The field of epigenetics, for example, stresses the degree to which certain genetic tendencies can interact with the environment. Recently, the nature-nurture debate was "declared to be officially redundant by social scientists and scientists, outdated, naive and unhelpful" and it was said that "nature and nurture interact to affect behaviour through complex and not yet fully understood ways, but, in practice, the debate continues," particularly in the field of criminology and in relation to juvenile-related crimes specifically (Levitt 2013)
First advanced by Bandura's Bobo experiments, Bandura (1961) observed in a controlled experiment that children were more likely to engage in mimicking violent behavior towards the same doll (a 'Bobo' doll) if they had seen an adult do so previously. "That is, children learn social behavior such as aggression through the process of observation learning - through watching the behavior of another person" (McLeod 2011)
A more refined notion of how 'nurture' or environmental forces can produce asocial behavior is manifested in theories such as strain theory, which suggests that a lack of harmony between expectations and realities can case individuals to behave in asocial ways. "The cornerstone of what is known as 'the means-end theory of deviance' is that crime breeds in the gap, imbalance, or disjunction between culturally induced aspirations for economic success and structurally distributed possibilities of achievement" (O'Connor 2014)
If the rewards for being a criminal are greater than the retribution it would bring then criminal behaviour seems more likely. This theory would predict that extreme punishments such as flogging or death would deter people from all crimes" (Sturt 2014)