SHOULD CRIMINALS BE PUNISHED? THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CRIME (BASIC APPROACH) 1

Why is there crime? Why do we have prisons? Why is there a court? Why do we have lawyers and judges? Heck, why do we even have law? Many of you reading this article would simply say that there’s crime because there will always be bad people in the world, and there are prisons to rehabilitate and keep these bad people. There’s a court to try these bad people, and lawyers as well as judges are there to make the trial as fair as possible. We have a law to keep order and to have a legitimate authority to convict criminals and serve justice. However, these all seem like perfectly logical and reasonable answers to these questions and a common response as well. Especially for law, where such responses are even taught in classrooms. “Why do we have law?” Answer: “to maintain order and prevent anarchy”. But do you ever ask yourself, “why is there anarchy in the absence of law?”. “Why can’t we ever have a self-maintained order without the need of some central piece that serves as a standard of action?” Thinking about it, is crime that easy to explain? Can we just call criminals “bad people”? After all, they are humans of the Homo sapiens species like every one of us. Is it truly justifiable to call them “bad”?

Studying crime can be very draining in the aspect that even though it seems clear enough at hindsight-he killed the man. Questions do arise. Why did he kill the man? How did he do it? Why is it he did it that way? What caused the deterioration of his moral compass? Did he even have one? If not, why didn’t he have one? And the truth is that we could keep on coming up with these thought-provoking questions. Crime is not direct in fact it is not a one moment event. It is a collective correlation and causation of different events and issues that caused a negative domino effect to the present, which is the crime scene. Hard-line religious movements and groups may have a divergent view though. They outright condemn these criminals and in the historic era of Catholicism, it was recorded that any criminal could very easily end up at the gallows for stealing an item, disregarding value. Especially if these individuals do not have any high status backing them.

Again, these criminals as society portrays them as- “bad”; they may have underlying causes as to which modern legal systems have tried to consider. For example, a psychologically challenged individual is not tried to sentence but taken to a psychiatric hospital to aid in his condition as he may not have been in the right state of mind when committing the crime. However, do people understand that most criminals subject to crime not because they want to but because they have no other choice. They believe that as life has been a hard ground to lie on, their actions are justifiable, this is why in some trials criminals seem to have no remorse or at least show it that way to the camera. The psychology behind crime is an extensive topic to discuss on, and it travails all current or set methods of thought and challenges us to think more broadly, that we understand that crime is not so one-dimensional; to understand that this world is not just black and white, there are also shades of grey. We should understand that there is not always distinct- a good and bad guy. This is because even the supposed good guys can be flawed. The way you see criminals all begins in the mind as it is the centre of thought.

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