Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Forensic Psychology For Dummies (13 page)
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Chapter 2
Exploring the World of the Criminal
In This Chapter
Understanding who criminals are
Considering what prevents people committing crimes
When I first went into a prison – with a colleague to interview some inmates, I hasten to add – I was struck by the fact that she kept all her keys for unlocking the various doors in a special leather pouch. The idea was to foil some clever prisoner noting a key dangling on a belt, memorising it and secretly setting about making a copy to aid his escape. A highly unlikely scenario, but even so a picture flashed through my mind of the dangling key and a brilliantly demonic criminal who needed to be second-guessed at every turn.
Forensic psychology doesn’t focus on this sort of offender for the simple reason that you so rarely meet them in real life. In this chapter, I look at the different sorts of
real
people who become criminals and offer you reasons as to how offenders get that way. I show the limitations of the over-simplistic ‘nature or nurture’ debate and suggest that much more is involved in a person becoming an offender than how his genes fit or whether he loves his mother. A particularly important aspect of someone becoming an offender is the difference between personality disorders and mental illness and how both relate, or don’t. Of course, not everyone turns to a life of crime and so I also talk about what stops the majority of people from breaking the law.
Defining Criminals and Crimes
If I ask you, ‘How does a person become a criminal?’, you may well answer ‘He commits a crime.’ Correct, but that begs the question of what’s illegal. For example, in some countries, as in many countries in the past, consentual homosexual activity is against the law, inviting imprisonment or even execution. Another example is the world of financial management, where business practice can vary significantly from one country to another, so that what’s acceptable in one country is considered fraud in another.
People are labelled as
criminals
because they break the law and not because of some inherent characteristic of the person.
This section takes a look at some basic terms and aspects of crimes and criminals (which turn out to be more complicated than you may think), and I hope explains and corrects a few myths and misconceptions.
Getting caught (or not)
Being labelled a criminal means getting caught and convicted of a crime. I’m always amused by the TV police drama where the story ends with the roll of dramatic music as the culprit gives himself away quite unintentionally during the police interview or in the way he tied the victim’s shoelaces. Rarely does the storyline take into account whether the evidence is going to stand up in a court of law, or if a good defence attorney can show that the evidence means something quite different to what the detective claims.
Early ideas about identifying criminals
Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) was one of the first people in modern times to study criminals and criminality, and although many of his ideas are now discredited, he left a mark on how people think of criminals even today. Lombroso tried to identify what’s distinct about criminals, and his efforts contributed to the (of course, wrong) idea that criminals are some sort of subspecies of society. He also claimed that criminals had distinct bodily features, being above or below average height with ‘projecting ears, thick hair, a thin beard, enormous jaws, a square and projecting chin and large cheek-bones’. He suggested that criminals were heavier than non-criminals or markedly lighter, pigeon-breasted, with an imperfectly developed chest and stooping shoulders. Criminals were also flat-footed! He even produced an
Atlas of Criminal Types
showing you what a poisoner, for example, or an assassin looked like.Lombroso’s idea was that criminals are less evolved than the rest of society, and closer to being animals. A few careful studies comparing non-criminals (university students actually) with criminals soon showed how mistaken Lombroso was. But the idea that criminals are of a certain type and can be characterised in obvious ways still hangs on, as I know every time a journalist asks the silly question: ‘Can you just tell me the typical profile of a serial killer/robber/rapist/fraudster.’
In real life things are somewhat different. In most countries statistics show that, of burglaries reported to the police, only one in every ten burglars is caught; and possibly as many as six out of every ten burglaries aren’t even reported. An even smaller proportion of rape allegations lead to a rapist being convicted. The figures for murder are more encouraging in that only a handful out of every hundred murders remain unsolved, at least in Western countries. This success is often because the murderer is known to the victim and so can be readily tracked down, and he may even give himself up (it’s not unusual that it’s the killer who calls the police and admits the crime).
Experts call unreported and unsolved crimes the
dark figure
of crime – a bit like dark matter in the universe that astrophysicists know exists but they can’t see. These hidden crimes may be similar to solved crimes or they can be very different. However, many explanations of crime that are based on studies of convicted criminals can be distorted by the characteristics of the offenders whose crimes are reported. The fact is that not all criminals share these characteristics. No doubt some very astute, capable people do turn to crime – like the Tom Ripley character in Patricia Highsmith’s novels – and constantly get away with it so that they don’t regularly feature in criminal psychology research.