Psychology and Crime

2nd edition

Aidan Sammons, David Putwain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351252126
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What does a criminological psychologist actually do? Most people picture a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, helping the police to solve crimes, but the reality is far more interesting and complex. Psychology and Crime offers a fascinating introduction to criminological psychology, providing the reader with a comprehensive grounding in everything from cognitive forensics to police interviewing.

Concise, informative and accessible, the book explores a range of theories to understand criminal behaviour, from the physiological to the social. It covers a range of contexts within the criminal justice system where psychology offers unique insights, including police investigation, the perspective of witnesses and victims, and courtroom proceedings. Thoroughly updated throughout to reflect developments in the field, and featuring new chapters covering cybercrime, terrorism and insights from neuroscience, this edition also includes a student-friendly 'Apply your learning' feature and case studies to bring the research to life.

Accessibly written for all levels, and with concise coverage of both classic and contemporary psychological theory, this is the ideal book for anyone studying criminal or forensic psychology.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Imagine asking a member of the public the following question:

• What is a criminological psychologist?
• What does a criminological psychologist do?
• What types of people do criminological psychologists work with?

The answers to these questions are likely to be informed by TV programmes, films and, possibly, high-profile media cases. In the public imagination, the criminological psychologist is a Sherlock Holmes-like figure, solving crimes and mysteries with a combination of arcane scientific knowledge and penetrating insight into the workings of the criminal mind. This makes good television but it does not represent the reality of criminological psychology. Criminological psychologists do sometimes contribute directly to police investigations but this is a relatively minor aspect of a very diverse field. Psychologists are involved in researching the causes of crime, rehabilitating offenders, preventing crime, providing expert advice to law enforcement and the courts and a great deal more. Criminological psychology is just one of a number of academic disciplines that contribute to policing and criminal justice. Others include criminology, sociology, psychiatry and law. Each has its own purpose, assumptions and methods and, consequently, each has something different to contribute to understanding and tackling crime.

Psychology is, broadly, the use of scientific methods to understand the behaviour of individuals. The contribution psychology can make to criminological issues reflects the strengths and limitations of the discipline as a whole. Psychologists undergo rigorous training in research methods, which makes them well placed to conduct investigations and to comment on and evaluate the research and practices of others. However, psychology tends to over-emphasise individual factors at the expense of social ones. In explaining crime, psychologists focus on things like brain function, personality and thinking processes. Sociology and criminology, by contrast, are much more likely to focus on social structural factors like inequality and social class. Although they frequently disagree on where the emphasis should go, each of these disciplines complements the others. In isolation, each tells only part of the story of crime and victimisation but, together, they give a more comprehensive picture. Consequently, this book draws on sociological and criminological research as well as psychological.

The origins of criminological psychology

Criminological psychology emerged as a distinct field in the 1960s but its origins are much earlier. A key influence was the work of Cesare Lombroso in the late 19th century. Lombroso was the first to advance the view that criminality is a heritable, constitutional characteristic. He suggested that criminals were a biologically distinct class of people who exhibited ‘atavistic’ or primitive features. They committed crimes because they were dominated by their primitive aggressive, sexual and acquisitive urges. Lombroso claimed that their atavistic nature led not only to criminal behaviour but also to distinct physical forms. Consequently, he believed that criminals could be identified from their features, such as heavy brows and strong jawbones. Different types of criminal were said to have different features, so murderers had bloodshot eyes and curly hair whereas sex offenders had thick lips and projecting ears. Lombroso supported his claims with measurements taken from the skulls of known criminals. However, he did not compare these data with measurements of non-criminals and, consequently, did not establish that the features he identified as ‘criminal’ only occurred in the criminal population. He also did not distinguish clearly between criminals and those suffering from various psychological disorders. It is also the case that Lombroso’s views reflected many of the prejudices of his time and he was overtly racist in linking criminality with minority ethnicity (Holmes, 2015; see Chapter 12). For these and many other reasons, Lombroso’s work is rejected nowadays. However, his important contribution was to insist on empirical evidence and (a version of) the scientific method in presenting his work. This helped to move discussion of criminality away from moral and philosophical discourse and into the realm of scientific research.

Another key early influence on criminological psychology was the psychological laboratory founded by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig in 1879 (Gudjonsson & Haward, 1998). Wundt was instrumental in establishing psychology as a scientific discipline where the measurement and experimental manipulation of sensory and behavioural phenomena were foregrounded. Wundt’s students studied a range of psychological processes with applications to everyday life. This included topics like witness memory, which is still central to criminological psychology (see Chapter 7). One of Wundt’s students, Hugo Munsterberg, settled in the United States, where he advocated for the introduction of applied psychology to the courtroom (with limited success) and carried out extensive research into the effect of leading questions on testimony, the discrepancies between witnesses to an event, the impact of attentional focus and the misleading nature of witness confidence, all of which remain current topics of interest (Memon et al., 2008). However, while psychologists researched and commented on crime and related topics throughout the 20th century, it was not until the 1960s that criminological psychology emerged as a distinct branch of psychology.

Applying psychological principles to crime

Criminological psychology is an example of ‘applied’ rather than ‘pure’ psychology. Pure psychology refers to the type of research usually carried out by academics in universities pursuing answers to questions about the basic processes of thinking and behaviour. Although academic psychologists may also be interested in questions about ‘real-world’ processes, they tend to carry out their investigations in the laboratory. This has the advantage of controlling for the influence of nuisance and confounding variables encountered in real-life situations. The researcher can create her own ‘micro-world’ where every variable of interest can be isolated and its effect examined free of other influences. Pure researchers usually belong to a theoretical tradition that influences the types of question that interest them and the way they go about answering them. For example, cognitive psychologists typically use laboratory experiments to investigate phenomena like attention, memory and problem solving. This is all done without necessarily considering how such processes might operate in real-life settings.

In criminological psychology, theories and research findings from pure psychology are applied to the questions raised by real-life legal and criminal problems. The pure theoretical approaches can be applied to crime and criminal justice in a number of ways (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Examples of pure psychology applied to criminological questions

Pure psychological areas	Criminological psychology topics
Cognitive psychology studies mental processes including perception, attention, memory and problem solving	The distorting effect of perceptual, attentional and memory processes on witness testimony (e.g. the effect of leading questions); techniques to improve witness accuracy (e.g. cognitive interviewing); criminal decision making (e.g. rational choice theory)
Social psychology studies social interaction and the effect of situational and group influences on behaviour	Social influences on criminal behaviour (e.g. gang membership and learning from the peer group); group decision making by juries
Developmental psychology studies changes in psychological attributes over the lifespan, for example, the development of moral reasoning and personality and the influence of parenting and other environmental factors on development	The role of parental attachment and early adverse experiences in criminal behaviour; the effect of victimisation on child development; developmental crime prevention
Learning theory studies how the environment shapes behaviour	The role of learning from the family or peer group in offending; the use of techniques to modify the behaviour of offenders
Biopsychology studies the influence of physiological processes on behaviour, including the workings of the nervous system and the influence of genetics on behaviour	The role of genetics, brain structure and functioning and neurochemistry in offending

Forensic psychology

The terms criminological, forensic, criminal and legal psychology are often used interchangeably, which can be confusing. Criminological, criminal and legal psychology all refer in a general way to the application of psychology to crime and the law. Forensic psychology, however, has a restricted meaning. Forensic psychology denotes expert professional knowledge of psychology as it applies to the courts and legal processes. The majority of forensic psychologists work within the court and prison system, giving expert evidence, advising courts and parole boards, designing and implementing offender rehabilitation programmes and doing research into offending and rehabilitation. In the UK, ‘forensic psychologist’ is a legally protected title: a person may only use it if he has completed an approved course of study and accreditation and has been granted a licence to practise by the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). Anyone who calls himself a forensic psychologist but is not registered with the HCPC is breaking the law and may be prosecuted.

Forensic psychologists may find themselves doing a great range of activities. In their clinical role, they may be asked to psychologically assess individuals who come into contact with the authorities and advise those authorities accordingly. For example, Brown (1997) describes a case in which an adolescent complained to the police that she was receiving frequent, indecent phone calls. Despite continuous monitoring of the phone line, nothing was intercepted. She then alleged that her property was being smeared with paint and some items were shown to the police, damaged as described. She became rather belligerent at the police station and considerable time was spent in enquiries. A forensic psychologist was asked to provide an assessment as to whether the complainant was manufacturing the evidence in order to satisfy some psychological need. The result of the assessment confirmed the police’s suspicion that she had fabricated the incidents.

In their experimental role, a forensic psychologist might be asked to investigate questions relating to evidence presented in a criminal case. Brown (1997) gives the example of a case in which three motorcyclists were charged with causing the death by dangerous driving of two other riders. The case hinged on a claim by a police officer that he had seen the motorcyclists speeding and had taken their number plates. But was it really possible to recall four muddy number plates, two and a half inches high, at a distance of 90 yards? Psychologists set up a laboratory experiment in which 100 participants were asked to identify four sets of number plates. These were presented in a degraded form to mimic the real conditions. They found that a few participants could recall one number plate but none could recall all four. Although this cast doubt on the eyewitness evidence given by the police officer, the jury was not convinced and all three of the motorcyclists were convicted.

Aims, organisation and content of this book

The aim of this book is to introduce the reader to a range of psychological research into crime. It is aimed at those who are studying introductory courses in criminal psychology, those who require a basic overview of the field for professional purposes and those who are simply interested in the area. A book of this nature cannot hope to cover such a diverse and complex field exhaustively, so the topics have been selected to reflect what is encountered in most introductory courses and to illustrate the range of topics that criminological psychology covers. Chapter 2 addresses basic questions about how crime is defined and measured and outlines some research on victimisation. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 present a range of explanations of offending including biological, psychological and social causes. Chapter 6 considers how psychological issues come to bear on police investigations through an examination of how evidence is processed, how police interview witnesses and suspects, and the controversial area of offender profiling. Chapter 7 examines how psychological processes affect witness memory and Chapter 8 outlines the psychological processes that affect what happens in a courtroom, with particular emphasis on how juries reach their verdicts. Chapter 9 discusses what happens to convicted offenders through an examination of prison and the alternatives, and Chapter 10 extends this into offender rehabilitation and the contributions of psychology to crime prevention. The field of criminological psychology continually evolves and so Chapter 11 outlines two areas that are of particular current interest, terrorism and cybercrime. Finally, Chapter 12 presents a range of critical perspectives on criminological psychology that offer alternative views to the mainstream one that dominates both the field and this book. In each chapter, a section called ‘Apply your learning’ invites you to develop your understanding of what you read by applying it to real-world questions and, at the end of each chapter, some further reading is suggested for those who wish to pursue a deeper understanding of any of the topics presented.