Psychology and Crime

A Transdisciplinary Perspective

Craig Webber

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781473944060
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

?Criminologists have been waiting a very long time for a psychology of crime that speaks their language. Finally it has arrived.? - Dr David Gadd, Keele University Now in an updated second edition, this book explores the links between psychology and crime, taking the reader through psychological explanations of crime and the use of psychology within the criminal justice system. The book aims to demystify some of the myths of psychological criminology and situates the subject within its historical and theoretical foundations, whilst maintaining a contemporary outlook and critical awareness of the field's advantages and limitations.

This second edition includes:

• Fournew chapters, on Psychological perspectives and their approach to crime, Mentally disordered offenders, The Criminal Courts and the role of the Jury, and Victims, Fear of Crime and Offender Management.
• Improved coverage of the issues around interpersonal violence, sexual violence and deviancy, the psychology of crime in groups, and war crimes.
• Increased analysis of psychology and the criminal justice system.

Essential reading for students in criminology, sociology and psychology.

1 Psychology, Sociology and Crime: Mapping the Historical Terrain

Overview

The opening chapter sets the study of crime in a historical context. Arguing that the psychology of crime is context dependent and what we choose to study is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is one directed by social scientific concerns. Historical fashions direct the gaze of the psychologist, and learning historical lessons on the uses and abuses of psychology are essential requirements of contemporary psychology.

Key terms

■ Modernity; Late Modernity; Postmodernity; Determinism

This opening chapter will discuss the changing fortunes of psychological and sociological accounts of crime and criminals. It will chart the emergence of different theories both in terms of how they fit together and their growth from engagement, and critique, of other theories. The chapter will not seek to reiterate the history of the subject, but to focus on how theories gained resonance and were reflected in the society and culture in which they were expressed, and how in turn they had an impact on social policy and popular images of crimes and criminals. The key theme is that there are many overlaps between sociology and psychology that need to be recognised and that drawing on the findings of each discipline can be a very powerful way to create more robust theories. This is not to say that these overlaps are in any way deliberate or that the authors were even aware of each other’s arguments, although that may be the case on occasion. The point is to highlight the fruitless disciplinary boundary forming that results in academics only referring to research cited in ‘their’ journals, such as psychologists only citing ‘psychological’ research and vice versa for sociological criminologists.

The sociologist Nikolas Rose, who has written extensively on the role of psychology in society, referred to this as the ‘baneful disciplinization of the human sciences’ (Rose 1989/1999: xvi). This chapter is a reminder, followed through in the rest of the book, that disciplinary insularity is an outmoded position to take when the ease with which one can conduct research across academic boundaries allows, and encourages, theoretical synthesis. A criticism of this type of theory synthesis is that logical contradictions between one approach and another can become blurred. Certainly, it is accepted that an uncritical synthesis is open to this problem. However, what is being argued here is that this critique should not close off critical theoretical synthesis and wider research beyond academic boundaries. This chapter aims to foster a historical imagination that remembers that such synthesis was once common place. What this book represents is a form of what the criminologist Gregg Barak terms ‘integrative criminology’. He defines this as an ‘interdisciplinary approach to understanding crime and crime control which incorporates at least two disciplinary (or non-disciplinary) bodies of knowledge’ (Barak 1998; Barak 2012: 219). Although Barak suggests that this is a relatively new approach, this book will highlight the moments when integration has already occurred. The position that I want to suggest is that we can now go well beyond interdisciplinary research of two separate disciplines working together to look at a problem like crime, and move towards an approach that might be described as transdisciplinarity. By this I mean that we can train ourselves to explore beyond the boundaries of our disciplines, reading the research and understanding the methods of another approach, accepting the differences, but aware of the overlaps. Indeed, this was something that the psychologist Jean Piaget also called for (Klein 2004). This is far easier in a world where we can quickly and without friction search across databases of research articles from any discipline (Halford et al. 2010; Yip et al. 2013; Van Hardeveld et al. 2017; Webber and Yip 2018). I am not suggesting that this is a novel idea, or that it only applies in the fields of psychology, sociology and criminology. Indeed, there are many overlaps between seemingly disparate fields of endeavour such as the establishment of computer science and the development of cognitive psychology, as will be discussed in Chapter 2. But, there is often a philosophical chasm between the psychological focus on the individual and the sociological focus on the role of the social. Criminology is ideally placed to bridge this divide, and indeed has attempted to do so previously.

One example is Taylor et al.’s (1973) The New Criminology that sought to combine Marxist and symbolic interactionist accounts of crime as well as social psychology to provide a fully social theory of crime. This book was written at a time when questioning the legitimacy of those in authority was commonplace; consequently, it will also be noted that theory reflects the concerns of the time (Danziger 1990). The chapter will conclude by noting that this book is critical not of psychology per se, but rather the way myths have developed around what criminological psychologists do. Popular representations, or ‘shadow criminology’ to use Paul Rock’s term (1978), of serious criminals as pathological monsters or antiheroes different from ourselves are not borne out by the evidence. The thought that serious criminals may be just like you, live next door to you, live with you, is more frightening and unsettling than believing that criminals are monsters.

The rise of the science of crime and the challenge of the ‘risk society’

The next section charts the rise of a science of crime and ends with a discussion of the risk society thesis. It is possible to talk about one science of crime because until recently there were significant overlaps in the main aims of those interested in the study of crime; namely the search for the cause of crime. All vibrant disciplines are beset by controversies and heated debates; however, criminology is somewhat different, not least because, as will be argued below, it is not a discipline at all. The tensions that exist within criminology tend to be split between the two dominant subjects that form its core ideas, sociology and psychology. Recently, these two subjects have viewed each other with suspicion and occasional contempt. Where sociology tends to place its emphasis on society and environment, psychology situates its main focus within the individual. This often leads to diametrically opposed explanations for phenomena and is sometimes referred to as the structure/agency debate. Taking poverty as an example, sociologists tend to see this phenomenon as having an external effect on people; it is an economic force that individuals can have relatively marginal control over. For some psychologists, poverty is the result of individual failure due to low IQ, personality or lack of positive motivation such as might be caused by depression. When these two approaches are pitted against each other within criminology not only are there the usual heated discussions but there is the added frisson of distrust in another discipline’s methods and theoretical foundations. Yet, fundamentally, the concern is with what causes crime.

To a certain extent this is a stereotype of the differences between sociology and psychology, but it is one held by many academics. However, this chapter will seek to remind those who hold this opinion that a certain amount of historical amnesia (Pearson 1983, 1994) has set in that leads to forgetfulness of the significant overlaps between the two approaches. For those students not yet tainted by the animosity, the chapter merely seeks to show that there are useful theoretical and empirical overlaps between sociological and psychological approaches to crime and deviance. The following demonstrates the interconnectivity of sociology and psychology when both are brought together in criminology by looking at the way that the study of crime became increasingly ‘scientific’. Moreover, the bipolarity of the structure/agency debate has developed into a more complex argument that posits an integration between the two extremes of structural determinism and the free choice of the agent (Giddens 1984). By way of setting out the argument early, W.I. Thomas in the first edition of the American Journal of Sociology in 1894 noted that sociology and social psychology were inseparable (Strauss 1964). As will be noted, social psychology is a distinct branch of psychology that perhaps more than any other fits with the sociological approach. But, none the less, such is the widening gap between the two disciplines that psychology is more likely to be seen in its own department rather than sharing one with sociology.

According to Garland (2002) criminology as a ‘science of crime’ has been in existence since the term ‘criminology’ was created in the 1890s as a broader term than others such as criminal sociology or criminal psychology. The latter two terms are too specific and separately based within disciplinary boundaries peculiar to their own traditions. Consequently, the discipline of criminology from the outset subsumed the concerns of other, more established traditions within its intellectual remit. As Lea has noted (1998), criminology can be seen not as a subject in its own right, but as a field that academics from other disciplines can enter, such as economists, historians, geographers, psychologists and sociologists. The only thing distinct about this field is that those who enter it study crime first and foremost, and the focus tends to be on the question of what causes crime. How academics from different subjects do that is, to a large degree, based upon the traditions of their ‘master’ disciplines. Hence, Garland has argued that ‘[i]ts epistemological threshold is a low one, making it susceptible to pressures and interests generated elsewhere’ (2002: 17). Garland also criticises the argument that criminological questions were being asked by many people before the term itself became widespread from the 1890s. Eighteenth-century philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria may have discussed crime, but they were not asking distinctive ‘criminological’ questions that were concerned with what makes the criminal different from the non- criminal and what causes this differentiation. Instead, their concerns were with the nature of the responses to crime by society. Criminals were, by and large, rational actors choosing to commit crime and therefore should be punished in proportion to the seriousness of the offence. Punishment should take the form of attempting to change the moral failures of the offender in prisons. The discipline of psychology, as a science of human behaviour distinct from philosophy or medicine, can be traced to the later nineteenth century. No precise dates are possible, but certainly from about 1875 a new series of questions were asked that may be called psychological with the creation of the first psychology laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879 being a major factor in psychology’s further development (Rose 1985; Janz 2004).

The early history of psychology in Britain shows only a slow growth with about 30 lecturing staff in English universities and six chairs in psychology (which means there were only six professors of psychology) up until the Second World War. At this time, the main task of psychology was to measure the mental attributes of humans. This process of categorisation, measurement and comparison lead to the creation of the ‘normal’ range of attributes that a human should have against which people could be compared. However, it was not the psychologists who sought out the problems to which this new science could be directed. Instead, it was those for whom effective and controllable humans were useful. Early psychology was directed towards industry, education, the military and the courts. These institutions, when run efficiently, maintained and reproduced a set of practices that, by their very efficiency, would reveal someone who deviated from these norms. Thus, the norms of the institution were what psychologists had to use as the yardstick with which to measure deviations. As Rose has argued (1985), psychology is a science that aims to regulate social life; it is a science that evolved to maintain the functional efficiency of the social world. One could add a Marxist analysis to this and argue that such functional efficiency is an integral feature of a capitalist world where to question too much the way things are is to potentially cause anarchy and rebellion. Behaviour that does not follow the functional efficiency necessary for the smooth running of business needs to be held in check and psychology is best placed to do that. However, psychology has been confronted by a new challenge that some see as indicative of a move to a late or postmodern society. It has been argued that there has been a shift away from individual causes of crime towards the statistical analysis of a group’s risk factors. This has impacted on the way that crime and justice research is carried out.

It has been argued that the search for individual causes of crime fell out of fashion between the 1970s and 2000 (Garland 2001; Hudson 2003). David Garland argued that the:

new policy advice is to concentrate on substituting prevention for cure, reducing the supply of opportunities, increasing situational and social controls, and modifying everyday routines. The welfare of deprived social groups, or the needs of maladjusted individuals, are much less central to this way of thinking. (Garland 2001: 16)

Criminologists have drawn on the risk society thesis in literature by sociologists such as Anthony Giddens (1990) and Ulrich Beck (1992), to analyse changes in the way that the apparatus of social control and justice has changed. Rather than focus on the risk factors of an individual, criminal justice has increasingly moved towards making judgements that are collective in focus and based on prediction (O’Malley 2001). This is a form of actuarialism, the kind of risk assessment undertaken by insurance companies to determine how likely it is that a car might be stolen. For example, rather than looki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Psychology and Crime: Towards a Transdisciplinary Perspective
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Psychology, Sociology and Crime: Mapping the Historical Terrain
• 2 Psychological Perspectives on Crime
• 3 Mentally Disordered Offenders
• 4 Psychological Theories of Interpersonal Violence and Investigative Psychology
• 5 Investigating Sexual Violence
• 6 Crime in Groups: Explaining Subcultures, Groups and Gangs
• 7 Mass Murder, Political Murder and War Crimes
• 8 Terrorism: From Pathology to Normality
• 9 Interviewing Witnesses, Suspects and Eyewitness Testimony
• 10 Psychology, Courts and the Role of the Jury
• 11 After Crime: Victims, Fear of Crime and Offender Management
• 12 The Futures of Criminological Psychology
• Glossary
• References
• Index