Psychology and crime

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Psychology and crime
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Areas of Psychology

• Personality and crime
• Abnormal Psychology and Crime
• MMPI and the CPI
• Antisocial Personality Disorder
• Mental illness and Schizophrenia
• Intelligence and crime
• Learning disabilities

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Psychological theories (con.)

• Attention deficit Disorder
• Learning theory and crime
• Moral development

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Personality and crime

• Is there a criminal personality?
• Personality characteristics of an individual
  that predisposes one to act in certain ways in
  certain situations
• Way one perceives, thinks about and relates to
  oneself and ones environment

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Freud and crime

• Freud the first to write about personality
• Believed that behavior is influenced by
  unresolved conflicts in childhood
• Superego
• Ego
• Id

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Freud (continued)

• Crime would occur if
• Malfunctioning of the id (too much)
• Weak ego
• Underdeveloped superego (no conscience)
• Or, overdeveloped superego (desire to be caught
  and punished)

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Freud (continued)

• Contributions of Freud
• Behavior is influenced by psychological
  processes, some of them unconscious
• Early childhood experiences are important
• Behavior can be treated by psychological means

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Freud (continued)

• Criticisms
• 1. cannot be disproven
• 2. focuses on internal factors, excludes
  societal factors
• 3. focuses on treatment rather than prevention

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Personality tests criminality

• A variety of personality tests have been given to
  prison inmates
• Generally do not provide a consistent pattern,
  one personality
• California Psychological Inventory they tend to
  score lower on Socialization and Conformity
• Lower on empathy scales

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Common traits

• Hyperactivity
• Impulsivity
• Aggression
• Sensation seeking/risk taking
• Extroversion
• External locus of control
• Inability to delay gratification

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Psychological tests

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
• 550 item T-F screening device for psychiatric
  problems
• Given to thousands of prisoners
• No single pattern emerges

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Tests (continued)

• Indicates more psychological problems than in the
  general population, i.e., Hypochondriasis,
  Depression, etc.
• Most common pattern is that of the antisocial
  personality disorder (APD), with high scores on
  scale 4 (psychopathy) and 9 (mania)

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Antisocial Personality Disorder

• Formerly known as psychopaths or sociopaths
• Also conduct disorder (adolescents)
• APD estimated at 3 in the general population,
  20-25 of incarcerated prisoners

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Characteristics of APD

• Failure to conform to social norms
• Lie/cheat/steal
• Exploit and manipulate others, use people
• Lack of remorse
• Absence of anxiety
• Self-centered

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APD (continued)

• Reckless
• Impulsive
• Aggressive
• Superficially charming
• Inconsistent work history
• Financial irresponsibility
• Irresponsible parenting

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APD (continued)

• Sexually promiscuous
• Poor judgment
• Do not profit from past experience
• Punishment is not effective
• Causes unknown
• Physiological basis?
• Environment?

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Mental Illness Schizophrenia

• Thought disturbance
• flat affect
• Ambivalence
• Autism (withdraw from others)
• Unusual behavior
• Episodes of psychosis (not in touch with reality
  delusions and hallucinations

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Mental illness (continued)

• Strikes 1 of the general population
• More common in prisons
• Most mentally ill individuals are not criminals
• Most offenders are not mentally ill
• However, there are some notable exceptions

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Schizophrenia (cont.)

• Sirhan Sirhan
• Charles Manson
• David Berkowitz Son of Sam
• John Hinckley
• Jeffrey Dahmer

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Intelligence and Criminality

• Intelligence capacity to act purposefully,
  think rationally and deal effectively with the
  environment
• Culture-bound concept skills necessary for
  success in a culture
• Lombroso hypothesized that his criminals were
  feebleminded, but there were no measure of
  intelligence

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Intelligence (cont.)

• Binet first intelligence test
• Used the concept of mental age if the majority
  of children of a given age can complete a task,
  the task requires that mental age
• He tested children, compared mental age to
  chronological age

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Intelligence (cont.)

• Goddard used his tests on institutionalized
  populations such as prisoners in the early 20th
  century
• Concluded that most prisoners were feebleminded
• However, when the tests were tried in screening
  men for the draft in W.W.I, they came out
  feebleminded, too!

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Intelligence (cont)

• Problem MA does not change after
  mid-adolescence but chronological age does.
  Thus, using Binets test, everyone would become
  feebleminded
• Goddards work was discredited
• It was until until the 1970s that the issue of
  intelligence and crime was reconsidered by
  criminologists

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Distribution of Intelligence
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Findings

• 10-15 point gap between offenders and
  non-offenders 100 v. 87
• Better than 10 of prisoners are MR, while the
  percentage in the general population is less than
  3
• Is this because of social class differences
  between prisoners and the general population?
  (SES affects IQ scores)

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Intelligence (cont.)

• Studies of nondelinquent and delinquent
  adolescents matched for age, social class and
  ethnic groups also find an IQ difference,
  although not as large
• Lower IQ scores are associated with higher
  recidivism among offenders
• Most of the differences are for Verbal IQ rather
  than Performance IQ

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Intelligence

• Higher IQ, especially verbal, might mean that one
  understands consequences better and have better
  planning skills--protective factor
• A lower verbal IQ might mean that the person is
  less likely to use internal speech and be
  more impulsive (and thus less likely to be
  deterred)

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Explanations

• The brighter might get arrested less often
  (although self-report studies still support a
  difference)
• Higher verbal IQ is associated with better moral
  reasoning skills

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Explanations

• School problems hypothesis
• Low verbal IQ -- poor academic achievement --
  frustration -- truancy and dropping out --
  association with other dropouts, unemployment --
  crime

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Learning Disabilities and crime

• LD academic achievement is not commensurate
  with IQ
• Most common reading problems
• More common among males
• Causes not clear--brain dysfunction? Problems at
  birth? Inherited?
• More common among delinquents 12 vs. 33

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ADHD

• Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
• Attention deficit
• Hyperactivity
• Impulsivity and aggression
• More common among criminals than in the general
  population
• More common among males (6-10 x)

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ADHD

• Associated, although not exclusively, with low
  birth weight (5 lbs. or less) and/or prenatal
  malnutrition
• Although ADHD gets better with age, 50 show
  residual signs in adulthood
• 25 of APD had an ADHD diagnosis in childhood

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Explanations LD ADHD

• Both tend to have more behavioral problems.
  Whether such problems are part of the disorders
  or a result of them, they are more at risk for
  behavior problems.
• School hypothesis

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Learning theory crime

• Learning a relatively permanent change, due to
  experience, that can affect behavior
• Human behavior is learned, and learned by
• classical conditioning
• operant conditioning
• Observational learning

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Learning

• Criminal behavior can be attributed to faulty
  learning
• Learned an inappropriate response
• Never had the opportunity to learn an appropriate
  response

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Classical conditioning

• UCS---------UCR
• Food---------salivation
• CS-----------CR
• Bell (after paired with food) --salivation
• Punishment--------pain, anxiety
• Illegal behavior-----anxiety

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Classical conditioning

• Classically conditioned anxiety results in
  avoidance conditioning
• Hypothesis APD lack anxiety because their
  ability to develop classically conditioned
  responses is impaired

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Operant conditioning

• Learning involves consequences to responses
• Responses resulting in favorable consequences
  become more likely
• Responses resulting in unfavorable consequences
  become less likely

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Operant cond (cont)

• Reinforcement strengths response
• Positive reinforcement receive reward
  increases p of behavior
• Negative reinforcement remove a punishment when
  a response is made, will also increase the p of
  that response
• Positive punishment aversive, unpleasant,
  decreases p of behavior

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Operant (cont.)

• Negative punishment take away reward, remove
  positive
• Generalization and discrimination
• Schedules of reinforcement and extinction
• Reinforcement, not punishment, is the way most
  behaviors are learned
• Most powerful love and approval

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Punishment

• An aversive stimulus that decreases the p of the
  behavior that precedes it
• Factors affecting punishment
• Immediate
• Intense enough, but not excessive (excessive
  results in anger)
• Consistent

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Punishment (cont)

• Aimed at the misbehavior, not the person
• Must provide positive reinforcement for
  alternative behaviors
• Is the CJS going to be effective at punishing?

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Kohlberg moral development

• Developmental stages of moral development
• Preconventional moral reasoning in terms of
  reward and punishment
• Conventional moral reasoning in terms of
  following rules

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Moral reasoning (cont)

• Postconventional moral reasoning in terms of
  what is best for the majority, or determining
  which ethical principle is most important
• Delinquents and criminals Commonly at the
  preconventional level, some at the conventional
  level, few at the postconventional level