An overview of Psychological Theories of Crime

Criminal behavior has a multitude of theories attempting to explain its origins ranging form the bizarre to the mundane. These include everything from tattoos causing crime, to crime being caused by poor parenting. There are a large number of theories attempting to explain crime through empirical methods from a multitude of disciplines - sociology, biology, and the area of specificity for this paper - psychology. Psychological methods beginning in Aristotle's Nichomachean ethics all the way through modern personality theories all attempt to explain the internal motivations of crime. Th…