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I.
Psychology and Criminality (page 85)
A. Psychological Development
1. The psychoanalytic theory of criminality attributes delinquent and
criminal behavior to at least three causes:
a. A conscience so overbearing that it arouses feelings of guilt.
a. A conscience so weak that it cannot control the individual’s
impulses.
b. The need for immediate gratification.
2. Sigmund Freud suggested that a person’s psychological well-being
is dependent on the healthy interaction of:
a. The id, which consists of powerful urges and drives for
gratification and satisfaction.
b. The ego, which is the executive personality, acting as the
moderator between the id and the superego.
c. The superego, which acts as a moral code or conscience.
3. Freud proposed that criminality may result if the superego is
overactive, or if the superego is not strong enough to control the
impulses of the id.
4. Despite the criticism of psychoanalytic theory, three basic principles
are of interest to psychologists that study criminology:
a. The actions and behavior of an adult are understood in terms of
childhood development.
b. Behavior and unconscious motives are intertwined, and their
interaction must be unraveled if we are to understand
criminality.
c. Criminality is essentially a representation of psychological
conflict.
B. Moral Development
1. Lawrence Kohlberg generated the moral developmental theory, which
posits that moral reasoning develops in three phases.
a. Preconventional level: children’s moral rules and moral values
consist of dos and don’ts to avoid punishment
b. Conventional level: adolescents typically reason at this level at
which they believe in and have adopted the values and rules of
society, and they seek to uphold these rules
c. Postconventional level: individuals examine customs and social
rules according to their own sense of universal human rights,
moral principles, and duties
2. According to Kohlberg, most delinquents and criminals function at the
Preconventional level.
3. Kohlberg has argued that basic moral principles and social norms are
learned through social interaction and role-playing.
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C. Maternal Deprivation and Attachment Theory
1. Research indicates that shortly after birth, mammals form an emotional
bond between infant and mother.
2. The strength of that bond, or the attachment, will affect the child’s
social development and ability to form attachments in the future.
3. Studies of attachment by John Bowlby support his theory of
attachment, which has seven features:
a. Specificity
b. Duration
c. Engagement of emotion
d. Ontogeny
e. Learning
f. Organization
g. Biological function
4. Bowlby suggests that in order to be securely attached, a child must
experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with a
mother figure.
5. If a child is separated from its mother, or rejected by its mother,
anxious attachment develops, which affects the capacity to develop
intimate relationships with others.
D. Learning Aggression and Violence
1. Social learning theory maintains that delinquent behavior is learned
through the same psychological processes as any other behavior.
2. Observational Learning
a. Albert Bandura argues that people learn violence and
aggression through behavioral modeling.
b. Behavior is socially transmitted through examples, which come
primarily from the family, the subculture, and the mass media.
3. Direct Experience
a. What people learn from direct experience is determined by
what they themselves do and what happens to them.
b. The individual’s behavior in the first instance and their
restraint are said to be “reinforced” by the rewards and
punishments they receive.
c. Violence and aggression may be learned, but they may not be
expressed until they are elicited.
d. Bandura suggests that there are instigators that will elicit
behavior:
i.
Aversive instigators
ii.
Incentive instigators
iii.
Modeling instigators
iv.
Instructional instigators
v.
Delusional instigators
4. Differential Reinforcement
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a. Ernest Burgess and Ronald Akers generated the theory of
differential association-reinforcement, which suggests that:
i.
The persistence of criminal behavior depends on
whether or not it is rewarded or punished
ii.
The most meaningful rewards and punishments
are those given by groups that are important in an
individual’s life.
b. People learn to behave in a violent or aggressive way, but
perhaps something within the personality of a criminal creates
a susceptibility to aggressive or violent models in the first
place.
E. Personality
1. Four discrete lines have examined the relationship between personality
and criminality.
a. Investigators have looked at the differences between the
personality structures of criminals and non-criminals.
b. A vast amount of literature is devoted to the prediction of
behavior.
c. Many studies examine the degree to which normal personality
dynamics operate in criminals.
d. Some researchers have attempted to quantify individual
differences between types and groups of offenders.
2. In The Criminal Personality, Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow
said that criminals share abnormal thinking patterns that lead to
decisions to commit crimes.
3. The research of Yochelson and Samenow revealed a common
personality profile: the criminals tested showed remarkable similarity in
their deficient self-control, intolerance, and lack of responsibility.
4. Eysenck’s Conditioning Theory
a. First, Eysenck claims that all human personality may be seen in
three dimensions:
i.
Psychoticism: aggressive, egocentric, and impulsive
ii.
Extroversion: sensation-seeking, dominant, and
assertive
iii.
Neuroticism: low self-esteem, excessive anxiety,
and wide mood swings
b. Second, Eysenck suggests that humans develop a conscience
through conditioning
II.
Mental Disorders and Crime (page 98)
A. Traditionally, the medical profession viewed mental illness as an absolute
condition or status; either you are afflicted with psychosis or you are not.
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B. This dichotomous scheme of diagnosis is problematic, and is apparent no
where more than in the insanity defense, which calls for proof of sanity or
insanity and generally does not allow for gradations in mental functioning.
C. Today the mental illness known as psychopathy, sociopathy, or antisocial
personality is diagnosed when a personality is characterized by the inability to
learn from experience, lack of warmth, and absence of guilt, but not
psychosis.
D. Psychologists have found that psychopaths, like Eysenck’s extroverts, have a
low internal arousal level, forcing them to constantly seek external stimulation
and rendering them less susceptible to learning by direct experience, including
punishment.
E. Psychological Causation
1. When examining criminal behavior, it is easy to make the fundamental
psycholegal error, which results when a cause for criminal behavior is
identified and then it is assumed that any behavior resulting from that
cause must be excused by law.
2. There is a serious likelihood of psycholegal error in cases where
lawyers have evoked the insanity defense.
III.
Biology and Criminality (page 101)
A. Modern Biocriminality
1. Biocriminology is the study of the physical aspects of psychological
disorders.
2. Recent research has demonstrated that crime does indeed have
psychobiological aspects similar to those found in studies of
depression.
3. There is also evidence that strongly suggests a genetic predisposition to
criminality.
B. Genetics and Criminality
1. The XYY Syndrome
a. One type of abnormality is the XYY chromosomal male; he
receives two Y chromosomes from his father instead of one.
b. Recent studies have discounted the relationship between the
extra Y chromosome and criminality.
c. One problem is separating the environmental factors from the
genetic predispositions with which they begin to interact at
birth.
2. Twin Studies
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a. Researchers have compared identical and fraternal twins in an
attempt to determine whether or not crime is genetically
predetermined.
b. The largest study of twins by Christiansen and Mednick found
that the chance of their being a criminal twin when the other
twin was a criminal was fifty percent for identical twins and
twenty percent for same-sex fraternal twins.
c. This finding lends some support to the hypothesis that some
genetic influences increase the risk of criminality.
d. A weakness of this research is that is may not be valid to
assume a common environment for all twins who grow up in the
same house at the same time.
3. Adoption Studies
a. One way to separate genetic and environmental factors is to
study infants separated at birth from their natural parents and
placed randomly in foster homes.
b. In the largest study of its kind, researchers hypothesized that
criminality in the biological parents would be associated with an
increased risk of criminal behavior in the child.
C. The Controversy over Violence and Genes
1. No one has found any direct link between genes and violence.
2. The controversial issue is the implications of such finding.
D. The IQ Debate
1. Historically, the results of IQ tests administered to incarcerated
criminals revealed low IQ.
2. Over the past century, criticism against the usefulness of IQ tests, and
the relationship between IQ and offending, has mounted.
3. Sutherland posited a strong argument against IQ tests, suggesting that
social and environmental factors caused delinquency, not low IQ.
4. The debate died down, but resumed again in the 1970s and remains to
be resolved.
E. Biochemical Factors
1. Food Allergies
2. Diet
3. Hypoglycemia
4. Hormones
F. Neurophysiological Factors
1. EEG Abnormalities
2. Minimal Brain Dysfunction (MBD)
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IV.
Crime and Human Nature (page 110)
A. Criticisms of Biocriminology
1. Biocriminologists deny the existence of individual free will.
2. Some see a racist undertone in biocriminological research.
3. Some feel that biocriminologists unfairly deemphasize social and
economic factors that may attribute to criminality.
4. Raises the seminal argument of social and behavioral science: is
human nature the product of nature or nurture?
B. An Integrated Theory
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