The book Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman is the true account of a novelist about the fact that his brother is sentenced to prison for life for murder, something the novelist's brother tries to understand and with which he has to cope. The first question he considers is why his brother ends up in prison while he goes a very different direction in life. He further questions the meaning of criminal behavior and how it develops. He examines the nature of the prison system. He must learn to cope with that system as a visitor, an outsider who is given insight by his visits and by letters written by his brother from the inside.
There have been many theories offered to explain why some people become criminals, and the author looks to some of these theories to give him the answer as to why his brother has become a criminal and he has not. There is always in his desire to find this answer a certain sense of guilt, as if he has failed to help his brother or as if he should have followed the same path in life. The two were raised in the same house, they have the same parents, they lived in the same neighborhood as children, and therefore they had many of the same experiences. There are several theories of how the environment influences the development of criminal behavior, but both brothers have had the same environment for their formative years. Other theories try to find genetic reasons for criminal behavior, and yet these two brothers are close together genetically. The author never really comes to a conclusion about which theory applies, but much of what he says would point to Eysenck's theory of personality and crime.
Bartol (1991) discusses this theory as developed by Hags J. Eysenck in 1989. Eysenck's theory was a counter to sociological approaches that he believed had little to offer toward understanding crime or treating it. Eysenck instead argues that psychological knowledge provides the key answers and stra...