Forensic Psychology For Dummies (78 page)

Chapter 8

Preventing Crime: Problems, Processes and Perseverance

In This Chapter

Discovering how difficult preventing crime can be

Examining some ideas for crime prevention

Understanding how psychological insights can combat certain crimes

You may wonder what forensic psychologists have to do with preventing crime. Don’t they just help clear up the mess and damage afterwards? In fact, no, because preventing crime is about attempts to influence the actions of individual criminals, and so anything known psychologically about them contributes to more effective crime prevention and reduction. Therefore, when forensic psychologists increase the understanding of criminals and help provide a framework for their rehabilitiation or stop them continuing a life of crime, they’re carrying out steps towards preventing future crime.

As I discuss in Chapter 2, the great majority of criminals aren’t bizarre, strange individuals – they’re people whose psychology can be understood. Making sense of their influences, and how they see the world and opportunities for crime, provides the starting point for prevention.

In this chapter, I focus on those aspects of crime prevention that have a psychological focus: an emphasis on criminals and their actions. I discuss the difficulties involved in preventing crime, some different attempts that have been suggested and tried and the foreseen and unforeseen consequences of these techniques. More specifically, I investigate how psychology can help combat the particular criminal areas of kidnappings, street gangs and organised crime.

Understanding the Difficulties of Preventing Crime

I’ve never come across a society without crime. One of the first acts of human beings described in the Bible is Cain killing Abel. So you have to face the fact that humans have always committed crime in one form or another, and that the chances of getting rid of it altogether are rather slim. This section looks at the problems involved in preventing crime, how psychological knowledge can help and the fact that society may well have to accept that reducing the crime rate is the best that the authorities can achieve.

Throughout this section, one question about the causes of criminal behaviour arises repeatedly: is committing crime the result of people’s inherent characteristics or their social circumstances? (I discuss this subject in more detail in Chapter 2.) Most experts accept that crime results from a mixture of these causes, but the one that people in power believe is
predominantly
responsible is going to be relevant to their thinking about crime prevention techniques and how they use psychological knowledge, insights and approaches.

The prevalence of crime is reflected in the surprising statistic that 34 per cent of the UK male population will have a criminal conviction by the time they’re 30. That doesn’t mean they’ve been in prison, just that they’ve committed a crime and have been caught. This includes a range of different crimes from the most serious to the most trivial. The statistics for the US are more difficult to pin down and are much more disproportionately distributed across different subcultures, but they do seem to be on a par with the UK figures. Obviously, the number of people who commit crimes and don’t get caught is much higher. Self-reported criminal activity in anonymous surveys indicate that probably every man and a high proportion of women have broken the law in one way or another by the time they’re 30. This can include buying illegal drugs, shop-lifting and more serious crimes like burglary and rape. The figures show that criminality isn’t limited to a small subset of the population, although prolific offenders are very rare.

A major challenge is to stop criminals committing more than one crime. A
Recidivist
is the term given to a person who’s arrested and convicted again within a given period of time, say, three years. These days, in general terms and very round figures, about two thirds of people convicted of crimes re-offend within three years. Of course, the figures vary a lot depending on the type of crime and the sentence a person gets. People who’re locked up for ten years don’t re-offend for some time, outside prison at least!

Politicians complain about such high re-offending figures. They put many schemes in place to stop re-offending and sometimes claim success in reducing the recidivism figures. But the truth is that many schemes don’t do much better than the general one third reduction, which is what happens if you don’t do anything at all. And guess what, in a fascinating book called
The Criminal
published in 1901, Havelock Ellis complains about the fact that about two out of every three criminals soon re-offend. In other words, the rates of criminality are remarkably consistent.

Although the number of people who become criminals (or at least who are caught) has been falling over the last two decades, those who do commit crimes are just as likely to re-offend today as was the case 100 years ago.

Preventing crime completely is a tall order. Reducing crime levels and the impact of crime is more feasible.

Keeping pace with the evolution of crime

One of the challenges in preventing crime is that it continues to develop and evolve. For example, one new type of criminal is the offender with information technology skills, who uses the Internet to commit crimes that in the past may have been carried out by door-to-door fraudsters (or farther back in time, highwaymen). Table 8-1 gives some pointers on how changes are opening up ever new areas in which criminals can prosper.

Table 8-1 Developments and Emerging Opportunities for Crime