The 2 Types of Criminals

In my quest to understand roots of various behaviour, I stumbled upon trying to understand crime. It’s unfortunate that all knowledge comes at a price, and many of the options I explored to gain deeper understanding of this came with big price tags.

So here I am sharing whatever little I could learn without swiping my card for huge sums.

Some people say that criminals are born that way. It’s in their brain chemistry, or that there’s some hormonal imbalance, maybe some brain damage, or it’s a matter of lower intelligence.

Others say external factors like friends, family etc. result in various behaviours, one of them being crime. Both of these views seem to ignore the fact that humans have agency, that they can control their actions.

Thus, the psychological view tries to take in both these internal & external factors to explain criminal behaviour. According to the psychology of crime, criminals can be largely characterised into two types:

Organised

• These kind of criminals will mostly look normal
• Live with people
• Good amount of planning will go into the crime
• They’ll be socially competent
• And Intelligent!
• They will experience anger / power while committing the crime

Disorganised

• These criminals will be socially inept
• They will live alone; and likely near the crime scene
• They will have suffered abuse at a young age
• Will have low intelligence
• And they will be confused and/or frightened while committing the crime

This classification was based on only 36 samples, and since these then these have been built upon and elaborated.

Anyway, I know that this looks short, but I could find out only this much. So will elaborate further once I learn more on this.