THE EFFECTS OF CATTLE RUSTLLING IN WEST POKOT COUNTY: A CASE OF KACHELIBA CONSTITUENCY

Violent Crime has been in place throughout time in memorial. It has been so troublesome and so persistent in marginalized areas like West Pokot, Baringo, Turkana counties etc that much efforts has been devoted to understanding its root causes. However, much has been unattended and eventually MARGINALIZATION is currently prevailing as the key root cause. Modern day approaches to deviant and criminal behavior can be divided into the general categories of sociological, biological and psychological theoretical explanations. Scientific explanations for deviant and criminal behavior centered on the importance of inherited factors and generated the importance of environmental influences. Deviant individuals are born, not made. Cesare Lombroso (1835?1901), was an Italian doctor who believed that too much emphasis was being put on free will as an explanation for deviant behavior which leads to LIVESTOCK THEFT. While trying to discover the causes and differences between deviant and deviant inhabitants resulting to practicing cattle rustling, he concluded that it was to understand the insights of the root causes. When he studied some of the insights, he came with the issue of Criminality in the communities practiced by people with certain characteristics of certain facial physique. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal-an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. (Taylor et al., 1973, p. 4) According to Lombroso, criminals are evolutionary throw backs whose behavior is more apelike than human. They are driven by their instincts to engage in deviant behavior. These people can be identified by certain physical signs that betray their savage nature. Lombroso spent much of his life studying and dissecting dead prisoners in Italys jails and concluded that their criminality was associated with an animal-like body type that revealed an inherited primitiveness (Lombroso-Ferrero, 1972). He also believed that certain criminal types could be identified by their head size, facial characteristics (size and shape of the nose, for instance), and even hair color, His writings were met with heated criticism from scholars who pointed out that perfectly normal-looking people have committed violent acts. (Modern social scientists would add that by confining his research to the study of prison inmates, Lombroso used a biased sample, thereby limiting the validity of his investigations.) Shortly before World War II, anthropologist E. A. Hooten argued that the born criminal was a scientific reality. Hooten believed crime was not the product of social conditions but the outgrowth of organic inferiority.