Is Criminality a Result of "the Lottery of Birth?"

Mr. Y robbed and then murdered a young man who was walking home after a birthday celebration.* After robbing the victim at gunpoint, Mr. Y then shot him at point-blank range in the stomach. Although a terrible tragedy, unfortunately, this event was not remarkable—another life lost on a big city street.

What stood out in news reports of the homicide was the sense of inevitability that a man from Mr. Y’s background would one day do something like this as if it was his destiny. Noteworthy is that both the prosecutor and the defense attorney agreed that the defendant’s background explained the crime. Both attorneys cited adversities that Mr. Y had to cope with from the time he was a young child.

Even the judge who sentenced Mr. Y to a half-century of incarceration referred to the “lottery of birth” by which the perpetrator was “born into a family of many many challenges.”

The list of adversities that Mr. Y encountered is long. His single mother who was raising other children failed to supervise him properly. Consequently, the Department of Social Services became involved in his life, and he entered foster care.

As a juvenile, Mr. Y was truant, had “anger management” problems, and ended up in various detention centers and psychiatric facilities. Ostensibly because he did not have a father involved in his life, Mr. Y gravitated to the “older men of a street gang” that sold drugs, including heroin and fentanyl. The gang also trafficked in firearms.

Even while in jail, Mr. Y continued engaging in criminal behavior. He harassed and cursed at female correctional officers and masturbated in front of them. Mr. Y boasted about obtaining a knife while locked up and identified a woman whom he planned to assault once he was released to the streets.

The media reported that Mr. Y’s “childhood troubles” were what “set him on a path to prison.” The inference is that this man was a victim of his environment and, just as a needle on a compass points north, Mr. Y was pointed toward the penitentiary.

Did the environment mold Mr. Y as though he were an unformed lump of clay and turn him into a criminal?

Risk factors vs. "root causes" of crime

We do not choose the environment into which they are born, nor do we choose our parents. However, from the time we are quite young, we constantly are making choices as to how we deal with whatever arises from our “lottery of birth.”

For more than a half-century, sociologists and criminologists have focused on “poverty, inequality and addiction” as among “root causes of crime.” On December 31, 2021, The Washington Post stated in an editorial that the “solution” to the increasingly “grim numbers” of homicides “requires” attacking such problems.

Criminologists and sociologists are more inclined to speak of “risk factors” rather than “root causes.” Mr. Y faced an abundance of “risk factors” including parental neglect, poverty, lack of a father’s guidance, and peer pressure.

For nearly 50 years, I have evaluated offenders from a variety of backgrounds. While interviewing men, women, and children from circumstances similar to those of Mr. Y, I have found that most of their siblings and neighbors living in similar or worse circumstances have not followed a criminal path.

As one offender said about his brother, “He didn’t want no part of no trouble.” I interviewed the man’s brother who feared that his sibling would wind up in prison or dead. He wanted to make something of himself and saw more attractive possibilities in going to school and staying away from gangs.

Those who continue to adhere to a grim determinism assert that if a person grows up as Mr. Y did under adverse circumstances, invariably he is “set on a path to prison.” Not only is that untrue but it also constitutes an insult to the multitude of people who don’t become criminals but, instead, live responsibly, work hard, and contribute to society.

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*The perpetrator’s name is omitted here. The news article appeared in the 12/11/21 issue of The Baltimore Sun.