Here’s a quickly found opinion:
[I have no knowledge of the field, but found this surprising. Apparently the Jury is still out...]
“So glad someone else has noticed Stanton Samenow. Trust me, the fact he’s prolific in the field has more to do with his marketing and work with the media than it does with actual research expertise—based on even a cursory reading of his books or his blogs, it’s clear he either doesn’t understand statistics, or willfully pretends not to. One of the most common “arguments” he presents in favor of his criminal personality theories is to discount any variable that does not invariably lead to criminality, saying things like, say, “abuse during childhood is irrelevant to criminality, because if it caused criminality, everyone who was abused would become criminals.” He’ll often do this with several variables in succession, conveniently ignoring the fact that they vary independently, and therefore could be used in conjunction to be a very strong predictor of criminality. He also plays very fast and loose with what he considers to be a criminal, and seems to determine the criteria for a criminal based on whatever best suits his current argument (e.g. Discounting recidivism data from some interventions because nonrecidivists were just “criminals temporarily avoiding criminal behavior”). Furthermore, he mostly avoids publishing in actual journals these days, mostly focusing on his books and his blogs, where he doesn’t have to show his data or methods, and can get away with making unsubstantiated claims based on nothing more than anecdotal experiences interviewing criminals. For a quick introduction to some of this, check this out and trust me, there’s more where that came from. It’s also notable that Samenow himself has actually been accused of being a criminal in his own right So, yeah, tl;dr, he’s a hack. Answer from _geist_in_the_shell on reddit.com”
Nature versus nurture is a long-standing debate in biology and society about the relative influence on human behavior of their genetic inheritance or biology (nature) and the environmental conditions of their development (nurture). Nature is what people think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception e.g. the product of exposure, experience, and learning on an individual.I immediately think of in the past one-hundred years a myriad of new laws, statutes, rules, and regulations intentionally created to make ordinary citizens into criminals. It once was nature that defined the criminal as Stanton Samenow obviously knew. It is possible that nurture has come to dominance with socialist intention.
Thanks. I have not studied him extensively but I did take this way from his one book I’ve read: Criminal behavior is a result of the thinking of the individual.