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Psychology and crime
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Areas of Psychology
• Personality and crime
• Abnormal Psychology and Crime
• MMPI and the CPI
• Antisocial Personality Disorder
• Mental illness and Schizophrenia
• Intelligence and crime
• Learning disabilities
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Psychological theories (con.)
• Attention deficit Disorder
• Learning theory and crime
• Moral development
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Personality and crime
• Is there a criminal personality?
• Personality: characteristics of an
individual that predisposes one to act in
certain ways in certain situations
• Way one perceives, thinks about and
relates to oneself and one’s
environment
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Freud and crime
• Freud the first to write about
personality
• Believed that behavior is influenced by
unresolved conflicts in childhood
•
Superego
•
Ego
•
Id
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Freud (continued)
• Crime would occur if:
• Malfunctioning of the id (too much)
• Weak ego
• Underdeveloped superego (no
conscience)
• Or, overdeveloped superego (desire to
be caught and punished)
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Freud (continued)
• Contributions of Freud
• Behavior is influenced by psychological
processes, some of them unconscious
• Early childhood experiences are
important
• Behavior can be treated by
psychological means
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Freud (continued)
• Criticisms
• 1. cannot be disproven
• 2. focuses on internal factors, excludes
societal factors
• 3. focuses on treatment rather than
prevention
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Personality tests & criminality
• A variety of personality tests have been
given to prison inmates
• Generally do not provide a consistent
pattern, one “personality
• California Psychological Inventory:
they tend to score lower on
Socialization and Conformity
• Lower on empathy scales
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Common traits
• Hyperactivity
• Impulsivity
• Aggression
• Sensation seeking/risk taking
• Extroversion
• External locus of control
• Inability to delay gratification
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Psychological tests
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory
• 550 item T-F screening device for
psychiatric problems
• Given to thousands of prisoners
• No single pattern emerges
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Tests (continued)
• Indicates more psychological problems
than in the general population, i.e.,
Hypochondriasis, Depression, etc.
• Most common pattern is that of the
antisocial personality disorder (APD),
with high scores on scale 4
(psychopathy) and 9 (mania)
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Antisocial Personality
Disorder
• Formerly known as psychopaths or
sociopaths
• Also conduct disorder (adolescents)
• APD estimated at 3% in the general
population, 20-25% of incarcerated
prisoners
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Characteristics of APD
• Failure to conform to social norms
• Lie/cheat/steal
• Exploit and manipulate others, use
people
• Lack of remorse
• Absence of anxiety
• Self-centered
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APD (continued)
• Reckless
• Impulsive
• Aggressive
• Superficially charming
• Inconsistent work history
• Financial irresponsibility
• Irresponsible parenting
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APD (continued)
• Sexually promiscuous
• Poor judgment
• Do not profit from past experience
• Punishment is not effective
• Causes unknown
• Physiological basis?
• Environment?
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Mental Illness: Schizophrenia
• Thought disturbance
• “flat” affect
• Ambivalence
• Autism (withdraw from others)
• Unusual behavior
• Episodes of psychosis (not in touch
with reality: delusions and
hallucinations
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Mental illness (continued)
• Strikes 1% of the general population
• More common in prisons
• Most mentally ill individuals are not
criminals
• Most offenders are not mentally ill
• However, there are some notable
exceptions
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Schizophrenia (cont.)
• Sirhan Sirhan
• Charles Manson
• David Berkowitz: Son of Sam
• John Hinckley
• Jeffrey Dahmer
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Intelligence and Criminality
• Intelligence: capacity to act
purposefully, think rationally and deal
effectively with the environment
• Culture-bound concept: skills
necessary for success in a culture
• Lombroso hypothesized that his
criminals were “feebleminded”, but
there were no measure of intelligence
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Intelligence (cont.)
• Binet: first intelligence test
• Used the concept of mental age: if the
majority of children of a given age can
complete a task, the task requires that
mental age
• He tested children, compared mental
age to chronological age
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Intelligence (cont.)
• Goddard used his tests on
institutionalized populations such as
prisoners in the early 20th century
• Concluded that most prisoners were
“feebleminded”
• However, when the tests were tried in
screening men for the draft in W.W.I,
they came out feebleminded, too!
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Intelligence (cont)
• Problem: MA does not change after
mid-adolescence but chronological age
does. Thus, using Binet’s test, everyone
would become feebleminded
• Goddard’s work was discredited
• It was until until the 1970s that the issue
of intelligence and crime was
reconsidered by criminologists
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Distribution of Intelligence
IQ range
130 +
120-129
110-119
90-109
80-89
70-79
below 70
Label
Gen. Pop. Prisoners
Very sup.
2.5%
0
Superior
6.5%
1.2%
High avg 14.9%
2.6%
Average
50%
42%
Low avg
14.9%
26.7%
Borderlin
6.5%
15%
MR
2.5%
11.9%
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Findings
• 10-15 point gap between offenders and
non-offenders: 100 v. 87
• Better than 10% of prisoners are MR,
while the percentage in the general
population is less than 3%
• Is this because of social class differences
between prisoners and the general
population? (SES affects IQ scores)
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Intelligence (cont.)
• Studies of nondelinquent and
delinquent adolescents matched for age,
social class and ethnic groups also find
an IQ difference, although not as large
• Lower IQ scores are associated with
higher recidivism among offenders
• Most of the differences are for Verbal
IQ rather than Performance IQ
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Intelligence
• Higher IQ, especially verbal, might
mean that one understands
consequences better and have better
planning skills--protective factor
• A lower verbal IQ might mean that the
person is less likely to use “internal
speech” and be more impulsive (and
thus less likely to be deterred)
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Explanations
• The brighter might get arrested less
often (although self-report studies still
support a difference)
• Higher verbal IQ is associated with
better moral reasoning skills
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Explanations
School problems hypothesis:
Low verbal IQ -- poor academic
achievement -- frustration -- truancy
and dropping out -- association with
other dropouts, unemployment -- crime
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Learning Disabilities and
crime
• LD: academic achievement is not
commensurate with IQ
• Most common: reading problems
• More common among males
• Causes not clear--brain dysfunction?
Problems at birth? Inherited?
• More common among delinquents:
12% vs. 33%
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ADHD
• Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
• Attention deficit
• Hyperactivity
• Impulsivity and aggression
• More common among criminals than in
the general population
• More common among males (6-10 x)
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ADHD
• Associated, although not exclusively,
with low birth weight (5 lbs. or less)
and/or prenatal malnutrition
• Although ADHD gets better with age,
50% show residual signs in adulthood
• 25% of APD had an ADHD diagnosis in
childhood
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Explanations: LD & ADHD
• Both tend to have more behavioral
problems. Whether such problems are
part of the disorders or a result of them,
they are more at risk for behavior
problems.
• School hypothesis
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Learning theory & crime
• Learning a relatively permanent
change, due to experience, that can
affect behavior
• Human behavior is learned, and
learned by:
• classical conditioning
• operant conditioning
• Observational learning
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Learning
• Criminal behavior can be attributed to
faulty learning
• Learned an inappropriate response
• Never had the opportunity to learn an
appropriate response
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Classical conditioning
• UCS---------UCR
• Food---------salivation
• CS-----------CR
• Bell (after paired with food) --salivation
• Punishment--------pain, anxiety
• Illegal behavior-----anxiety
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Classical conditioning
• Classically conditioned anxiety results
in avoidance conditioning
• Hypothesis: APD lack anxiety because
their ability to develop classically
conditioned responses is impaired
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Operant conditioning
• Learning involves consequences to
responses
• Responses resulting in favorable
consequences become more likely
• Responses resulting in unfavorable
consequences become less likely
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Operant cond (cont)
• Reinforcement: strengths response
• Positive reinforcement: receive
“reward” increases p of behavior
• Negative reinforcement: remove a
punishment when a response is made,
will also increase the p of that response
• Positive punishment: aversive,
unpleasant, decreases p of behavior
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Operant (cont.)
• Negative punishment: take away
reward, remove positive
• Generalization and discrimination
• Schedules of reinforcement and
extinction
• Reinforcement, not punishment, is the
way most behaviors are learned
• Most powerful: love and approval
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Punishment
• An aversive stimulus that decreases the
p of the behavior that precedes it
• Factors affecting punishment
• Immediate
• Intense enough, but not excessive
(excessive results in anger)
• Consistent
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Punishment (cont)
• Aimed at the misbehavior, not the
person
• Must provide positive reinforcement for
alternative behaviors
• Is the CJS going to be effective at
punishing?
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Kohlberg & moral
development
• Developmental stages of moral
development
• Preconventional: moral reasoning in
terms of reward and punishment
• Conventional: moral reasoning in
terms of following rules
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Moral reasoning (cont)
• Postconventional: moral reasoning in
terms of what is best for the majority, or
determining which ethical principle is
most important
• Delinquents and criminals: Commonly
at the preconventional level, some at
the conventional level, few at the
postconventional level
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