Among the most firmly established facts about criminals is that their IQs differ from the population at large. Criminal offenders have IQs of about 92, eight points below the mean for Caucasians. The relationship of IQ to criminality is especially pronounced in young men who constitute the chronic criminals responsible for most of the crimes committed in this country. Again, as with previous chapters, the authors deal exclusively with white males as they dissect the various elements of criminality.
Crime can tear a free society apart at the seams because free societies depend so heavily on faith that the other person will behave decently. Yes, it is always possible to buy better locks, stay off the streets after dark, regard every stranger with suspicion and post security cameras on every street corner, but these are poor substitutes for living in a peaceful and save neighborhood inhabited by law abiding citizens.
Most Americans think that the crime rate has gotten far too high, but the ruminations about how we have reached this state and what might be done about it, pay little to no attention to one of the best documented relationships in the study of criminality: criminals, as a group, are below average in intelligence. Although the authors ignore the issue, intelligence, or lack of same, is a particularly important factor in inner-city black on black crime.
It was not always this way, most of us older folk can remember a time when it was save to walk the streets at night, even in poor neighborhoods. From 1950 to 1963 the rate of violent crime was very low and flat. The crime rate increased steadily from 1963 to 1992 and, when this book was written, was five times what it was in 1963. The population, of course, did not become significantly more stupid over this 29 year period, so social factors unrelated to intelligence must have responsible for the increase in criminality during 1960, 1970s and 1980s. Rather, changes in social policies, including, most importantly, Johnson's great society legislation were to blame for the increases in criminality in the last half of the ninetieth century (my assessment, not the authors).
Are criminals psychologically distinct, or are they ordinary people responding to social and economic circumstances. The leading scholars in the 1950s, 60s and 70s saw criminals as much like the rest of us, except that society had earmarked them for a life of criminality. Some went further, seeing criminals as free of personal blame. The most radical theorists argued that the definition of crime was in itself ideological, creating "criminals" of people who were behaving in ways that the power structure chose to define as deviant. the more moderate sociological experts maintained that poverty and unemployment were the root causes of criminality. These classical sociological arguments were distinguished more by their popularity than by any analysis of criminal behavior.
Recently, the emphasis has shifted more to the characteristics of the offender and away from the circumstances of his environment. In their most extreme forms, psychological theories claim that people are born criminals, destined by their biological make up to offend. The authors are at neither of these theoretical poles. The reason for calling attention to the contrasting views of the experts is that public discourse has lagged and remained more nearly stuck at the sociological pole than it is among the experts. The authors are more interested in the role that cognitive ability plays in creating criminals but do not deny that sociology, economic and public policy also play important roles in the development of the criminal mind.
Let's start with an overview of the link between cognitive ability and criminal behavior. The statistical association between crime and cognitive ability has been known since intelligence testing began in the early nineteenth-century. The British physician Charles Goring found that a lack of intelligence was one of the distinguishing traits of the prison population early in the century. In 1914 H. H. Goddard reported that a large fraction of convicts were intellectually subnormal.
Then in 1931 Edwin Sutherland wrote an article "Mental Deficiency and Crime" that effectively put an end to the study of IQ and crime for half a century. He observed, accurately, that that the IQ differences between criminals and the general population were decreasing as testing procedures improved. Sutherland leaped to the conclusion that the remaining differences would disappear altogether as the art of intelligence testing continued to improve.
The differences, in fact, did not disappear but that did not stop criminologists from denying the importance of IQ as a predictor of criminal behavior. By 1960 the association of intelligence and crime was altogether dismissed in criminology textbooks and so it remained until recently.
Hirschi and Hindelang's 1977 article, "Intelligence and Delinquency: A Revisionist View" served to right the floundering IQ/criminality ship. The authors of this study reviewed the articles that included measurements of IQ and concluded that juvenile delinquents were in fact characterized by substantially below-average levels of intelligence. Criminology textbooks now routinely report the correlation between crime and intelligence and, although some questions of interpretation are still open, the correlation between intelligence and criminality is no longer in dispute. Just what is the size of the IQ gap?
Taking the literature as a whole, incarcerated offenders have an average IQ of about 92, eight points below the mean for nonoffenders. The studies show that a disproportionally large fraction of all crimes are committed by people toward the low end of the scale of intelligence. However, there are very few very low IQ offenders probably because extremely dull people have difficulty mustering the competence to commit most crimes. In addition a sufficiently low IQ usually is enough to exempt a person from prosecution and, as a result, they are not included in the statistics related to criminology.
The question arises, do the unintelligent criminals commit more crimes, or do they just get caught more often? There is no evidence to support the claim that there are a large population of very bright offenders who escape detection because they are smart enough to escape detection by law enforcement officials. In fact, in the small amount of data available, the IQs of uncaught offenders are not measurably different from those who are caught.
On the other side of the coin, those who do not commit crimes, it is clear that high cognitive ability protects a person from becoming a criminal even if other precursors such as poverty and social status are present. A study of high risk sons, whose fathers had prison records, in Copenhagen revealed that the high risk sons with no criminal record had IQ scores one standard deviation than the sons of criminals who themselves had become criminals.
Similarly, a New Zealand study divided boys and girls at age five into groups based on whether they were at low or high risks for delinquency. High risk children, those with low IQs, were twice as likely to become delinquent by their mid teens as were the low-risk higher IQ children.
Self-reports, information that was volunteered by individuals who were incarcerated when interviewed, showed that white men's socioeconomic background had little or nothing to do with their criminality; in fact, higher socioeconomic status actually was associated with higher crime rates after controlling for IQ.
The crime rate also is higher in white males who come from broken homes but even here IQ is the most important determinant of criminality. For example, young men from broken homes, but with average IQs and socioeconomic backgrounds had a four percent chance of being incarcerated while those in the lower centiles of intelligence had a 22 percent chance of being in prison.
Education, which also is a measure of intelligence, also plays a major role in criminality. Of all white males who were interviewed while in jail, 74 percent had never gotten a high school diploma and none had a college degree.
Many people tend to think of criminals as having come from the wrong side of the tracts. Indeed they are correct, insofar as that is where people of low cognitive ability live. But the assumption that to glibly follows from these observations is that economic and social disadvantages is in itself the cause of criminal behavior. This mistaken belief has driven much of our social policy over the past half century. The attention that has been given to problems of poverty and unemployment should be shifted, the authors believe, to another question altogether: coping with the cognitive disadvantaged.
Comment: I cannot think of a single social problem that is not strongly related to intelligence, criminality is no exception. The social problems we face in this country will only worsen unless those who make public policy come to the realization that we are not all born equal in anything, and most certainly not in cognitive ability.
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