What is the cause of crime? One can find answers in many places: in Genesis, in the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov. The many answers include impiety, appetite, rage, and even the lure of transgression itself. For many, religious and poetic insights still offer the most compelling explanations. In the eighteenth-century, Enlightenment scholars and intellectuals began seeking a different kind of answer—one rooted in systematic inquiry and rational study. Eventually these inquiries crystallized as the field of criminology, a distinct branch of social science, interwoven within the history of sociology.
Within the field of criminology today the dominant answer to “What causes people to commit crime?” includes three elements: blocked opportunities, delinquent peers, and delinquent labels. That’s the story leading criminology textbooks and theorists tell. Oddly, however, the supporting evidence
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