Download psychopath

Crime in mind: introduction to
psychology and criminology
Professor Gwen Adshead
June 2016
Who or what is a criminal?
• Do you commit crimes because you are
criminal?
• Or do you become a criminal when you
commit a crime?
• What is a crime anyway?
• Who gets to decide?
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Laws create groups
• Early groups of humans make laws to regulate
relationships between people in groups
• Breach of rules leads to expulsion from the
group
• Anything or anyone that causes harm to the
group is an offender
• Trials of objects and animals in mediaeval
times
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Identification with sin
• Moral offenders breach moral rules
• People who breach rules are bad people
• Bad people are not like us good people
(obviously)
• Identifying, marking and excluding bad people
is a an important process
• Also need to have process: trials and hearings
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Getting confessions is hard
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Detection is hard too…
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A prisoner at court
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Criminological theories
• Classical: the law creates crime, and those
who break the law are criminals
• Sociological: the environment creates the
contexts in which people break the law:
poverty, poor housing and lack of space
• Positivist/individual: there is something in the
offender that makes them want to break the
law
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Innate degeneracy
• Criminals are born different
• With innate vulnerabilities that make them
more likely to break the law
• Skull size ( Lombroso, Berthillon)
• Brain size
• Body shape
• Genes…..( Ferri, Garofalo, contemporary…)
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Cesare Lombroso 1835-1909
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Skulls of criminals
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Individual psychology
• 19C attention to individual psychology and
self –experience
• William James in the USA, Sigmund Freud in
Europe
• A medical model of mind
• The deviant behaviour is a ‘symptom’ of an
underlying defect or dysfunction
• E.g Criminals from a sense of guilt ( 1912)
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John Bowlby (1944)
• A study of juvenile thieves
• All had suffered maternal deprivation,
compared to a group of similar boys who were
not thieves
• An early study that combined environmental
influence with individual psychology
• Lack of care led boys to feel deprived; and the
stealing was a response to the sense of loss
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Nuremburg trials
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Post war studies of deviant
behaviour
• Conservative norms and values as part of
post-war adjustment to peace
• Explanations for human cruelty and deviance
located in individual psychology
• Supports argument for individual
responsibility and culpability
• The criminal as ‘other’ to the norm
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Hervey Cleckley 1941
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The Mask of Sanity
• A series of case studies of people who break
social rules
• Who are profoundly antisocial and who do not
seem to care about how others feel
• Do not seem to learn from experience or feel
concern about how others see them
• The ‘psychopath’: one who has no emotional
depth to their personality
• ‘They know the words but not the music’
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Eysenck 1964
• Studies of personality traits
• Four major dimensions to personality
• Extraversion (E: sensation seeking);
Neuroticism ( N: emotionality);
• Conscientiousness and Openness to
experience
• Psychoticism (P) not substantiated ( yet…)
• Criminals high in E and N
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An influential theory
• An inter-actionist approach
• Involving genetic and physiological
explanations
• And acknowledging environmental influence
• Anticipating current epigenetic studies i.e.
individuals with genetic vulnerabilities may be
exposed to environmental stressors that
makes rule breaking more likely
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Yochelson & Samenow 1976
• A study of ‘the criminal personality’
• Beginning in the 1970s
• Interviews with 255 people who had
committed crimes
• A psychoanalytic approach which shifted to a
more cognitive approach i.e. from
unconscious meaning to conscious thinking
styles
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The criminal personality
 Restless, dissatisfied and irritable
 While at school, considered requests from their
teachers and parents as impositions
 Continually set themselves apart from others
 Want to live life of excitement, at any cost
 Are habitually angry
 Are lacking empathy
 Feel under no obligation to anyone or anything except
their own interests
 Are poor at responsible decision-making, having prejudged situations.
The birth of criminal psychology
• People who commit crimes show persistent
cognitive errors and distortions that make
crime more likely
• They seem to be more impulsive and not care
about consequences
• Other risk factors can exacerbate cognitive
distortions and impulsivity e.g. substance
misuse, social isolation
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But…
• Studies rest on self-report studies of
personality ; and on detected criminals!
• Bias in terms of which criminals studied:
emphasis on juvenile delinquents who change
• Not all crime is the same! Persistent theft and
robbery is a different sort of crime to white
collar fraud
• Similar and different processes
• The criminal still seen as ‘other’: no
connection to the social group
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A different approach
• Criminological theories of mind
• Sykes and Matza’s studies of juvenile
delinquents
• Observations: these young people did express
guilt, and also expressed admiration of others
who were law abiding
• They had views about who was a legitimate
victim and who was not; they recognised legal
and moral norms
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Neutralisation techniques
• In order to commit a crime, young offenders
have to convince themselves of the following:
• It wasn’t my fault
• They aren’t really harmed by what I did
• They had it coming
• You were just as bad in your day (everyone
does this)
• I had to stick with my friends
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Hirschi: what makes people keep
the law?
• The importance of self control
• Six elements: impulsivity, a preference for
simple tasks, favouring of physical over mental
activities, self-centeredness, and a temper
component.
• Developed in childhood
• Low self-control plus criminal opportunity
makes crime more likely
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A different approach to offenders
• Studying what they say about themselves in
their own words
• Tony Parker’s studies of life sentenced
prisoners and sex offenders
• Studies of how offenders talk about their
offences; how they see themselves
• The Narrative turn in the psychology of
offending
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Maruna (2001)
• Most young offender do give up by late
twenties
• Only a minority persist
• What makes young offenders give up
offending?
• Those who desist describe a sense of agency;
an ability to effect change in themselves
• The story of myself
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Supreme Court Jan 2011
Violence is not a term of Art. It is
capable of bearing many
meanings and applying to many
different types of behaviour
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Types of crime in E&W
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The psychology of violence
• Who are the offenders we are most concerned
about?
• The most persistent? Or the most dangerous?
• Not the same!
• Lots of rule breakers out there; but the risk of
mainly related to property threat
• What about the 20% of offenders who commit
acts of violence?
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Commonest recorded violence:
assaults by young men on other men
assaults by men on partners
physical abuse of children
Interpersonal
Most violence takes place in context of
relationships
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Homicide victims in E&W by sex
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Risk factors for violence
Socio-cultural factors: being young and male;
cultural norms about use of violence
social isolation
Paranoid mental states
Substance misuse
Poor reality testing
Hypervigilance
Insecure attachment and relational
disturbance?
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Absence of mentalising
• Mentalising: perceiving and appraising the
intentions of others
• Keeping mind in mind
• Deficits in mentalising in those who commit
antisocial actions:
– What I think is reality and the only reality
– Only the physical is real
– Intellectualisation
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Mental states that lead to violence
• Who is the victim?
• What sort of violence?
• Different states of mind
– Affectful or affectless
– Impulsive or controlled
– Clear or confused
– Excited or detached
– Proactive or reactive
Do they have anything in common?
• Disturbance of reality: personal, social
• Threat perception problems
• Disturbance of connection to others: others
do not seem real or human
• Absence of consequential reasoning: nothing
will matter later because this isn’t real
• The wish to hurt and denigration of
vulnerability
Scully & Marolla (1984)
• A study of convicted rapists
• Excuses and justifications
• Reluctant to use the word violent or to admit
to use of weapon
• Women were culpable in some way
• It was a minor harm
• Alcohol and drugs were to blame
• I have emotional problems/I’m a nice guy
really
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The violent state of mind
• Those who are violent typically see others as
threat or prey
• They have little sense of agency: they see
themselves as being acted on by others
• They therefore feel justified in what they do:
no anxiety
• They overcome inhibitions to violence (VIM)
• A communication to the victim?
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Seeing others as threat
• Failure to mentalise negative affects of rage,
hatred, fear
• Projection of these feelings onto others
• Panic, attack and contempt in response to
conscious anxiety and perceived vulnerability
• Unconscious identification with the aggressor
Seeing others as prey
• Failure to mentalise feelings of neediness and
vulnerability when these are stimulated
• Projection of vulnerability onto others
• Denigration and derogation of weakness and
need in others
• Identification with the aggressor
Self-justification: it feels right
• Rigidity in moral reasoning: all or nothing
thinking
• Absence of forgiveness
• Lack of empathy reduces anxiety
• Strict dominance hierarchies: might is right
• Reduction of shame and promotion of selfesteem
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Violence can take place in the absence
of conscious anxiety
• Organised cruelty
• May be individual or group
• Associated with denigration and derogation of
attachment feelings
• Neediness associated with shame
• Mastery and pride associated with denigration
of vulnerability
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Socio-Cultural risk factors
-
stereotypes about “acceptable” victims
denigration of weakness as part of male
gender role
tolerance of substance misuse
-
tolerance of violence
-
access of weapons
-
violence by the state
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Conclusions
• There is not a single ‘criminal mind’
• There are mental states and self-accounts
that make rule breaking more likely
• What is this person’s attitude to their
offending?
• The importance of identities and stories
• Listening to the voices of offenders may tell
us most
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