Forensic Psychology For Dummies (14 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
When studying the personality of criminals, experts are usually dealing with people who are convicted. The offenders have been caught and (typically) are in prison, because that’s where researchers can find them and ask them to fill in questionnaires or do psychological tests. Psychologists can’t always tell you therefore what the characteristics are of every person committing a crime, only about those they have access to.
What’s deemed to be a crime, the sheer diversity of crimes, and who gets caught and convicted, have significant implications for the forensic psychologist. Under the right circumstances, just about anyone can be labelled a criminal (in certain cultures, even committing adultery can result in someone being treated as a serious criminal). Therefore, great care is needed when discussing the causes of criminality (as I’m doing in this chapter) because there are so many ways and reasons for a person to become designated as a criminal.
Careering towards criminality
Sometimes people refer to persistent offenders as ‘career criminals’ and as having ‘criminal careers’. These terms are misleading, because they imply that a life of crime is similar say to working your way up in a legal organisation. Films about the Mafia give you the idea that members climb a ladder of criminality, like starting as an office boy running errands for the boss and ending up in charge of the whole mob. Although some highly organised criminal groups do exist (such as the Chinese Triads), the vast majority of criminals don’t experience anything like a career.
A more useful way to think of ‘career criminals’ is as persons living on ill-gotten gains. The criminal has no legitimate way of earning a living and devotes himself to crime in the same way as most people have conventional jobs. The term ‘criminal career’ refers to the range of crimes a person commits over an extended period of time.
You won’t find a criminal starting off on a training course, although some people think that prison can provide training in how to commit crime as younsgters mix with more experienced offenders. Fortunately, there’s no such thing as becoming junior management of a criminal gang, and then getting promoted to sales manager, and eventually joining the board.
Identifying different forms of similar crimes
In general, there’s a difference between crimes involving the taking of property (
property crimes
) and those involving direct interaction with other people (
crimes against the person
). Although this separation is a helpful summary, try asking your friends whether arson is a property crime or a crime against the person and the answers you get are likely to show the limitations of the separation. You need to know a lot more about some crimes before you can accurately place the crime into a category.
Are criminals specialists or versatile?
Criminals aren’t usually specialist offenders, choosing to concentrate on being a devious fraudster, an axe-wielding maniac, a cat-burglar who climbs up drainpipes to enter a house, a bank robber, and so on. Studies show that the great majority of people (particularly youngsters) who commit enough crimes to end up in prison are pretty versatile. When I looked into the criminal backgrounds of convicted rapists, for example, I found that eight out of every ten had previously been convicted for some non-violent crime, notably burglary. (Although the vast majority of burglars don’t commit sexual assaults.) Older criminals can be a bit more specialist, but even an experienced cat-burglar doesn’t shin up a drainpipe if the front door is left open.
Studies of criminals show that those willing to get involved in violent crime form a distinct subset of the general mass of offenders. Some criminals have more aggressive and confrontational personalities. The majority of offenders, especially burglars, prefer not to take on the occupants of a house.
The other subgroup that tends to be distinct are those who carry out sexual crimes, such as rape or indecent exposure.
I think of all crime as doing violence to a person, whether overtly as in assault, rape or murder, or implicitly as in burglary or many types of fraud. I refer to burglary and robbery a lot in this book because they’re such common crimes, and I want to help you to avoid making the mistake I made when I first started out, in thinking that the two crimes are the same thing.
burglary
) and coming into contact with someone and stealing using the threat of or actual violence (
robbery
).
To complicate matters, some forms of burglary do involve contact with the owner of the stolen goods but not in a threatening or violent manner, as when a person knocks on the door and asks for assistance but then steals something when the occupant isn’t looking. Other forms of theft also exist, including various types of fraud and not returning lost property.
These subtle distinctions give you some idea of the many diverse legal definitions there are for the hundreds of things that the law deems to be illegal. This creates a problem for the psychological study of crime because legal refinements, and the distinctions that keep lawyers in business, are often not the distinctions that are relevant or useful to understanding what a person has done or why.
Important behavioural variations exist within any legally defined crime. Take the following two examples. First, a bank can be robbed in a haphazard, risky way or the offence can be very carefully planned to avoid violent confrontation. The same law is broken in both cases, but the psychology involved is very different. Second, think about the even more contentious example of child sexual abuse. Abuse can occur over time in an unthreatening way, by leading the child to believe that the deed is acceptable, or the assault on the child can be violent. The consequences and implications of these acts may be different for understanding (but, of course, not condoning) the offender and possibly even for the nature of the traumatic effects on the victim.
Throughout this book I use the legal term to describe the criminal act being discussed, but every now and then I try to get to grips with the important behavioural details. Therefore, a person with a number of crimes on his record is called a
serial
criminal and his crimes as a
series.
The term
series
applies to all series of crimes, such as burglary or robbery, not just the favourite of crime fiction, the serial killer. For the forensic psychologist the serial offender is often the most interesting criminal to study. A serial offender may have drifted into crime, or been involved in illegal activity, for a long time, but although he may not think of himself as a criminal, you and I probably recognise him as such.