Social Class and Crime: A Biosocial Approach
By Anthony Walsh (Routledge, 2012; ISBN 9780415811064)
184 pages, 3 black-and-white illustrations. Available in hardback and eBook.

There’s something charming—if bleakly so—about watching an entire academic discipline dig itself into a trench and pretend biology doesn’t exist. For decades, criminology has done that. Crime, we’ve been told, is a social construct: the poor commit more crime because they are poor, and society (which is never defined) should be blamed for not giving them enough playgrounds. Anthony Walsh, in Social Class and Crime: A Biosocial Approach, wades into this intellectual sandbox with a bucket of genetic realism. He does not quite laugh, but he doesn’t ask permission either.

The core of Walsh’s argument is simple: crime is not just caused by bad schools and worse television. It is, in large part, an evolved reproductive strategy—a “mating effort” in environments where stability, attachment, and long-term investment are in short supply. And unlike your average sociologist, Walsh is not afraid to spell out what this actually means.

A high-mating-effort strategy is associated with traits such as impulsivity, aggression, sensation seeking, and callousness—traits that also predict criminal offending.

This is where it starts to get interesting—and offensive, if you’re employed by a diversity office. Walsh points out that in chaotic, low-status environments, being criminally violent is often a fast-track to sexual success. Criminals tend to have more sexual partners, start younger, and, in some cases, father significantly more children than their more law-abiding counterparts. One British study cited in the book found that just 10% of men accounted for 27% of all offspring in the sample. To the progressive ear, this sounds like eugenics in jackboots. To anyone with half a brain and a working knowledge of evolutionary biology, it sounds like reality.

And the implications are brutal. If criminal traits help you reproduce, then they don’t just survive—they spread.

Walsh goes further than Darwinian sexual economics. He draws from behavioural genetics, developmental psychology, and plain common sense to argue that the destruction of the family is central to the modern crime epidemic. Single-mother households? Stepdads with criminal records? Maternal neglect? These aren’t sob stories—they’re predictive models for future mugshots.

The presence of a stepfather, particularly one with a criminal record, significantly increases the risk of abuse and neglect.

It turns out that children don’t do well when raised in chaotic households by adults whose primary qualifications are that they haven’t yet been arrested. But this is not just about poor supervision. It’s about neurodevelopment. Walsh explains how early trauma, malnutrition, substance exposure, and lack of attachment literally deform the brain. Executive function is compromised, stress responses are exaggerated, and impulse control becomes a fantasy.

By this point, the reader may feel that Walsh’s model is becoming deterministic. It isn’t. Genetics, he insists, are probabilistic, not prescriptive. But they do matter. A lot.

If this were just another nature v nurture debate, I’d be bored. But Walsh’s genius lies in how he links the two. He is not a genetic determinist. He is worse: a biosocial interactionist. In Walsh’s view, crime emerges not just because people are poor or impulsive—but because poor and impulsive people are placed in environments that amplify both traits. He writes:

People bring their genes to environments, and these genes influence the kinds of environments they experience.

This is not a comfortable thesis. Especially not if you’re a policy wonk whose job is to commission more youth centres. But it is a coherent one. Poverty, in Walsh’s world, is not a mere economic state; it is a biological environment that reshapes the developing brain. Lead exposure, bad food, maternal smoking, stress hormones—all of these become part of a feedback loop that entrenches antisocial tendencies. If you’re born into a mess, and wired to respond to it with more mess, the outcome is not surprising.

In a welcome section, Walsh turns his attention to white-collar criminals—those parasites in business suits who commit fraud instead of burglary. Surprise: they’re not morally different. They’re just better at hiding it.

Chronic white-collar criminals… possess many of the same traits as street criminals—impulsivity, low self-control, risk-seeking, and low empathy.

Indeed, the primary difference is opportunity. If you grow up in a council estate, you smash a window and steal trainers. If you grow up in Kensington, you embezzle seven figures and call it investment banking. Either way, you’re a selfish bastard. But only one version ends up with a statue or a column in the FT.

Walsh’s application of the Five Factor Model makes this clear. Criminals tend to score low on agreeableness and conscientiousness—traits that also define the modern CEO. The difference is surveillance and vocabulary.

Social Class and Crime is not a comforting book. It will not win any prizes from the Royal Society for Kindness. But it is honest. It treats crime as something real and persistent—and it refuses to explain it away with sentimental theories about injustice. If you want to know why some people mug pensioners while others start hedge funds, read this book. It will not make you optimistic, but it will make you informed.

In a world built to flatter dysfunction and punish competence, Walsh offers an answer we are not meant to hear: criminals are not broken. In many environments, they are winning.