Tuesday, October 30, 2012

PSYCHOLOGICAL CRIMINOLOGY


Psychology is the study of people of how they think, act, react and interact with others. It’s a discipline that aims to understand a person’s behavioural patterns and the motivations, thoughts and feelings behind them.
    In Blackburn’s (1993) assessment, historically psychology and psychiatry have played an important role in the development of criminology. Unlike the sociological explanation of crime, psychological explanations distinctively focus on the individual but they cannot ignore sociological theories and approaches as well.
      Psychologists have to come to a consensus that there is a nature vs. nurture debate in crime. By nature, this includes biological factors which can be hereditary and also brain structures and functions. By nurture, this includes society, how criminals socially integrate, the cultures they adhere to and the environment they dwell upon. The criminal is largely seen as a person with psychological defects that is prone to crime depending on how they are nurtured within society.
The Criminal Psychologist- Their role is to identify why the individual lacks moral values and performs crimes by understanding their behavioural patterns, insecurities and what patterns, motivations and feelings are occurring within the individual as they perform and are led to crime.
Ainsworth (2000) - Notes that there is no definitive or inclusive definition of the psychological theory of crime.
Freud (Ego/Super Ego) - The classical psychologist Freud believed that personality is determined by innate drives and early experiences.  Thus the individual is prone to crime due to an abnormal development of the psyche. The Super Ego is the moral regulator of behaviour it punishes the ego with anxiety when an act is committed that is immoral. A weak super ego can thus be developed from abnormal relationships within the family. Thus a person gives into their passions or ego and commits a criminal act to satisfy their desires.

Psychological Studies/Evidence of Crime and Deviance
Bio-Psychology- Studies conducted suggest biologically the best studies of XYY males indicate that they are more prone to aggressive behavior than XY males. Apparently the extra Y makes them more masculine having more violent tendencies.

Schlapp and Smith- The production of hormones can affect both physical and mental processes within the individual making them more prone to crime. For example, males with high levels of testosterone are psychologically more prone to crime.
Mc Guire (2004) - Explains that offenders largely tend to suffer from mental disorders. This means they are different from the norm and not psychologically normal making them prone to crime in certain situations. The psychologist however criticizes their own judgement due to the difficulty of defining such mental disorders. However examples of Psychopathology and offending behaviour are noted by Blackburn (1998) which includes:
    • Schizophrenia
    • Mood Disorders
    • Personality Disorders
    • PTSD   

Farrington (1992) - Explains that offending is closely linked with life course. So people are psychologically affected depending on what experiences they adhere to on their social and psychological development in life. The peak age in males is at 15 and females 18. Around this age a person’s intellectual and moral development is still being constructed and they are more likely to be psychologically unstable due to the fact that they are going through a lot of biological changes and adapting to them for example during puberty.
    • Peak age of offending; Male 15/ Female 18.
    • People that have criminal records are more likely to be more anti-social that one’s without.      
    • Troubleness at school, higher likelihood of future offending.
    • Predictors of offending;


Blackburn (1998) – Explains that delinquents display a development mental delay in understanding moral maturity than non-delinquents which can be seen as the differentiation of why people perform crime and why some don’t. This largely supports Farrington’s concept as maturity also seems to develop with time and age.

Social Learning Theory
There seems to be a distinctive link between the media and crime. Those who witness it on T.V can be fascinated by it which can then in turn become psychologically or mentally normalised within their minds. The glamorisation of crime in the media showing people with power, status and wealth can push the criminal personality into individuals that seek such glamour.
    Sutherland (1939) suggested that there were two prerequisites for a person to develop into an offender.  They need to learn a set of values and attitudes that support offending, and they need to learn specific behaviours for committing crimes.  These are all learned within the family and peer group. However, in our postmodern society, crime rates are high because of the popularity and fascination of it which the media portrays.
   Williams’s 1986 Later studies examined children’s levels of aggression before and after the introduction of television into an isolated community.  Williams found that over a two year period aggression in this community’s children rose steadily. This shows that aggression is a learnt psychological trait and television is the new way of socialisation where crime is largely focused on by the media.

Conclusion
·         It cannot predict criminality by studying personality or biological supposed criminal traits. (Williams, 2004)
·         It fails to recognise that the individual is a social construction by society’s organic and collective consciousness argued by sociologists such as Emile Durkheim.
·         There is an uneasy relationship between psychology and crime. For example the ability to plead insanity for an offence is valid and acceptable in the courtroom with enough evidence to support.
·         Making generalisations about crime as a whole in society is incredibly difficult due to the many factors that affect the individual such as “free will”, “moral values” and “social strains or stress.”

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