Criminal Psychology

A Beginner's Guide

Ray Bull, Claire Cooke, Ruth Hatcher

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781780740133
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia applicata

It is a conundrum that has vexed societies throughout history: how do you deal with those that break the law? If their aim is to evade you, how do you identify them? If their aim is to lie, how do you interview them? If they don't see their actions are wrong, how do you help them to successfully reform? Criminal psychology is the discipline which tackles these challenges head on. From the signals which give away we're lying to the psychological profiling of violent offenders, this exhaustive guide, written by the UK's top experts, is the perfect introduction. Also covering policing, and the much debated topic of sexual offenders and their treatment, it will demonstrate how understanding the mind will help us to view modern justice from a more informed perspective.

1

Criminal psychologists: within which settings do they work?

Introduction

If you were asked the question ‘What do criminal psychologists do in their everyday working life?’, what would you answer? If you were to believe the latest television dramas you might think that the main role of criminal psychologists involves helping the police to catch criminals or engaging in the ‘profiling’ of offenders. If, however, you had watched films such as The Silence of the Lambs, then you might believe that criminal psychologists attempt to gain a better insight into the minds of serious offenders by talking to convicted offenders about their crimes, like the chilling interviews conducted by Clarice Starling.

These popular conceptions of the work of criminal psychologists, while they may be true for a small number, do not represent the wide variety of roles that those trained in criminal psychology can, and do, work. From assisting the police in investigations, providing advice on interviewing of suspects or witnesses, working as expert witnesses in court cases, working in the rehabilitation of offenders, conducting criminal psychology research or working in academia, the work of criminal psychologists is varied and wide reaching.

This chapter aims to present a balanced view of the profession of criminal psychology and to introduce the reader to the variety of roles within which criminal psychologists can, and do, work. It will guide you through the criminal justice process and provide a brief overview of how criminal psychologists may contribute their expertise at each stage. Further and more in-depth information can be found in the following chapters.

What is criminal/forensic psychology?

The term ‘criminal psychology’ has been defined in a number of different ways. Even today there is no accepted definition. For example, ten years ago two leading criminal psychologists in the UK defined it as ‘that branch of applied psychology which is concerned with the collection, examination and presentation of evidence for judicial purposes’ (Gudjonsson and Haward 1998, p. 1). It would seem from this explanation that criminal psychology is concerned with investigative (those to do with the police) and court processes. However, with the growth in the last quarter of a century in the involvement of criminal psychologists in the assessment and treatment of offenders following their sentencing, it would not be surprising if there were some disagreement with a definition which would exclude these groups of professionals from being called criminal psychologists.

It would seem therefore that a wider definition of the term is needed. A leading American psychologist has gone some way to provide this. He described criminal psychology as ‘any application of psychological knowledge or methods to a task faced by the legal system’ (Wrightsman 2001, p. 2). This more inclusive definition involves the whole of the legal system. As you will see in the coming pages, criminal psychologists can be involved in all areas of the judicial process (including post sentence) and a broad-based definition is needed to encompass all of this work.

In 1981 Professor Lionel Haward, one of the UK’s founding fathers of criminal psychology, described the four roles that psychologists may perform when they become professionally involved in criminal proceedings. These are:

1. Clinical: in this situation the psychologist will usually be involved in the assessment of an individual in order to provide a clinical judgement. The psychologist could use interviews, assessment tools or psychometric tests (i.e. special questionnaires) to aid in his or her assessment. These assessments can inform the police, the courts, or the prison and probation services about the psychological functioning of an individual and can therefore influence how the different sections of the criminal justice system process the individual in question. For example, a psychologist may be asked to assess individuals in order to determine whether they are fit to stand trial or whether they have a mental illness which means that they would not understand the proceedings.

2. Experimental: this can involve the psychologist performing research in order to inform a case. This can involve carrying out experimental tests in order to illustrate a point or provide further information to the courts (for example, how likely it is that someone can correctly identify an object in the hand of an individual from a distance of 100 metres at twilight). Alternatively, it can involve psychologists providing the court with a summary of current research findings which may be relevant to the case in question.

3. Actuarial: in this instance the word ‘actuarial’ relates to the use of statistics in order to inform a case. One example of how a psychologist may act in an actuarial role is if they are required to present actuarial information relating to the probability of an event occurring to the court. For example, a court may wish to know how likely an offender is to reoffend before the sentence is decided. In such a case, a psychologist could be called upon in order to inform the presentence report to the court.

4. Advisory: in this role the psychologist may provide advice to the police about how to proceed with an investigation. For example, an offender’s profile could inform the investigation, or advice could be provided about how best to interview a particular suspect. Alternatively, a prosecution or defence lawyer may ask for advice on how best to cross-examine a vulnerable witness or another expert witness. This role involves the use of the psychologist’s expertise in order to advise the police, courts or prison and probation services.

As you can see, psychologists can be used in a variety of different scenarios within the criminal justice system and for a number of different reasons. The next few sections will examine in more detail how psychologists can and do contribute their expertise to aid the work of the criminal justice system. This list of roles, however, does not claim to be exhaustive – there are many more ways in which psychologists play their part. We have therefore chosen the most well-known roles in order to give an indication of what working in criminal psychology can involve.

Criminal investigations

The role of a psychologist in criminal investigations can take a variety of forms. Professor Laurence Alison of the University of Liverpool has suggested a number of ways in which the expertise of a psychologist could aid the police and support the work that they do.

It is important to appreciate that the ways in which psychologists can contribute extends well beyond the process of profiling offenders. Indeed the apprehension of the offender would be assisted by enhancing police decision-making and leadership skills, improving methods of interviewing witnesses and victims, developing accurate methods of recording, collating and analysing data on preconvictions of offenders, developing suspect prioritization systems based on empirical research and enhancing intelligence-led policing and the use of informants.

(Alison 2005)

From the list contained within this quote, it can be seen that the role of the psychologist in assisting the police can be wideranging. The next sections will focus on some of these roles in more detail.

Crime analysis

Crime analysis (sometimes also called intelligence analysis) is one field of work which draws upon criminal psychological methods. Crime analysts are generally employed by the police (or policing agencies, for example in the UK the National Crime and Operations Faculty and the National Crime Squad) in order to analyse crime data to aid the police to carry out their roles.

One of the most common roles of crime analysts is that of case linkage. This process involves the linkage of crimes based on the similarities in the behaviours of the offender as reported by the victim or as inferred from the crime scene. For example, let us examine a rape case committed by a stranger on a woman walking home alone after a night out with her friends. Crime analysts could use the details of this case – the fact that she had just left a nightclub, that the rapist took some of her clothing away from the scene with him, and the content of the threats used towards the woman – in order to check against an already established database of similar crimes to see whether there are any similarities to past crimes. If matches are found – the same threats were used, similar items of clothing taken by a rapist, and it was in a close geographical location to another rape – then this information can be used by the police to investigate the potential that the same individual offender has committed both crimes. This allows the focusing of the resources of the investigation in order to avoid duplication of work. (The case linkage work that crime analysts carry out, along with a case study of case linkage in relation to Jack the Ripper, is outlined in much more detail in chapter 2.)

CASE STUDY

Sarah is a criminal psychologist who is employed by a national police agency within the UK. Sarah has received information from a local police force on a serious undetected stranger rape. She will read through the statements and reports relating to the case and pick out information relating to the behaviour of the perpretator. This will then be compared to the behavioural indicators recorded from similar crimes, to look for any indications that the same person committed more than one crime.

Sarah will then prepare a report for the police, summarizing as to whether the behavioural evidence indicates that the undetected crime was likely to have been committed by the same individual as any of the crimes held on the national database. This information can be used by the police force to focus their investigation, or if the crime on the database is solved, the police can use Sarah’s report to aid them when building a case to arrest this individual for the undetected rape.

Offender profiling or criminal investigative analysis

Offender profiling has received a great deal of attention from the media in recent years. Media reporting of the utilization of criminal psychologists in high profile cases has introduced the general public to the notion of offender profiling. While this has raised the profile of the field, it could be argued that the (largely) sensationalist portrayal of profiling has resulted in a general confusion of what profiling actually is, how often it is done and who does it. This uncertainty amongst the general public is not altogether surprising however, as there is an absence of an agreed definition of the term ‘profiling’, even in academic circles.

What we can be clear about is that profiling uses information gleaned from the crime scene relating to the offender’s behaviour during the crime. This can be pooled with other information, such as victim statements (if available), in order to draw conclusions about the nature of the person who committed the crime. Was the crime planned meticulously or was it impulsive? Does the offender live locally to the crime scene? What age range is the offender likely to fall into? What gender is the offender? This information can then be used to aid the police in investigations and in targeting resources.

But how exactly is a profiler able to look at the scene and use this to specify the characteristics of the offender? The answer to this question is not entirely clear, mainly because different people involved in offender profiling can, and do, use a variety of techniques in order to reach their conclusions. Even those individuals who claim to be working from the same theoretical standpoint can still vary in how the theory is applied to any given case. Chapter 2 describes the different approaches of clinical and statistical profiling in detail.

Interviewing, detecting deception and eyewitness research

One of the most important tasks during an investigation is collecting reliable evidence in order to put together a case of what happened during the event in question. One of the main sources of this evidence is the people who were eyewitnesses to the event. In order to gain this information, an interview needs to be conducted by the investigating police officers with the aim of gaining as much accurate information from the witness as possible. In addition, once a suspect has been identified, he or she too is interviewed in order to gain his or her view of events and possibly to extract a confession to the crime. Hence the interview (whether with a witness or suspect) and the manner in which it is conducted can be crucial to a case.

It is not surprising, therefore, when you think of the processes (those relating to memory and the retrieval of memory) that are involved in the interview situation, that psychologists have been interested in this area for years. Given research findings such as those that state that the recall of events by witnesses can be manipulated by the interviewer (either intentionally or unintentionally – for example, by the type of questions asked), it is clear that those carrying out the interviews need to receive training in how to conduct the interviews appropriately. Psychologists have been instrumental in developing guidance and advice on how best to interview witnesses and suspects and have also provided training to various police forces on these techniques. (For more on this see chapter 4.)

The police can also use psychologists in order to gain advice on how to interview particular types of witnesses or suspects. For example, psychologists have conducted research into interviews with vulnerable witnesses such as the young, the elderly and learning disabled witnesses. This research can be used to inform the police on how best to retrieve the information that they require from such witnesses without causing them too much stress while at the same time ensuring that the information received is as accurate as possible.

Research performed by criminal psychologists investigating the detection of deception also has useful applications for the police when interviewing witnesses and in particular suspects. How do people behave when they are lying and what cues can police officers look out for that might indicate that the suspects are lying about their whereabouts during the crime? Is it possible to tell with a level of accuracy when someone is lying? And are polygraphs reliable in detecting deception? These questions will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.

CASE STUDY

Robert is an academic who works within the field of criminal psychology. He specializes in the interviewing of vulnerable witnesses, such as the elderly and the young, and has been carrying out active research within this area for a number of years. The police have asked him to provide them with some advice in relation to a case they are working on.

An adult male has been found murdered and the only known witness is a little boy. The police wish to gain as much accurate information from the child as possible in order to help their case but are unsure as to how much they can rely on his statement due to his age and the trauma he has been through. The police also need advice on how best to approach the little boy so as not to traumatize him any further. They therefore need the help of an expert in this area and contact Robert, who is able to use the findings from his research to advise the police.

Police psychology

The information in this section has, thus far, been concerned with the application of psychological knowledge to assist in police investigation. However, there is another field within which the work of psychologists, and the application of their knowledge, is useful to the police. Like many organizations, the police force itself presents its own challenges – what type of pe...