Criminal Motivation And Personality

Only by discovering what criminals want to obtain from the behaviors of crime that they committed can we touch the essence of criminals as well as their criminal psychology. The research on motivation of crime and criminal personality plays one of the key roles in the process of accomplishing such discovery. Motivation of crime, which can be understood from the level”criminal motivation”(being of core status) and the level“motivation of crime”, is the internal force that spurs individuals to commit a crime. As one of the factors of personality orientation, motivation of crime is of great value in criminal psychology structure, and is also the key theory as well as countermeasure system in criminal psychology. The theory of“The Selfish Gene”in sociobiology is used as theoretical hypothesis in this paper, so as to demonstrate and clarify the relationship between motivation of crime and system of need, and the relationship between social culture force and individual personality. Influenced by the social culture force, the need system, mainly deficiency need, can be externalized to direct criminal motivation and stable criminal personality through approaches such as imitation, role-identification, cognitive choice, and self-reinforcement.The development of theories on motivation can be interpreted by instinct theory, inducement theory, reinforcement theory and cognitive-affective theory. These theories, which explore and analyze human behavior from various dimensions, are all of scientific values. This paper holds dialectic and synchronic viewpoints of motivation, so that the characteristics, the essence, and the structure (including factors, components and mechanisms) of motivation of crime can be completely analyzed. Due to the core role and significant importance played by motivation of crime, criminal psychology is bound to provide theoretical and empirical support for legal psychology criminal integration.Motivation of crime is determined by various factors. The instinct and need are primary sources of the formation as well as the development of motivation of crime, which directly reflects dominant needs under the influence of particular culture and regulations. Here, based on hierarchical theory of needs, relationships of hierarchy and relative advantage can be found between criminal motivation and various needs including instinct need, safety need, belongingness need, esteem need, cognitive need, aesthetic need and self actualization need. Such relationships turn out to be concrete components of motivation of crime, among which unconscious criminal motivation is of peculiarities, mainly in negligent crimes, juvenile delinquencies, crime of passion, abnormal sexual crime, and group crime .Motivation of crime is determined by various mechanisms. In the process of socialization that transforms individuals from nature persons to social persons; it is less likely that dominant needs can turn to be motivation of crime automatically and directly. Needs act as source and fundamental premise of criminal motivation, but not the necessary result. The social environment and cultural force that individuals live in will inevitably influence criminal motivation via assimilation and accommodation. Individual mechanism of criminal motivation is related with both conscious aspects and unconscious aspects, such as imitation mechanism, exchanging mechanism, pressure mechanism, attribution mechanism, neuro-physiological system and defense mechanism.Dominated by various factors and mechanisms, motivation of crime has four concrete components: physiological component (represented by survival instinct, sexual instinct, competition instinct and braveness instinct), behavioral component (represented by criminal inducing force, criminal goal orientation and criminal habits), cognitive component (represented by criminal goal value, rationalization of crime, self efficacy of crime and criminal thinking model), and emotional component (represented by seeking pleasure, pain avoiding and emotion releasing force) .Criminal personality and criminal motivation are coincident in essence. Criminal motivation that works consistently formulates criminal personality, and acts as core component of criminal personality. Criminal motivation is not mechanistic expression of biological gene in social regulations, but the cognitive and emotional expression of conscious ego of individual. Criminal personality is stable and developmental embodiment of criminal motivation in terms of rationality and emotion.As an important force of criminal psychology, criminal motivation formulates earlier than criminal behavior. The existence of criminal motivation does not always lead to criminal behavior, but most crimes wouldn't happen without criminal motivation. There are two patterns of criminal behaviors, namely rational pattern and emotional pattern, both of which have forces of law, morality, relation, ability and other special resistant force.The existence of motivation of crime is not static. Combing personality development theory, the author analyses how criminal motivation changes and develops in the process of individual socialization and in different periods of individual criminal evolution.With synchronic pattern composed of biology, social culture and criminal personality, relevant factors of criminal motivation such as force source, structure model, changes and particular expressions are interpreted in this thesis by considering individuals from an integral angle. In criminal justice practice, motivation of crime acts as not only embodiment of“criminal jurisprudence of personality”, whose core component is subjective factors (the need system, goal system, and self-control system) of criminals, but also rational tactics that center on the correction and reintegration of criminals.