Research Paper on:
Causes of Criminal Behavior

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
since their behavior is already preordained? This is the question that many have wrestled with for the past several decades and, it would seem, will continue to debate for years  to come. Taking the stance that criminals are made and not born, as per the Hernstein and Wilson suppositions (Jack Selzers Conversations, 2000), then one would think that there would  be some action taken to prevent those environmental and sociological factors from occurring. But it isnt as simple as that, it would seem. According to Hernstein and Wilson, the  answer to the question, Is a criminal born or made? is both. They propose that it is a combination of predisposing character traits channeled by social circumstances(Selzer, 837). What they  noticed when they began to do a historical research was that nearly all of the crimes committed throughout history have been done so by young men. In fact, their studies  showed that this is a universal characteristic. Regardless of nationality, crime was a young mans pursuit. In fact, they site a case study that involved the use of twins.  Nearly 1500 sets of twins were studied in various countries around the world and interestingly enough the findings showed that identical twins, or those who shared the most exact genetic  make-up, were twice as likely than fraternal twins, to share a criminal record(Selzer, 838). This would seem to support their theory that biology has something to do with determining the  fate of an individual. Next, they speak of a test done where children of criminals were adopted and placed into very good, loving, supportive families. The children were quite young,  infants some of them. What was under scrutiny here was to see if environment had an influence on biology. The findings were negative. In most cases the criminal records