Forensic Psychology For Dummies (119 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
The Runaway Jury
The various psychological interventions of coaching witnesses, studying jury decision-making, using shadow juries and developing questioning strategies add up to a great deal of potential interference with how a court works. This problem is delightfully illustrated in the book by John Grisham called
The Runaway Jury
(made into a film starring Gene Hackman). In the movie, every possible psychological device is employed by the attorney to get the jury to accept his arguments. However, the plot twist is that a member of the jury is even more sophisticated than the attorney and gets the opposite decision. This clever narrative device illustrates how problematic any attempt is to shape activities in court.The Runaway Jury
also draws attention to the ethical and legal dilemmas created by introducing psychological expertise into how the court processes should run. Not least is the fact that the experts providing such services are usually very expensive (although free online advice is increasingly becoming available). As a result, rich defendants are more likely to use them, especially a major corporation (which is the defendant in the John Grisham book), instead of ordinary folk who can’t afford the cost of such advice. Another concern is that the advice can drift into distorting the evidence presented and how the legal procedure unfolds in ways that undermine basic principles of the law, notably that it should be objective and its processes openly transparent.
Part V
Helping and Treating Offenders
In this part . . .
The most important way to reduce crime is to stop it happening in the first place, or if someone does commit a crime to set in motion some intervention that will reduce the chances of him or her doing it again. Psychologists are very active in both working with families to lower the probability that their children will become criminal and providing interventions with offenders that are aimed at helping them out of future criminality. Violent and sexual crimes are the ones most obviously open to some form of treatment programmes. Illustrations of how they work and the principles on which they are based is dealt with in this part.
Chapter 13
Intervening to Rehabilitate Offenders
In This Chapter
Looking at the psychological effects of imprisonment
Hearing about the challenges of treatment
In this chapter, I explore the psychological issues surrounding punishment and rehabilitation of offenders. I examine the use of imprisonment and ways in which incarceration is helpful or otherwise. I also describe using psychological treatment programmes
(interventions)
with prisoners, some effective and others less so, and the associated challenges. Although there are many difficulties in providing successful interventions, some do have benefits and reduce re-offending.
A very large proportion of convicted offenders don’t go to prison. They have to attend probation sessions and carry out services in the community or suffer other forms of sentencing, such as a curfew (electronic tagging). Many of the interventions that I mention in this chapter are relevant to people in prison and those that aren’t, although delivering the therapy to offenders who aren’t in the controlled environment of the prison can be very difficult.
Examining the Challenges of Imprisonment
The sentence that a convicted criminal receives has a number of possible objectives, including:
Retribution for wrongdoing.
For the widest possible benefit to both prisoners and the general public, the last point is perhaps the most important of all.
The overall objective of prisons is seen as combining
reformation
with punishment, which is why they can be called
‘reformatories’
or in the US
correctional
establishments. Yet this view raises questions about how successful prison really is in changing people for the better, and whether other more effective ways exist of enabling offenders to find their way onto the straight and narrow, as I examine in this section.
Investigating the effectiveness of prison
A major form of criminal sentence these days is to serve time in prison, with debate revolving around how long a person’s sentence needs to be for any given crime. However, a strong case exists for using alternatives to prison because the experience of prison can be so destructive. For this reason, different forms of punishment, such as service in the community or in special secure units (including the therapeutic communities that I describe in the later section ‘Treating in therapeutic communities’) are increasingly being used in the judicial system.
Prison was introduced as a major form of punishment relatively recently, about 150 years ago. (This is not to be confused with the medieval practice of throwing people in dungeons or locking them in the Tower of London. They were not legal punishments as such but ways of keeping awkward people out of circulation.) Its increased use in the 19th century drew on the idea that crime was a product of association with other criminals. The notion was that if a person was separated from other criminals and given the Bible to study, he’d mend his ways. Physical exercise, such as walking on a treadmill or around an exercise yard, was allowed, but all imprisonment was, in effect, solitary confinement.
This system was soon found to be very debilitating to prisoners (see the nearby sidebar ‘Isolating a prisoner’) and expensive to manage. As a result, the authorities quickly changed it to today’s prison system in which inmates are allowed to mix with each other (known in UK prison jargon as
association
), and required to participate in any work activities that are available. Prisons now often aim to provide something to replace the traditional sewing of mail bags, however, so that the work provides both a sense of achievement for individuals and a social context in which habits of working productively with others can be developed. If possible, the work also gives the inmates skills that they can use in legitimate jobs on release.
