Criminal Behavior Biologically Determined
Is Criminal Behavior Biologically Determined
Jessica Bean
This is a statement that researches have long sought the answer for, it all boils down to nature versus nurture. Is there a clear answer? I can honestly say now that I do not believe so, after evaluating both sides I see that nature and nurture seem to play an almost even role. Therefore, I do no think it is fair to determine this question with a yes or no answer, instead I hope to present the facts and allow others to make a judgment based on those. When beginning my research I had the advantage of working with top psychiatrists in my area to try and determine the cause of criminal behavior, and I realized very quickly that there are two very convincing opposing sides and no …show more content…
To be biologically determined you could say that this person had a mental illness that drove them to commit these felonious crimes. Many people do not even believe in psychiatric illness none the less that it can drive behavior. I work on 552 evaluations, which are essentially people who plead not guilty due to reasons of insanity and there is a team of us that meet and evaluate the legitimacy of those statements. We have a team of psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, and medical doctors with no affiliation to the psychiatric field. One of those medical doctors constantly says to us that "a brain can be diseased but a mind can not, because the mind is not a physical organ". He believes that blaming mental, emotional, and behavioral problems on mental illness allows a person to reject free will and personal responsibility for their actions. To him the words psychological and biological are not synonymous, so therefore you can't be driven to do a crime on a mental …show more content…
When you talk about the schizophrenic with command hallucinations that killed someone, or commit some other crime; there are some biological markers that prove the person truly suffers from a mental illness. For one, there is a significant loss of gray matter in the brain in schizophrenics in some cases up to 25%. The areas most lacking in gray matter are usually the frontal and temporal areas of the brain which play a big role in decision making and rational thinking. There are many others in depth medical studies that compare the brain of a mentally ill person with a healthy adult brain and some significant differences in the two, which to me proves that there is a biological
Jessica Bean
This is a statement that researches have long sought the answer for, it all boils down to nature versus nurture. Is there a clear answer? I can honestly say now that I do not believe so, after evaluating both sides I see that nature and nurture seem to play an almost even role. Therefore, I do no think it is fair to determine this question with a yes or no answer, instead I hope to present the facts and allow others to make a judgment based on those. When beginning my research I had the advantage of working with top psychiatrists in my area to try and determine the cause of criminal behavior, and I realized very quickly that there are two very convincing opposing sides and no …show more content…
To be biologically determined you could say that this person had a mental illness that drove them to commit these felonious crimes. Many people do not even believe in psychiatric illness none the less that it can drive behavior. I work on 552 evaluations, which are essentially people who plead not guilty due to reasons of insanity and there is a team of us that meet and evaluate the legitimacy of those statements. We have a team of psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, and medical doctors with no affiliation to the psychiatric field. One of those medical doctors constantly says to us that "a brain can be diseased but a mind can not, because the mind is not a physical organ". He believes that blaming mental, emotional, and behavioral problems on mental illness allows a person to reject free will and personal responsibility for their actions. To him the words psychological and biological are not synonymous, so therefore you can't be driven to do a crime on a mental …show more content…
When you talk about the schizophrenic with command hallucinations that killed someone, or commit some other crime; there are some biological markers that prove the person truly suffers from a mental illness. For one, there is a significant loss of gray matter in the brain in schizophrenics in some cases up to 25%. The areas most lacking in gray matter are usually the frontal and temporal areas of the brain which play a big role in decision making and rational thinking. There are many others in depth medical studies that compare the brain of a mentally ill person with a healthy adult brain and some significant differences in the two, which to me proves that there is a biological