Description
From Simon & Schuster, Crime & Human Nature is the definitive study of the causes of crime.The reader may wonder, as we ourselves once wondered, why a political sci- entist and an experimental psychologist should be writing a book on the causes of crime. Our collaboration in this venture began in 1977 when our mutual curiosity about individual differences in criminality led us to teach at Harvard, together with Professor Mark H. Moore, a graduate seminar and then, the following year, an undergraduate course on crime and criminal justice. The three of us had come together to explore our belief that psychol- ogy, political economy, and political science each had something interesting to say about crime and what to do about it.
Over the many years during which the course evolved, our interest gradually shifted away from current issues in crime control and toward the causes of crime. Moore had by this time left our partnership because of other academic commitments, and we (Wilson and Herrnstein) began to wonder whether our growing familiarity with research findings on crime could be set forth and interpreted in the light of a single theoretical perspective. In doing so, we gradually became aware that we were, in effect, drawing together two ancient disciplines that had once been united but that, in recent decades, had drawn apart. Political science and psychology had arisen
Crime is that behavior condemned by society; it occurs despite the re- wards and punishments that have been devised to enforce that condemnation. If individual differences in criminality are to be explained, one must explain why some individuals, formed in part by their experiences within social institutions, nonetheless disobey many of the most important rules of those institutions and do so even when society has made it clear that it will try to punish that disobedience.
ISBN:9780671628109
