor, or to one set of factors, and equally popular among the experts to construct a system or frame of reference that will explain delinquency and crime, suicide, desertion and divorce, or any other form of human pathology; students in the behavioural sciences are constantly on the alert, hoping to discover the open sesame to the riddle of human misconduct. No unilateral theory, however profound, whether nurtured by biologists, psychologists, psychiatrists or sociologists, can ever hope to answer the question of the totality of criminal behaviour.

The competing single-factor traditions bear that out. The traditional approach in the United States has been socio-economic; many countries of Europe and Latin America have insisted that biological or constitutional factors are more influential; the geographical determinists have espoused weather, the seasons, topography and humidity; and the psychiatrists, sociologists, endocrinologists, psychologists and religionists, as well as the racists and the eugenists, have all attempted to give the answer.

As a first step to a better understanding of crime and its causes it is well to cease discussing crimes and criminals in any general sense, and to concentrate solely on individual crime situations and individual criminals: knowledge must be built up by studying particular crimes and individual criminals.

But such study has little permanent value unless we discover from it the personal and social situations most likely to produce crime or most favourable to it. Unless we find what those conditions are we can do little to reduce and prevent crime. Investigation of an individual prison inmate may help to rehabilitate him, but it will be of no general social importance unless it helps to tell us what personal and social factors encourage antisocial behaviour.

• Sutherland's objection is the decisive one. A theory of crime causation must differentiate: the conditions said to cause crime should be present when crime is present and absent when crime is absent. Many persons with the pathological traits do not commit crimes, and persons in the upper socio-economic class frequently violate the law although they are not in poverty, do not lack recreational facilities, and are not mentally retarded or emotionally unstable. So it is not the conditions or traits themselves that cause crime; they are sometimes present without crime and sometimes absent when crime occurs.
• It confuses levels of analysis. Holding an explanation at one level, so that early factors are combined with or differentiated from later ones, reduces the number of variables a theory must consider. The multiple-factor approach does the opposite: it multiplies them. Many criminologists concerned with understanding crime would attribute causal power to what is, in the falling-bodies analogy, the roundness of the object.
• It does not yield a theory. Even at its best it yields approximations to theories of crime, and its practitioners say so.
• It cannot be tested. A list of clusters is not a proposition capable of being false.

The approach does, however, meet the criminologist's dilemma in considerable measure, and three things can be said for it.

First, it is honest about the diversity of the phenomenon, where the single-factor theories are not.

Second, it is the working method of the courts. Every sentencing decision considers the personality of the offender as revealed by his age, character, antecedents and other relevant circumstances, and his tractability to reform; every pre-sentence report and every probation officer's inquiry into the circumstances or home surroundings of an accused is multiple-factor reasoning in practice.

Third, the general theories themselves converge on it from the other side. Lombroso, as a founder of the positive school, is something of an anomaly: he is known principally for the atavistic criminal, but the real basis of the positive school is the search for the causes of criminal behaviour founded on the conception of multiple factor causation, in which some factors may be biological, others psychological and still others social. His own successive editions demonstrate the drift, from 252 pages on atavism in 1876 to over 1,900 pages twenty years later taking in climate, rainfall, the price of grain, marriage customs, banking practices, tariff policy, the structure of government and the state of religious belief.

- Give the three solutions to the homogeneity problem — specific-crime research, general process theory, and multiple factors — and place the approach among them. That framing alone earns marks. - Give the standard cluster rather than a shapeless list of factors; the point of the theory is that clusters repeat and single factors do not prove causation. - Attack it with Sutherland, using the differentiation test and the respiration example. - Rescue it with Lombroso, using the page counts, to show that even the arch-single-factor theorist ended as a multiple-factor theorist. - On the syllabus sub-heads — mobility, cultural conflicts, family background, religion, economic condition, ecology of crime — treat each as a candidate factor and say in each case what the cluster reasoning requires: that the factor be shown to combine with others in repeated patterns, not merely to be present in the lives of offenders. </content>