The Causes and Costs of Crime

Details

Written by Ian E. Macindoe

A summary of

The Causes and Costs of Crime and a Controversial Cure

by

David T Lykken

University of Minnesota

Journal of Personality 68:3, June 2000

Lykken points out that ‘we’ (in the USA) ‘have experienced an unprecedented, rapid and quite regular increase in crime and violence that began in the early 1960s’ (p. 561). He cites figure and graphs to demontrate that ‘the current rate of violent crime in the United States is still some 300% higher than it was in 1960’ (p. 563) and analyses the reasons for an observed recent downturn in the statistics as due mainly to the high number of felons now imprisoned. He also provides plausible arguments for the differences in the figures produced by the National Crime Victimisation Survey (NCVS) and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR), the latter being more accurate — and more worrying — than the former, in Lykken’s view, as they include ghetto crimes and the like which are not covered by NCVS.

Lykken argues that a major factor in crime increase can be traced to inadequate socialisation in the early years of life, that there is a critical period in which socialisation either occurs or fails to happen. ‘Unless it is evoked, sculpted, and made habitual in childhood, our human talent for socialization may wither and never develop’ (p. 567). In the USA, he argues, there is a ‘striking correlation’ between ‘fatherless rearing and subsequent social pathology’. ‘If the base rate for fatherless rearing of today’s teenagers is 25% (which is the best current estimate …), then one can calculate that the risk for social pathologies ranging from delinquency to death is about seven times higher for youngsters raised without fathers than for those reared by both biological parents’ (p. 568).

While recognising that correlation does not prove direct causal connection — single mothers may tend to live in bad neighbourhoods, may tend to be less competent as parents etc. — Lykken cites data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in which (after controlling for ethnicity, place of living and birth by teenage mothers) male incarceration by the age of 30 is most strongly predicted by family structure. ‘It is interesting that the presence of a stepfather did not decrease the risk involved with mother-only rearing, whereas boys reared by single fathers were no more at risk for serious delinquency than those brought up by both biological parents’ (p. 569).

In the USA the proportion of high-risk children born out-of-wedlock since 1960 has increased by 250% while the increase in violent crime during this same period has increased 300%. ‘Having established this relationship,’ writes Lykken, ‘we can consider the three causal candidates: Do fatherless youngsters so often fail to become socialized because of their parenting, their poverty, or their personalities?’(p. 569).

The rest of Lykken’s paper deals with the evidence and analysis for each of these possibilities, starting with personality which, after presentation of considerable technical data from twin studies, is discounted as the major cause. ‘… (the) data support the view that, while certain inborn traits of temperament clearly do increase the risk for crime, family environment also plays a significant role’ (p. 580). The work of J. R. Harris (The Nurture Assumption) is critically, if sympathetically, examined. Harris argues that children’s peer environment has much more influence in shaping values and behaviour than do children’s parents. Her work is of particular interest to Lykken, the originator and mainstay of the Minnesota Twin Registry, because she calls on data from twin studies. She makes the point that children of ethnic parents rapidly learn to their peers’ version of English as well as the neighbourhood’s standards and values.

            Harris emphasizes children’s capacity for context-dependent learning, for being able to adopt one set of behavior precepts in the home environment and a quite different set in the broader context of the community environment. And it is the latter set of values and behavior tendencies, rather than the ones modeled and shaped within the narrow confines of the home environment, that gradually evolves into that child’s adult personality and behavior pattern (p. 582).

However, Lykken remains skeptical of Harris’s discounting of parental influence. He thinks that parents do play an important part in either maximising their offsprings’ good qualities and chances for success or assisting their disadvantaged children in overcoming their disadvantages. ‘And I believe that some parents are truly bad — incompetent, uncaring, or downright malignant — so that those children in their feckless care are at great risk to become unsocialized adults’ (p. 582).

So Lykken spends several pages examining what he calls ‘the good parent conjecture’ and ‘the bad parent conjecture’: based almost exclusively on anecodal, but persuasive, evidence. His view is that between 10 and 20 percent of parents make a real difference in the adult lives of the children they raise. ‘ … some parents are able to help their children make more of their good proclivities, and to overcome their genetic handicaps, than are the general run of parents’ (p. 583). Similarly, there is a proportion of parents who have the opposite effect. Lykken is willing to share Harris’s view that success in socialising children does not vary greatly, but he wants to limit that view to the ‘broad mid-range of parental competence’. He holds to a different analysis when it comes to the 10 – 15 percent at either end of the parental competence spectrum:

            … some unusual parents have greater success than most caregivers would in socializing the really difficult cases, while other parents are so bad — so inept, overburdened, immature, or unsocialized themselves — that almost any child in their custody will become a victim of social pathology. … the current epidemic of crime and violence … (grows) exponetially because victims infect new victims in crescendo fashion. Out-of-control families headed by single mothers (or by single grandmothers), living in poverty in bad neighborhoods, spawn in each generation additional families of the same sort. And the generations are short because daughters begin having babies in their mid-teens. The boys start doing serious crimes in their mid-teens (p. 588).

Lykken then goes on to make a distinction that is important for his argument: the distinction between sociopaths (individuals of genetically normal temperament who become unsocialised young adults because of a collective failure of socialising agents, primarily parents) and psychopaths (whose genetically-determined tendencies and temperaments make them very difficult to socialise). Lykken’s theory of the relationship of parenting and genetic factors, and how these relationships give rise to various outcomes of socialisation, is illustrated in a crucial figure (set out on p. 589). Again, Lykken supports his theory with intriguing hypothetical case history-type arguments, at the end of which he concludes that the number of unsocialised sociopaths, including those who become criminal sociopaths, ‘is much larger that the number of psychopaths … Moreover, because unsocialised people tend to become incompetent parents themselves, the number of sociopaths is growing faster than the general population, faster indeed than we can build reform schools and prisons’ (p. 591).

After commenting on the question of poverty as a prime cause of the situation with which he is concerned, Lykken indicates that an underclass culture will not be eradicated by better welfare systems, more money to deprived families and so on. He sums up his thoughts, with concluding rhetorical questions, thus:

            Pychologists like to base their social policy recommendations upon empirical evidence but there are some experiments that do not have to be actually carried out before we can accurately guess their outcomes. Too many of these problem parents grew up themselves unsocialised, unskilled, functionally illiterate, unable to manage their own lives, much less their children’s. Because they were victims, too, and because the fault is ultimately ours, we must help them to survive as best we can. But are we obliged also to let them continue to create more victims? Or is our obligation instead to try to break this spiraling cycle of victimization? (p. 592).

Citing the educational literature widely on this problem, Lykken comes to the work of the child psychiatrist, J.C. Westman, who has proposed parental licensure as a viable approach to improving the situation. While quite stringent conditions must be met for adoption of a child (teenagers, crack addicts, prostitutes, criminals and those who are destitute do not qualify), due to the child’s right to a good start in life, no standards are in place for biological parents. Every child, argues Lykken, has a right to be ‘assisted at least to the starting line of our meritocracy’ which he defines as ‘graduation from high school with appropriate grades, unhampered by babies, addictions, or criminal convictions’.

The statistics indicate that most youngsters do achieve this goal who are reared by both biological parents when those parents are mature, self-supporting, sufficiently committed to be married,and neither criminal nor incapactitated by mental defect or illness (p. 594).

These would be the basic criteria that would need to be presented for parental licensure to maintain custody of the couple’s future biological children. No great bureaucracy need be involved, says Lykken. It could be done at the same desk at which one applies for a driving license. Cases of unusual circumstances (gay/lesbian couples, single parents and so on) might be required to make application to a Family Court. In any case, the basic aim would be to curtail the perpetuation of the kinds of social problems outlined above.

Being an American writing for a predominantly American audience, Lykken must address the question of Black crime and White crime. This he does, among other things pointing out that

young Black men are about six times more likely to commit a violent crime than are young White men, but that more than two-thirds of all violent crimes are committed by just a handful of chronic offenders, whether White or Black (p. 596).

Lykken is clear that the causes and cures of both Black and White crime are the same, with Black crime being at a higher rate only because the problem of father-absent child rearing began 30 years earlier in the Black community than in the White. On this issue he concludes:

                If every American child, Black or White, were to be born to pairs of parents who meet the minimum criteria for licensure outlined above, both Black and White underclasses would shrink in size and the Black and White crime rates would be reduced to tolerable and equivalent levels (p. 597).

Lykken is at pains to point out that what is being proposed here is what he calls eumemics, as distinct from eugenics. While the latter is a matter of selective breeding for genetic characteristics, eumemics is based on the ‘meme’ which is a unit of experience or environmental influence, making eumemics ‘the science of maximising the good memes and minimising the bad ones in the developmental experiences of our children’ (p. 589). The ‘controversial cure’ (in the title of this article) is summed up by Lykken:

            It has been my argument that high upon the list of good memes that we all want for our own children and for all children are the experiences that conduct towards the three components of socialization: the avoidance of antisocial behavior, the disposition towards prosocial behavior, and the acquisition of the work ethic and the capacity for economic independence. Because these memes are primarily the responsibility of parents to provide, this proposal to license only those potential parents who seem both able and likely to provide these socializing experiences qualifies as a eumemics program (p. 589).

The paper concludes with a ‘challenge to critics’ set out in the form of ten basic facts that must be addressed by those with social policy concerns about the matters dealt with in this paper.

[I.M.’s note: In the same issue of the journal in which this paper appears Lykken responds to his three most cogent and distinguished critics. This is academic discourse of the highest order.]

Ian Macindoe