Notes

Crime causation is a daunting and complex field. For centuries, philosophers have pondered the meaning of the concept of cause as it pertains to human behavior. Increasingly, research suggests that individuals are unaware of the causes of other people's behaviors as well as the causes of much of their own conduct. It is no longer sufficient to ask people, "Why did you do that?" (Davison and Neale, p. 167), because they may only think they know. Instead, modern research offers a bevy of approaches in an attempt to answer that question.
The "why did you do that?" inquiry is particularly perplexing when it applies to crime. Criminal behavior is, by definition, outside of normative conduct. Many criminals engage in behaviors that most people could not conceive of doing themselves. There is also a wide range of criminal misconduct that may not always share the same source. For example, the causes of violent crime can differ from the causes of property crime; the causes of chronic and repeat criminality can differ from the causes of one-time or infrequent criminality. This type of variation makes the field of crime causation all the more challenging.
There are two basic questions concerning cause-and-effect relationships: (1) What evidence is needed to support a legitimate inference that "A" caused "B"? (2) Assuming that the evidence in question (1) is acceptable, what inferences can be drawn from such evidence, and how? These questions are difficult in part because there are no clear semantics for describing causal chains nor the proper empirical tools for raising causal questions and deriving causal answers. Yet the questions are critical for determining the causes of crime. The concept of cause structures the way we perceive and think about the "why did you do that?" inquiry, as well as the legal action courts may take in response to it.
Some causal questions are particularly troublesome to researchers because of the strong ties between criminology, philosophy, and law. For example, the concepts of cause and effect are inter-twined with the concepts of free will and determinism, which are in turn associated with the legal concepts of responsibility and reasonable person. More philosophically detached fields of study (such as engineering or mathematics) appear to encounter fewer problems with causal investigations because they can more easily sidestep moral and value-laden issues. While increasingly quantitative approaches in criminology may succeed in restructuring the way researchers investigate the causes of crime, the field of criminology cannot avoid tackling philosophical questions altogether; the semantic roots of law and morality run too deep and they frame the disciplinary lense that criminologists use for study.