Psychology and Crime

Francis Pakes, Jane Winstone

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134021420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Society today is fascinated by crime. Crime is a hot topic in the media, so that people are continually exposed to criminal events, portrayals of those who commit them, and the suffering of victims. Yet the reality of crime is often very different from how it is portrayed in the media. Most crime is neither violent nor morbid; most offenders are not psychopaths, and although prison generally does not work, there may well be other, less punitive but more constructive interventions that are actually quite effective. This book exposes some of the most prevalent myths about crime and criminal behaviour. In addition it provides the reader with up-to-date knowledge on crime and offending behaviour. It also highlights the ways in which psychological methods of research and psychological knowledge can help us to understand criminal behaviour and the ways that targeted interventions are developed based upon this. Pakes' and Winstone's Psychology and Crime is essential reading for students taking courses in the psychology of crime, criminal and forensic psychology, criminology, and community justice, as well as for other courses where a knowledge of the complex relationship between psychology and crime - and its application in practice - is required. Practitioners and policy-makers will also find it highly informative.

Chapter 1

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Why do people offend? psychological and sociological explanations

Introduction

On 10 July 2006, the British news media reported on a 40-year-old man from Newcastle who walked into a police station carrying a large bag. Calmly, he told the receptionist that he had shot and killed four people. The man was immediately overpowered and arrested. His bag was found to contain a range of weaponry. When police entered the man’s house, the four victims were discovered. They were relatives, a man and a woman in their seventies and two men in their forties, all shot dead from close range (Daily Mail10 July 2006).

Why did this happen? What is it that brings a man, on a quiet Sunday, to kill two relatives with a handgun with a silencer, and then to wait quietly for the two other residents to come home, and to shoot them as well? The newspaper made much of the fact that the man had fought in the Gulf War in 1991 and speculated whether that was a contributing factor.

In September 2005, the BBC ran the story of a man on the Isle of Man who was sent to prison for three months for taking part in a ‘happy slapping’ incident. He was with two others when he assaulted a man in Douglas, Isle of Man, and the assault was filmed on a mobile phone. The offender admitted the assault after footage was shown and also admitted that he had been drinking. However, he could not explain why he became involved in the violent attack (BBC News 8 September 2005).

Crime can be incomprehensible stuff. It is difficult if not impossible to creep into offenders’ minds and establish with any degree of certainty just why they did what they did. In cases where offenders are prepared to talk about their crime, the reasons they give are often unsatisfactory. Happy slapping is allegedly carried out for fun. ‘Fun’ is hardly an explanation. Similarly, the claim that sex offences are carried out for sexual gratification offers some sort of explanation, but not one that is very enlightening. We can see that that is the immediate motive, just as material gain explains why theft or fraud might occur, but it fails to establish other facts: Why was this particular victim chosen? Why at that point in time? Why do other people with the same problems not resort to crime?

Wilson and Seaman (1990) documented accounts of individuals convicted of murder, who often gave rather trivial reasons for their crimes. Norman Smith said he acted out of boredom when he shot Hazel Woodard while she was at home watching television. The students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb said that they committed a murder simply as a challenge. They killed a 14-year-old boy. Ruth Steinhagen invited a baseball player into her hotel room in Chicago and then shot him. When asked why, she said that she wanted the thrill of murdering him (Wilson and Seaman 1990).

These accounts illustrate that asking ‘why’ is not necessarily the right question. To understand offending behaviour so that we can predict or prevent it requires a different type of analysis. That is what this chapter is about. Before he became prime minister, Tony Blair launched a famous slogan when he said that New Labour would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ (Blair 1993). In order to start our enquiry, we must develop ideas about what we actually mean when we talk about the causes of crime. After that, this chapter will outline various biological, psychological and social explanations of crime. Biological factors include genes, hormones, and brain injury or dysfunction. Psychological factors include personality, a factor known as self-control, and the concept of sensation seeking. We will also examine the role of the family. Sociological factors include poverty, subcultures and a concept called strain. In the end, we examine factors that might prevent people from committing crime.

Understanding causes of crime

When psychologists or criminologists talk about offending behaviour, they are often talking about causes of crime rather than motives. We do not necessarily need to know what the offender was thinking at the time of the offence. It is anyway doubtful whether that is where reliable answers can be found. After all, we can only uncover that by asking the offender, and it is very possible that the answer will be influenced by demand characteristics (that is, the expectation of what the interviewer wants to hear) and concerns of self-presentation (that is, the desire to leave a particular impression of oneself); for example, Douglas and Olshaker (1997) argue that asking such questions often brings about well-rehearsed self-serving answers, rather than anything nearer to the truth.

Instead, psychologists and criminologists are usually concerned with what the social and psychological factors are that contribute to the offending behaviour. Thus, when we talk about the causes of crime, psychologists and criminologists tend to look at general factors that apply to offending and offenders in a way that is disproportionate. If most offenders share a characteristic which non-offenders do not, that might be identified as a possible correlate of crime. Whether that characteristic is anything to do with actually producing crime is a different matter. That is a key question when deciding to call a factor a cause of crime.

There are other ways of understanding crime, of course. One way is by life stories; in criminology, this is called narrative individualism (Bretherick 2006). The method is in-depth case study: we describe the life of notorious criminals, and in their past we seek to identify certain key events or circumstances that might have driven them to offend. When Ressler and Shachtman (1992) interviewed serial killers in US prisons, they found that many offenders would pinpoint a certain event that set them off on the path to destructive violence. Such watershed events often involve being subjected to sexual or physical abuse. Alternatively, witnessing violence in the home might also act as a later trigger.

On the other hand, the ‘defining moment’ can be something relatively trivial or unexpected. The long running British soap Coronation Street at one point featured a serial killer called Richard Hillman. Viewers were offered the suggestion that his motivation may have had something to do with the fact that he was infertile. His inability to father children may have been the initial trigger that brought about the subsequent destructive tendencies. Criminologists and psychologists would not call this a cause of crime: for that, we would have to establish in real life that men who cannot father children are significantly more likely to commit crimes than others. Such a study does not exist. We therefore do not say that infertility causes crime.

A cause of crime, therefore, is a factor or circumstance that applies significantly more to offenders than to non-offenders and that potentially has a direct, but not necessarily immediate, link to crime. Factors such as alcohol dependence or drug abuse are commonly understood to have a potential bearing on people’s behaviour. It is hardly controversial to think of those as causes of crime. The extent to which societal factors such as poverty or social exclusion can cause crime is more hotly debated. Equally, the role of biology, via genes, hormones or brain dysfunction is a factor of concern. Not only is the extent to which people’s biological make-up affects their propensity to offend a controversial factor, but also the question of how to use such knowledge is another factor for which there are no easy answers. Later in this chapter, we will discover that we are most concerned with a certain type of cause of crime: the type that we can change. After all, as men are more prevalent offenders than women, we could focus on gender as a cause of crime. However, as gender, by and large, tends to be fixed, that knowledge does not help us much in trying to prevent crime. It is therefore more fruitful to look at circumstances that we can influence. Thus, in this chapter, we seek to identify causes of crime with an eye to prevention.

Biology

Understanding criminal behaviour from a biological perspective seems deceptively easy. You simply assume that what causes crime lurks within criminals: there is something wrong with them. Whether it is a faulty gene, or too much or too little of a certain hormone, or the fact that they fell on their head as babies, the assumption is that offending behaviour is the result of some sort of pathology. Cesare Lombroso (1911) was one of the first to advocate this. He was an Italian army doctor in the nineteenth century who examined criminals and concluded that they are degenerate, not fully developed as human beings. Criminals in this view are Darwinian failures, a lesser, more primitive version of Homo sapiens. Their offending behaviour is an expression of inferior desires and decision-making. Lombroso argued that although these people do manage to survive in civil society they are actually more equipped to live in the wild. Incapable of telling right from wrong, they are unable to sustain meaningful social relationships, and are biologically predisposed to a life of crime. Importantly, Lombroso argued that you could tell criminals by their physical features. Dwyer (2001) summarises these as follows:

•a narrow, sloping brow;

•a prominent jaw;

•high cheekbones and large ears;

•extra nipples, toes or fingers. (Dwyer 2001)

Later in his career, Lombroso softened his views and conceded that maybe only a subset of all criminals subscribed to this typology (Lombroso 1911). Nevertheless, Lombroso’s name is synonymous with the approach that regards criminals as subhuman degenerates.

It must be appreciated that within the scientific and social world of the nineteenth century, this was not such an outrageous position. Lively research took place that sought to establish the racial superiority of whites. Much of this was achieved via the measurement of the skull (or the brain) of various races. Usually, the conclusion that these European researchers sought to reach was that white people were more intelligent and civilised (e.g., Gould 1981). This line of enquiry has long been since discredited as biased and often racist in nature.

Lombroso’s work fits this tradition. Differences between races or between groups of people such as criminals and non-criminals were explained in terms of how evolved these groups were. Science soon moved away from this approach, but it dominated popular debates on crime long after. In a way, Lombroso’s research is a skeleton in criminal psychology’s cupboard. Today, it is a source of embarrassment, rather than of knowledge. His work was methodologically sloppy and biased, and his ideas tended to be misguided.

A methodologically more promising way to study the relation between genetics and crime is via so-called twin studies. The rationale underlying twin studies is simple. Monozygotic twins are identical twins with an identical genetic make-up. Therefore, any differences in their behaviour can be ascribed to the environment. Dizygotic twins are fraternal twins. These non-identical twins are genetically as similar to each other as other siblings. Studying the behaviour of twins can therefore provide valuable clues as to the extent to which criminal behaviour is affected by nature or by nurture.

Twin studies are a classic paradigm in criminal psychology. Early examples include a study by Lange in 1931. Lange looked at 13 monozygotic and 17 dizygotic twins. He did find a very high level of concordance, that is, similarity, between identical twins: if one twin had a conviction leading to imprisonment, there was a 77 per cent chance that the other twin had the same. It was only 12 per cent for the non-identical twins. However, the sample size was so small that it was difficult to draw unequivocal conclusions. These findings may not generalise easily from his sample to the general population.

More recent twin studies have been carried out in Scandinavia, and they tend to find results that go in the same direction. However, the concordance for monozygotic twins does not tend to be as high as in Lange’s early study. Christiansen examined no fewer than 3,586 pairs of twins from Denmark. He found a concordance for male identical twins of 35 per cent (13 per cent for fraternal twins), whereas, for women, it was lower still, 21 per cent and 8 per cent, respectively. That would suggest a rather modest role for genes, as the results for identical twins suggest that when one twin has a criminal record, that does not mean that the other twin will have one too.

A number of points need to be made. Firstly, as we said, twin studies have improved in that the samples have become larger, and are put together in a more systematic fashion. In addition, the measurement of offending behaviour has improved as well. Lange looked at imprisonment, which is a crude factor that will only take into account serious crime, and only the crimes for which participants have been caught and convicted. As much crime goes officially undetected, that measure certainly has its limitations. Christiansen looked at criminal records generally which is less crude but still not as accurate as self-report data might have been. In addition, we must ask to what extent similarities between twins are brought about by nature or nurture. After all, identical twins usually share not only genes, but also much of their environment. They usually grow up in the same household, in the same place of residence, and they might attend the same school, and share a group of friends. In other words, their environment might be highly similar as well. Thus, any similarities can be explained by both their genes and the similarity of the environment. Thus, these twin studies might suggest a modest effect of genetic build-up, but still cannot provide conclusive answers. A study that looks at identical twins brought up separately would be able to provide clearer answers, but, unfortunately, in criminology such a study does not exist.

An ambitious longitudinal twin study is currently taking place in the UK. It is called the Twins Early Developments Study (see Jaffee et al. 2005, for an overview). The study follows the development of 1,116 twins and their families over time to look at various factors in their development. Some of these factors, such as intelligence and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may have an impact on crime.

The research group recently published a paper in which they assessed how behavioural problems had come about as a function of both adverse circumstances and maltreatment in conjunction with certain genetic vulnerabilities. These genetic vulnerabilities were factors such as impulsivity and hyperactivity. They found that a genetic vulnerability to problem behaviour had a big impact on the degree to which maltreatment produced behavioural problems in 5-year-olds (Jaffee et al. 2005). A genetic vulnerability does not inevitably lead to problems, but is likely to make the effects of abuse or maltreatment much worse.

Recent research has moved away from looking at nature–nurture from an either–or perspective, but is investigating the ways in which genetic vulnerabilities and adverse life circumstances might bring about a variety of problem behaviours in childhood. Some children who display this type of problem conduct early are most likely to acquire a criminal lifestyle when they grow up (Moffitt 1993; Moffitt and Caspi 2001).

Modern types of research seek to explain certain types of offending from a biological perspective. There is some evidence that, in rare cases, genetics can have a strong impact on impulsive and violent behaviour. In Chapter 4 on aggression, we will discover that biological factors such as levels of testosterone or certain types of brain injuries may also have an influence. Thus, it does not seem safe to ignore biology and genetics as factors altogether. However, it is only in interaction with much more potent factors that they affect criminal behaviour. By themselves, their role is, at most, very modest.

Personality

Personality is an elusive thing. We cannot observe it directly, but must infer it from a person’s behavioural patterns over the course of time. The assumption is that those patterns hang together in a meaningful way, are relatively stable over time, and vary from individual to individual. Personality is closely linked to a person’s identity and self-perception. Personality is usually measured via questionnaires in which respondents answer questions about themselves, agree or disagree with certain statements, or indicate how they would behave in a variety of situations.

Hans Eysenck is credited with formulating the most famous personality theory within criminal psychology. His personality dimensions are broad and basic and closely linked to temperament. In his view, personality is shaped by subtle individual differences — ‘particularities’, in his own words (Eysenck and Gudjonsson 1989; 247) — in the brain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the authors
• Introduction
• 1 Why do people offend? psychological and sociological explanations
• 2 The criminal mind: understanding criminals from their scene of crime
• 3 Pathways into crime: understanding juvenile offending
• 4 Aggression and violence
• 5 Sexual violence: from theory into practice
• 6 Insanity, mental health and the criminal justice system
• 7 Stalkers and their victims
• 8 The psychology of addiction – are there more questions than answers?
• 9 Date rape and drugs
• 10 Can prison ever work?
• 11 Victims and fear of crime
• References
• Index