This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

This course provides an in-depth examination of four contemporary and highly influential explanations for how and why people commit crime. These four theories - self-control, social control, social learning and sub-cultural deviance, and general strain theory - are distinguished by their combined emphases on the processes that lead individuals to commit crime and on the mindsets that enable them to do it. In this course, we will build on material covered in CRIM1000 to learn more about the individual causes of crime that have dominated criminological research and theorizing over the last 20 years. We will also learn more about how these theories are changing in response to recent discoveries and cutting-edge research on the biological bases of criminal behaviour. Finally, we will aim to integrate insights from two decades of criminological research together with recent (and some long-standing) discoveries in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and genetics to build a more complete understanding of "criminal minds" - the attitudes, perceptions, and orientations that lead people to commit crime.