Understanding Crime

7 Key excerpts on "Understanding Crime"

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  eBook - ePub

  Psychology and Crime

  A Transdisciplinary Perspective

  • Craig Webber, Author(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  2 Psychological Perspectives on Crime Overview Moving on from a historical overview of social scientific understanding of crime, this chapter looks at the different psychological perspectives that constitute psychology. We will see that although they are sometimes presented as discrete areas of research, in fact there is some significant overlap between them. If we want to understand the problem of many accounts of crime, both sociological and psychological, then we can interrogate them through the lens of age. One of the key criminological truisms is that most people grow out of crime (Rutherford 1986/2002). This will be a recurring theme of this chapter so that the different psychological perspectives can be understood through issues like aging and desistance from crime. Key terms ■ Psychological Perspectives; Biological Psychology; Behaviourism; Cognitive Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Social Psychology The previous chapter explored the main approaches to Understanding Crime as they developed historically; this next chapter is a more in-depth overview of some of the major psychological approaches to studying human behaviour. This is not meant to be an exhaustive overview, merely a reminder for those who have already studied psychology, and an introduction for those who have not. All psychological approaches share the common focus of studying internal mental processes. Psychology can be distinguished from psychiatry through the latter’s focus on the study and treatment of mental illness and emotional disturbance. Psychiatry is a branch of medicine that, for the most part, focusses on illness and derivations from ‘normal’ 1 behaviour. Psychology is interested in a broader range of human behaviour that includes mental functions such as perception (e.g. taste, colour or object sizes), the capacity and ability of memory, as well as behaviour that some might describe as ‘abnormal’ such as aggression

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  eBook - ePub

  An Introduction to Criminal Psychology

  • Russil Durrant(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Given the strengths and limitations of the three types of approach for measuring crime and criminal behaviour, how should we go about determining the nature and prevalence of crime in society? As with other types of research enquiry, the best approach is to draw on a diverse range of research methods rather than to rely predominantly or exclusively on one source of data. If we can demonstrate similar patterns across different sources of data then we are in a stronger position to claim that the particular phenomenon that we are interested in is a ‘robust’ one and not simply an artefact of the particular source of data. Throughout this book we will draw on a range of different sources of information about crime, alongside various different research methodologies for understanding criminal behaviour.

  REVIEW AND REFLECT

  1 How would you define ‘crime’?

  2 What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of using official crime statistics?

  WHAT IS CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY?

  This book is centrally concerned with the application of psychology to our understanding of criminal behaviour. Let us pause for a moment to reflect on what this actually entails. As every introductory psychology textbook will quickly tell us, psychology is ‘the science of mental processes and behavior’ (e.g., Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2004, p. 4). Criminology textbooks are rather less concise or uniform in how they define their discipline, but, broadly speaking, criminology is defined as the study of crime, criminal behaviour, and responses to crime (e.g., Newburn, 2013). Criminal psychology, then, critically involves the use of psychology as a science to advance our understanding of the causes of crime. Psychology here refers to the academic discipline of psychology (which includes the study, among other things, of brain processes, development, cognition, personality, social influence, and culture) not just peoples’ thinking process and personality (as in the psychological level of analysis

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  eBook - PDF

  Psychology and Crime

  2nd edition

  • Aidan Sammons, David Putwain(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This being the case, it is difficult to see how consensus could be achieved among researchers about the acts they ought to be studying. Different researchers resolve this issue in different ways but many follow the suggestions of Blackburn (1993) who makes several useful recommendations. First, ‘criminal behaviour’ should be defined in terms of the conscious breaking of rules. That is, the people of interest to criminological psychology are those who know what the rules are, but do something different. This inevitably means that some chapter 2 Defining and measuring crime 8 behaviour that is legally permissible is nonetheless of interest to psychologists and criminologists whereas other behaviour that is technically criminal is not. So those who park their cars in the spaces reserved for parents with children are not com-mitting a crime but might still be of interest because there is an underlying simi-larity between this act and other acts that are illegal. This approach allows us to recognise the continuity between, for example, conduct problems in childhood and later delinquency and criminality in adolescence and adulthood. Second, Blackburn recommends that criminological psychology should focus, in the main, on crime as legally defined. The problems this raises notwithstanding, it at least offers research-ers a clear framework on which they can agree. The majority of ‘mainstream’ criminological psychologists accept this but not all. Those who adopt one of the more critical perspectives on criminological psy-chology take issue with this apparent willingness to admit, on the one hand, that ‘crime’ and ‘criminal’ are social constructs but, on the other hand, treat them as if they were natural or objective facts. Critical perspectives raise questions about how the social construction of crime relates to issues of power, gender and race in society (see Chapter 12).

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  Theories of Crime

  • Ian Marsh(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3Psychological Explanations for Criminal Behaviour

  INTRODUCTION

  For many centuries, we have attempted to find out which people are likely to become criminals and what drives certain individuals to commit a particular type of crime in the first place. Over the years psychologists have considered a range of different explanations in order to answer these difficult questions. Some have argued that there may be a genetic explanation which is at the centre of explaining criminal behaviour; others have suggested that it is the environment in which people live which can influence their chance of becoming criminal.

  At different periods in history these ideas have been prominent in the minds of not only psychologists but also other professionals and the public alike. However nobody has seemingly provided a comprehensive and infallible answer to the question of criminality. This chapter will introduce some of the key theories that psychologists have attempted to use to explain criminal behaviour, such as personality, social factors and cognition.

  CRIMINALITY AS AN ELEMENT OF PERSONALITY

  It is common for us to attach labels to criminals and attempt to explain their behaviour through describing them as possessing a certain character trait. For example, it is common to refer to some criminals as ‘psychos’—particularly in films and the newspapers. This type of person is actually called a psychopath and labels such as these have been developed by psychologists to help us understand the different types of personality category that people fit into. Not all of these are criminal, but it is assumed that many criminals possess similar personality characteristics. Clearly there are some important factors to criminality that can be explained by situational and developmental factors, but there is also the psychological element to criminal activity that is relatively unique to that individual. One possible explanation for this desire to uncover the psychological traits of offenders is that it provides a quantifiable difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and to some extent further defines law-breakers as being almost another ‘breed’ of person. The following section will describe the different explanations of criminal personality

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  eBook - PDF

  An Introduction to Criminology and Criminal Justice

  • Chris Crowther-Dowey(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Writers belonging to another school of thought, known as positivism , have focused on those ways in which biology influences human behaviour, whereas others have focused on the psychological factors associated with criminality. Positivism holds that to a certain extent crime is ‘in the genes’, and psychological theories suggest that crime is ‘all in the mind’. The view here is that individuals lack self-control because innate forces over which they have no, or very little, control determine their actions. Criminals such as violent psychopaths may still be described as evil, but there is a tendency to view them as sick and in need of treatment to rehabilitate them and return them to normality. These are examples of biological and psychological positivism. Although these are crucial elements of such accounts, they are of course rather crude over-simplifications. For example, another important debate concerns the extent to which human behaviour can be said to be caused by the functioning of the mind, or the brain and body. In other words, are individuals’ actions determined by their biology or their psychology? The answers to this question are varied, and while some research evidence would suggest behaviour is determined by one of these, most thinkers recognize that the causes of individual behaviour are complex and may include elements of both. Others plausibly argue that the environmental and social context is important too, and that human action is not just driven by psychological and biological variables. Indeed there are also some sociological explanations of criminality which are based on looking at the indi-vidual at a micro level. Rather than finding the cause of crime in the offender and his or 276 Theories of Crime her inner physical or psychic make-up, attention is turned to the individuals surrounding the offender, such as police officers, who arguably turn individuals into criminals through stereotyping and labelling (Becker, 1963).

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  Defining Crime

  A Critique of the Concept and Its Implication

  • M. Lynch, P. Stretesky, M. Long(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This is a big list, one that would be quite long if we listed each behavior it includes. There is no reason that the list of behaviors that criminology ought to treat as crime needs to be short. The list needs to be valid and to represent those kinds of behaviors that the definition includes and limiting the list to truncate its content sim- ply results in potential challenges to the conceptual validity of the definition of crime. Second, universally, crimes can be seen as behaviors that— through the use of deception, trickery, expropriation, and force— allow an individual or entity to take possession of the property, monetary, or financial holdings or property rights held by others. This dimension of the definition of crime also covers a wide range of behaviors that include any form of behaviors that harm others financially. These behaviors would include many of the things that the criminal law defines as crime, but does not limit itself to the criminal law in its identification of these offenses. Such offenses would include many behaviors currently beyond the purview of the criminal law and the traditional definition of crime including, but not limited to, illegal advertising and marketing frauds; financial, stock, and forms of commodity market manipulations; the sale of faulty products and those that make unsubstantiated claims; the sale of undelivered goods and service; and so on. Some may wish to extend the definition of this dimension of crime even further to include behaviors ordinarily accepted as normal. Radical criminolo- gists, for example, could employ this dimension of the definition to explore exploitation in the workplace as crime. 124 DEFINING CRIME Third, in an effort to recognize the legitimacy of the study of state crime, crimes between states, or by agencies attached to the state, it is important to allow for the examination of human rights violations by states.

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  Criminal Psychology

  • David Canter(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  This chapter deals with those psychological explanations. One set of explanations relates directly to a person’s mental state. The possibility that criminals are typically mentally disordered is explored. It turns out that dis-entangling whether mental illness is a direct cause of offending or a consequence of a criminal life style, especially imprisonment, is rather difficult. However, one area that straddles mental disturbance and personality is the notion of the psychopath. That is often drawn on to explain some aspects of criminality. Consideration of whether other aspects of personality are typical of criminals is another approach to understanding their Psychological explanations of crime 3 When you have completed this chapter, you should: 1 Know about the variety of mental disorders that are relevant to criminality. 2 Appreciate the role of mental disorder in some criminal behaviour. 3 Be aware of the various cognitive distortions characteristic of criminals. 4 Understand how theories of personality are applied to criminality. 5 Appreciate the contribution of offender’s personal narratives to understanding criminality. LEARNING OBJECTIVES 34 EXPLANATION OF CRIMINALITY psychology. There are some general trends of interest, but the variety of criminal activity makes definitive correlations problematic. A generally productive approach is to explore more directly the thought processes and styles of personal interaction that are typical of offenders. There is considerable research to show they do have characteristic cognitive distortions. More recently, this has been developed to consider the personal narratives of offenders and how this relates to their crimes. MENTAL DISORDER AND CRIME One aspect of individuals that is frequently thought to relate to criminality is mental disorder.

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