CRIME, THEORIES OFThese are related but analytically separate ques-
tions about the causes of crime. As Donald Cressey
(1951) argued many years ago, an adequate ac-
count of criminality should contain two distinct
but consistent aspects: First, a statement that ex-
plains the statistical distribution of criminal behav-
ior in time and space (epidemiology), and second,
a statement that identifies the process or processes
by which persons come to engage in criminal
behavior.
Statistical distributions of criminal behavior in
time and space are usually presented in the form
of crime rates of one kind or another. One of the
most familiar of these is the index crime rate report-
ed annually for cities, states, and other jurisdic-
tions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The
index crime rate is comprised of the number of
reported cases of murder, non-negligent man-
slaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, rob-
bery, burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson per
jurisdiction, expressed as a rate per 100,000 per-
sons in that jurisdiction’s population.
Many crime rate patterns are well known,
including relatively high rates of violence in the
United States as compared to other nations, state-
by-state variations in forcible rape rates, regional
variations in homicide and other crimes within the
United States, and so forth. However, criminological
scholars continue to be hampered in their efforts
to account for variations in crime across various
nations in the world by the lack of detailed data
about lawbreaking in nations and regions other
than the United States (although see van Dijk,
Mayhew, and Killias 1990).
Criminologists have developed a number of
theories or explanations for many crime rate varia-
tions. One case in point is Larry Baron and Murray
Straus’s (1987) investigation of rape rates for the
fifty American states, in which they hypothesized
that state-to-state variations in gender inequality,
social disorganization (high divorce rates, low
church attendance, and the like), pornography
readership, and ‘‘cultural spillover’’ (authorized
paddling of school children, etc.) are major influ-
ences on forcible rape. Steven Messner and Rich-
ard Rosenfeld’s (1994) institutional anomie theory is
another example of theorizing that focuses on
crime rate variations. They argued that in present-
day America, cultural pressures to accumulate
money and other forms of wealth are joined to
weak social controls arising from noneconomic
elements of the social structure, principally the
political system, along with religion, education,
and family patterns. According to Messner and
Rosenfeld, this pronounced emphasis on the accu-
mulation of wealth and weak social restraints pro-
motes high rates of instrumental criminal activity
such as robbery, burglary, larceny, and auto theft.Crime rates are important social indicators
that reflect the quality of life in different regions,
states, or areas. Additionally, theories that link
various social factors to those rates provide consid-
erable insight into the causes of lawbreaking. But,
it is well to keep in mind that crime rates are the
summary expression of illegal acts of individuals.
Much of the time, the precise number of offenders
who have carried out the reported offenses is
unknown because individual law violators engage
in varying numbers of crimes per year. Even so,
crime rates summarize the illegal actions of indi-
viduals. Accordingly, theories of crime must ulti-
mately deal with the processes by which these
specific persons come to exhibit criminal behavior.In practice, criminological theories that focus
on crime rates and patterns often have had rela-
tively little to say about the causes of individual
behavior. For example, variations in income ine-
quality from one place to another have been iden-
tified by criminologists as being related to rates of
predatory property crime such as burglary, auto-
mobile theft, and larceny. Many of the studies that
have reported this finding have had little to say
about how income inequality, defined as the une-
qual distribution of income among an entire popu-
lation of an area or locale, affects individuals. In
short, explanations of crime rate variations often
have failed to indicate how the explanatory vari-
ables they identify ‘‘get inside the heads of offend-
ers,’’ so to speak.Although criminological theories about crime
rates and crime patterns have often been devel-
oped independently of theories related to the
processes by which specific persons come to exhib-
it criminal conduct, valid theories of these process-
es ought to have implications for the task of under-
standing the realities of individual criminal conduct.
For example, if variations in gender inequality and
levels of pornography are related to rates of forci-
ble rape, it may be that males who carry out sexual
assaults are also the individuals who most strongly