Crime in the United States || Criminals' Views on Crime Causation

American Academy of Political and Social Science

Criminals' Views on Crime CausationAuthor(s): Albert MorrisSource: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 217, Crime inthe United States (Sep., 1941), pp. 138-144Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and SocialScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1023424 .

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Criminals' Views on Crime Causation By ALBERT MORRIS

RIMINAL occupations, like others, are both selective of those who

enter them and to some extent deter- minative of the bias of their opinions. Conventional police methods are much better adapted to the detection of criminals who commit crimes which have what might be called a high social visi- bility than they are to the discovery of those committing concealed and devious offenses involving fraud, bribery, or complex accounting and financial ma- nipulations. For this reason, criminal vocations and avocations are not represented in their proper proportions among convicted offenders.' This condition is well recognized by convicted offenders, at least, and is often the basis of cynical comparisons whose tone is suggested by a frank, if halting, bit of poetry written by an inmate of the Massachusetts Re- formatory for Women, beginning:

I'm walking about a prison, What do you think I see?

A lot of dumb-bells doing time, While all the crooks go free.

The data to be considered in an ade- quate survey of criminals' views on crime causation ought therefore to come both from upperworld or white-collar criminals and from underworld or tradi- tional criminals.

DIFFICULTY OF SECURING VIEWS

Unfortunately, lawbreakers who have been so fortunate as to escape conviction for their criminal offenses are not readily identified except by their intimates, and they are not likely to feel any great im- pulse to discuss, even with their friends,

much less with others, the origins of their misbehavior. Data from the upperworld group are therefore dispropor- tionately limited and derived chiefly, though not entirely, from a few convicted upperworld offenders without previous police records. The greater part of the materials available have come from the convicted recidivist group.2

Men undergoing punishment for their crimes may more or less willingly answer direct oral inquiries by staff members about their lives, but in so doing they are apt to have always the feeling that whatever they say goes into the record and may have an important bearing upon the comfort with which they can live in prison among their fellow inmates or with the prison staff, and upon their chances of early release. Even when the inquiry is made in confidence after friendly relations have been established, by one not having any official relation to the institution, complete frankness may be lacking, for it is difficult for the prisoner to dissociate himself from the general attitude of the prison community toward outsiders even under such circumstances.

1See Edwin H. Sutherland, "White-Collar Criminality," American Sociological Review, Vol. 5: 1, Feb. 1940; Albert Morris, Criminol- ogy (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., rev. ed., 1938), pp. 65-66, 153-57.

2 The writer here acknowledges his indebted- ness to the men and women, too numerous to mention individually, who have contributed the facts or opinions on which this paper is based, or who have helped in the gathering of data. Some are of necessity anonymous; others have asked to be so. Especial ac- knowledgment, however, is due to Dr. Robert Lindner, whose entirely personal and unoffi- cial comments with reference to Federal prisoners have been freely used; to Dr. Glenn Kendall, acting director of education of the New York State Department of Correction, whose suggestions have been most helpful; to Warden Walter Wallack of Walkill Prison, who has made case materials available; and to Harold E. Lane, director of the Central Application Bureau, whose services are best acknowledged without specification.

138



CRIMINALS' VIEWS ON CRIME CAUSATION 139

Such expressions of views on crime causation as can be obtained from criminals are nevertheless of some worth. Even when they are lacking in penetra- tion or sincerity, the verbalizations of criminals may have a diagnostic value as great as other overt behavior.

Occasionally the most ordinary person may, under circumstances of great emotional stress or relief, throw new light upon the dynamics of his and others' behavior by a casual but penetrating re- mark. Fortunately, also, there are a few criminals of rare insight and objectivity, whose comments on crime causation may be particularly valuable in helping us to understand their mental dynamics. This is a useful result, because the factors, both causative and curative, of criminal behavior operate only as they are brought to a focus in the human mind with a resulting inter- pretation of them and a correlated ini- tiation of response. Perhaps the more general usefulness of obtaining the views of criminals, however, is in the suggestions they may embody for programs of crime prevention and treatment. What a man needs and will accept is to some extent correlated with his own judgment of his present condition and how he got into it.

THE UNCONVICTED OFFENDER

In general, it would seem that the unconvicted upperworld criminals (exclud- ing those who are unconvicted because they are new offenders or too petty to attract official notice) are above the average of prisoners in their intellectual powers as well as in social and economic status. Data obtained from men who have most probably been engaged, though undetected, in serious violations of the criminal law, though not exten- sive, suggest that such offenders more generally analyze their conduct with understanding and objectivity than do run-of-the-mill prisoners.

One intelligent unconvicted offender, married but without children or near relatives, explained his behavior in de- frauding the company for which he worked by saying:

My wife knew perfectly well what I was about, but we had no one to worry over. We liked to do things that we couldn't af- ford on my salary, and this seemed like a good risk. The loss was spread out so that nobody suffered, or I wouldn't have done it. I more or less expected to get caught ultimately, but not until I had what I wanted, and they would only have dis- charged me then, for it would not have helped their business to do otherwise.

Then in answer to further questioning:

Certainly I believe it was wrong, but chiefly because you can't have everybody doing what I did. I didn't get much satisfaction out of my work, and my business relations were impersonal. There was no one to get hurt but ourselves.

FIRST OFFENDERS

Men serving their first prison term seem to belong chiefly to the group in which a socioeconomic situation is an obvious causative factor, and secondarily to the medical and personality defect groups. The situational group of first convictions includes upperworld or white-collar criminals guilty of such crimes as embezzlement and fraud, and those among our Federal prisoners who have violated securities or income tax laws or other legislation, much of which is of recent passage.

These situational offenders are allied to the unconvicted group in their rela- tively high economic, social, and intellectual levels. Though individual dif- ferences are obvious, they have been exposed to conventional ethical training, and tend, as a group, to recognize rather clearly the general nature of their own problems, and are willing to accept a fair measure of responsibility for them. They know that they and their families



140 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

have lacked the self-control to live within their means in a highly competi- tive acquisitive society. Creatures of a sensate culture, they are without the sustaining framework of substantial in- ner resources, and hence without the moral stamina to resist temptation when deprived of the things of the flesh.

One prisoner, without previous record, serving a term of two to four years for Second Degree Grand Larceny, expresses himself in a manner similar to that of a number of first offenders of substantial education and reputation who, for one reason or another, have come to bet on horse races:

My wife joined a bridge club. She be- gan to gamble and lost heavily. We were behind in our bills. I borrowed some money from my employer's funds that I intended to return. Finally, I tried to get even by betting on the horses and just kept getting into debt heavier. I kept borrowing more money from the fund. When the auditors came I just gave up the cause, because I was $23,000 in arrears. My wrong was an attempt to make my wife's wrong a right, but it was poor judgment on my part primarily that finds me in prison.

A sixty-year-old former department- store executive, convicted of his first offense in devising a fraudulent scheme which mulcted the business of several thousands of dollars, attributes his criminality to a desire for revenge upon the store because he was not given pro- motions promised by the store owner.

A thirty-eight-year-old auditor whose wages were insufficient to meet his ex- penses stole from his employer in the belief that he could build up a profitable chicken farm with it and return the original investment to its owner's ac- count without discovery.

Some men, caught in a hopeless tangle, are relieved that the strain is over and that a new sense of perspective has been gained; others are disgruntled at an economic order that limits their

opportunities. But by no means are all of those serving their first sentences able to review the factors involved in their misbehavior so rationally. Some are unstable individuals who have com- mitted casual or impulsive crimes of a serious nature, unplanned and often pointless, and frequently involving at- tacks upon the person. These various cases in which medico-psychological factors are most obvious include both or- ganic and functional disorders ranging in a few instances into the area of definite psychotic conditions. Occasionally such offenders discuss the sources of their misbehavior with some insight, as did a twenty-two-year-old college stu- dent with a marked deformity of face and chest, who felt that he would not have attempted a felonious assault if his parents had taken him to a plastic sur- geon to have his physical deformities corrected. But more often the prisoner, seemingly more surprised than anyone else, exclaims, "I don't know what made me do it."

RECIDIVISTS

First offenders, however, constitute a minority of penitentiary inmates. Prob- ably three-fifths or more of penitentiary prisoners are those who have previous records of criminal activity. Among them is found no consensus of opinion as to why they or other men commit crimes. Their views range all the way from a denial of their own guilt (a common attitude of sex offenders, who look upon fellow prisoners convicted of crimes against property with all the naivete of the prison visitor) to those who discuss crime causation in the jar- gon of academic criminologists, with whose writings they have some acquaint- ance and whose views on the interrela- tionship of multiple causative factors they expound with conviction. In between falls a large group of those who associate their criminality superficially




with some one obvious factor, usually of a socioeconomic nature. Typical of this type are the alcoholic offenders, who without hesitancy point to drinking as the cause of all their troubles, but who seem never to wonder what factors may underlie their alcoholism.

Every time I get drunk and need money, I write "phoney" checks. After I am in jail I realize that it was wrong, but I just cannot help myself. Drink is the real reason for me being a convicted man.

Bad companions, difficulties with parents or wife, lack of employment or money, are common socioeconomic sources indicated more or less sincerely as the single cause of their crimes by a considerable number of prisoners.

"I stole because I was nearly starving and needed the money."

"The whole cause of my trouble is my father."

"My mother is the cause of my delin- quencies. When I was a child she used to punish me by cutting my hands with a knife."

"I was drinking with some fellows and they suggested that we could make some easy money. I didn't know what they intended to do."

"My father threw me out when I was eighteen because I couldn't get along with my stepmother."

In a summary of statements made during a careful psychiatric study of 250 recent admissions to Sing Sing Prison and compiled for the writer by Dr. Ralph S. Banay, Senior Clinic Psy- chiatrist, the following answers were given, listed in order of their frequency:

Needed money 43 Intoxication 40 Denies guilt 37 Can't explain 26 Fight 17 Marital troubles 13 Bad association 9

Lost head 8 Business difficulties 7 Accident 7 Sexual difficulties 7 Miscellaneous 36

Total 250

A somewhat smaller group includes recidivists who have accepted organized crime or some specific criminal trade or profession as their proper way of life, and who, though reluctant to discuss it, are apt to give straight, if not extended, answers when they do.

Distinctive among the alleged causes of crime are the statements made by some intelligent habitual offenders that their way of life offers them freedom ("I'd rather die than be a wage-slave") and adventure which they cannot find in legitimate pursuits and which are essential to a tolerably satisfying existence for them. Such a viewpoint is common among professional criminals who rely upon technical skill and their wits rather than upon force, and who are likely to look upon violence as stupid. Forgers and confidence men frequently express such views, and burglars have been known to. One able second-story worker who has never owned a gun has for more than twenty years wintered in Florida and spent his summers in New England, carefully planning a limited number of profitable jobs just before each seasonal migration.

Such criminal businessmen regard im- prisonment as one of the risks of their trade, and accept it without bitterness, as an undesirable but inevitable occa- sional interruption roughly comparable to hospitalization for a businessman who has become ill.

The thrill motive in less mature guise is also found among many youthful de- linquents, particularly auto thieves, who take cars primarily for the sake of joy riding, but who may sell them to junk dealers for profit if they are not caught.




Another causative force recognized by some recidivists might be described as a sort of cultural compulsion. Without resorting to claims of special advantages for their "businesses," professional offenders may make no moral distinction between their methods and those of other so-called "legitimate" businessmen. Although they know that their acts are considered wrong, they do not regard themselves as criminals. Every- one has a racket; theirs suits them, and beyond that they do not go except to venture a slight feeling of contempt for the hypocrites who assume a holier-than- thou pose because they seem to keep within the law.

One unusually intelligent inmate maintained to Dr. Glenn Kendall that there is a definite hoodlum culture, and that boys who grow up in areas where it prevails come naturally by it, ac- cepting its code of behavior even to their manner of dressing, its heroes, and its contemptuous attitude toward "working stiffs."

Another example of cultural compulsion is represented among Federal offenders by the southern hillbilly moon- shiners, who follow the ways of their fathers without consciousness of moral guilt, and who, according to Dr. Lind- ner, are often painfully honest outside of their distilling activities.

THE PSYCHOPATHS

Perhaps the most annoying and hopeless offenders that treatment agencies deal with are the psychopaths of good intelligence, who often know what they have done, appear genuinely sorry for it, verbally assume their responsibilities manfully, and promise with utter sincerity to keep out of trouble hereafter, only to give way almost as soon as they are released, to emotional impulses which they have never managed to bring into harmony with their knowledge.

No one has better characterized the views of this type on crime causation than Dr. Robert Lindner, whose gen- erous statement to the writer is based upon some years of comparative study of criminal psychopaths and so-called "normals" carried on under a special grant. Says Dr. Lindner:

Causation statements by psychopathic individuals differ as widely as psychopaths themselves. They take in the whole gamut of reasons for crime, from the "broken family" motif ("I could not get along with my folks, so I just left home and drifted") to the economic ("I wanted some money to dress up nice and a good car to get around in") and to social criticism ("How do you expect a man to get along under this system?"). The denominator which is common to all of them is that without any exception whatever they bear no true rela- tionship to the facts in the case; at best they are post hoc ergo propter hoc rationalizations. It is not rare to find among psychopaths men who possess (according to the exacting psychometric tests which we administer to them) a high degree of intelligence, and who have a complete intellectual insight into their motivation, who know right from wrong very well, and who nevertheless, on the spur of the moment's im- pulse, steal the car, rob the bank, attack their superior or the law officer, or commit any of the other crimes on the statute books. In other words, their intellectual insight kindles no emotional response. To use the language of the Catholic Church: their confessions (often forthcoming with all of the aplomb and exhibitionism symp- tomatic of the psychopath) are without the essential element of contrition, because emotionally they are not capable of contrition. Intellectually, they "know" that others have rights; emotionally they find themselves without the restraint to respect them. The law regards them as "sane," and indeed, they often show not only a devious and designing shrewdness, but a seemingly intelligent comprehension of the social significance of the laws they offend and the legal processes by which they are brought to justice. Nevertheless, it is my




considered opinion that we are dealing with compulsive behavior patterning in these cases, because their intellectual understanding is not charged with any emotional acceptance of any social order, however con- stituted. And therein lies their greatest danger for the community, by comparison to which their almost casual felonies shrink into unimportance. In the present state of world affairs, with social criticism (often of a very violent nature) made the common custom among all classes and types of people, the natural escape mechanism for the psychopath is to blame his troubles and those of his fellows on someone else, or (more important for society) on rubrics descriptive of the order in which he lives; i.e., the "system," "democracy," "capital- ism," etc. Significantly, a considerable number of inmates diagnosed as psychopathic cases are openly sympathetic to certain of the totalitarian regimes abroad, and many of those of southern extrac- tion see in the late Huey Long a model statesman and political leader. Nor would the psychopath be content to be merely a camp follower in the event of widespread social disturbances. His colossal egotism, his lack of any restraining moral or ethical principles, as well as his frequently dis- played talent for leadership are likely to make him the ideal subaltern in any or- ganization formed to promote what Rausch- ning has called "The Revolution of Ni- hilism." For that is what the psychopath really is: a Nihilist. His only intense emotional preoccupation is with himself. He appears to lack entirely the will to community, to borrow Rudolf Allers' succinct phrase; his behavior is one long aggressive substitute for unresolved infantile conflicts and frustrations.

Hence, the motivation of his crime by the psychopath is relevant only as a part of the symptomatology of his defect. His statements on the problem are never to be trusted, since they are either deliberately misleading or, in some cases, the results of willful self-deception. Even where he appears to show genuine repentance for his offense and what seems like an honest reso- lution to do better, he will, at the first opportunity, revert instantly to the crazy- quilt pattern of his style of life.

MAJOR GROUPS OF CRIMINALS: A HYPOTHESIS

The views of criminals on crime causation, whether accepted at their face value or critically analyzed and compared with verified case records, make it quite clear that the stereotype "criminal" does not exist except as a handy literary figure. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of their views on crime causation, the hypothesis may be advanced that four major, if somewhat indefinitely bounded, divisions appear:

First, unconvicted and once convicted upperworld criminals of normal to superior intelligence and social opportunities who have failed to comport themselves acceptably under great socioeconomic pressure, and who understand as well as most persons the roots of their difficulties. Their views on causation as ap- plied to themselves are likely to be sincerely expressed, often in great detail, within a normal range of human bias and rationalization.

Second, a major group of recidivists within the prison population, of normal to dull intelligence and from average to marginal social and economic levels, be- set with medico-psychological weak- nesses and hence incapable of living acceptably in their difficult world without help. Such offenders may or may not intend to express honestly their understanding of how they came to behave criminally, but in either event, they generally point with assurance to one par- ticular factor, with little apparent comprehension of the complexity of their own motivation.

A third group, recidivists, not too numerous, ranging from normal to dull intelligence, have departed from the accepted limits of legal behavior because of the overwhelming strength of the culture that immediately touches the offender, or because of a choice made gradually but more or less consciously




in favor of a way of life, criminal primarily in its economic aspect, because of a preference for its apparently greater satisfactions in terms of freedom and variety. Such criminals can rarely be induced to comment on causation in their own lives, but seem likely to answer intelligently, though laconically and with what seems to those outside of that group to be a biased dogmatism, when they speak at all.

Finally, there seems to be a group of recidivists of average or higher intelligence who comprise the vaguely defined unstable group of psychopaths whose intriguing discussions of causation in their own lives, though often readily obtained and convincingly given, are entirely unreliable because the offender fails to recognize or at least to face the basic constitutional limitation for which his criminal attack upon society seems attempted compensation.

HOPE FOR REFORMATION

There is little support in these suggestions for either extreme environmen- talist or Neo-Lombrosian biological in- terpretations of crime causation. The general pattern of culture, though important, is not always a predominant factor. The offender may be insulated from much of it, so that even as one factor it is only the part that touches the offender that may be demonstrably operative. In any event, the range of causative factors is great, their functions relative, their combinations varied and unique in each instance.

If genuine reformation be thought of as a sincere acceptance by a criminal of a legally approved pattern of behavior,

and the development of his capacity to live in accordance with it, then the chances of bringing an offender to that desirable state would seem to bear some direct relation to his views on the causes of his criminality. There seems little likelihood that the criminal who is con- tented with his choice can be converted by any consciously designed treatment now available. Only slightly more hopeful are the psychopathic recidivists whose cure, if it comes at all, will re- quire extended and competent psychiatric care-a point that might well be considered by those sincere friends of prisoners who are led by the convincing rationalizations and earnest professions of good intentions of this type to spend so much time, effort, and money at- tempting with little success to restore them to the good life.

From the situational group of first offenders may come a considerable pro- portion of successful releases. These are the most hopeful cases; among them are fortunate outcomes to which formal treatment beyond the shock of detection and conviction has contributed little or nothing, and which we may some day find the means of treating with necessary deference to society's demand for expia- tion but in a more economical fashion than is now customary.

The large group of socially and bio- logically inadequate offenders offers perhaps the greatest variety of possibilities for treatment, and invites the widest range of approaches. It continues to challenge an unimaginative and con- servative public opinion to support for an indefinite period of time an array of honestly and ably conceived experi- mental treatment programs.

Albert Morris is professor of sociology at Boston University, and has taught in the summer session of the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of the general text "Criminology" and of "A Study Guide in Anthropology."



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Crime in the United States || Criminals' Views on Crime Causation