Forensic Psychology For Dummies (7 page)

Step 3: Investigation gets underway

A few forensic psychologists may help with many aspects of police procedures, most famously by ‘offender profiling’. I put this term in inverted commas because, as I discuss in Chapter 5, the technique isn’t what sensational fiction suggests. Sure, from time to time a person crops up on TV or in the newspapers putting himself forward as a profiler, suggesting he’s a modern Sherlock Holmes. But if profilers are doing the job properly, they aren’t basing their proposals on instinct and intuition, or even the brilliant insights that made Holmes so admired, but using established scientific procedures.

Profiling procedures are still in their infancy and their predictions only weakly successful. Profiling is best understood as a small part of the much broader growth in the psychological study of criminals, their victims and various aspects of the legal process. These studies are trying to find out what it’s about an individual that leads him to offend (or at least to offend more seriously than the average citizen). Forensic psychologists look at what goes on in interviews during investigations in order to improve the information the investigators have to work with.

A lot of forensic psychology is concerned with helping people who’ve become criminals to find a way out of their life of crime or at least to cope with their imprisonment in a way that’s less personally destructive.

Some developments over the last decade that draw on geographical analysis as well as behavioural analysis show the huge gap between the brilliant but flawed profiler and the neutral scientific process. The question of how investigators make decisions is also a fascinating psychological one, but still rarely studied.

Step 4: An offender is apprehended

The forensic psychologist gets down to work at this stage. He or she assesses the individual’s ability to understand the legal process, or whether any aspects of his (see this book’s Introduction for why I use the male pronoun throughout) mental state mean that he was unable to be aware of the nature or consequence of his actions. Assessments help the court to decide if the person is fit to stand trial and whether aspects of his mental capacity need to be taken into account during the trial. An assessment can also influence what the court decides is to happen to the defendant if he’s convicted.

Step 5: Conviction for a crime

If a person is convicted, he may undergo a variety of punishments or indeed ‘treatments’. Psychologists may be active in helping him through those punishments and in providing various forms of assistance. Most commonly, help is given if the person has some obvious psychological problems. Alcoholism is a typical example of the problem a person may be struggling with that leads him into crime. Violence between people who are intimates, often called ‘domestic violence’, is another area where an offender can be helped to deal with his personality and interpersonal issues. Sexual offending (which I discuss in Chapter 15) is a further activity that may grow out of the offender misunderstanding the impact or significance of his actions, and which psychotherapeutic interventions can help.

Treatment and other interventions with offenders is one of the fastest growing areas of forensic psychology. I talk about treatment and interventions for offenders in Part V.

Step 6: After the trial

Psychological assessments of criminals go on long after the trial is over, in prisons and in other places dealing with offenders. These assessments are the bread and butter of the day-to-day work of the majority of forensic psychologists. Assessments are made up of a variety of different, standard procedures that have been developed over the years to measure aspects of an offender’s personality, intellect, experience, attitudes and actions. Go to Chapter 9 to find out how these measuring procedures are developed.

A particularly interesting aspect of assessment is the consideration of individuals who have no obvious mental illness or other intellectual problems, but who clearly have difficulty in relating effectively to others. At the extreme such people may be called ‘evil’ and they pose a challenge to psychological assessment. Various approaches to this issue have been explored but the dominant one is to think of the person as having a
personality disorder,
the main example being
psychopathy
. I cover these issues a little more in Chapter 2 and give over the whole of Chapter 10 to personality disorders.

Considering the court process raises many intriguing psychological and social psychological questions, but answering them is difficult and greatly influenced by the differences between different legal systems. For example, many courts throughout the world don’t have juries: legally trained professionals, magistrates or judges make all the decisions. Where juries do exist, important differences arise in how psychological issues are dealt with and, crucially from the point of doing research, how possible it is or isn’t to examine how the court operates.

In the US, issues around proceedings are more open. The delightful film, based on the John Grisham novel
The Runaway Jury
pushes to the extreme the ways in which some knowledge of individual personality processes and social dynamics can influence juries. The attorney used this advice in the film to try and choose a jury that would give him the verdict he wanted and then to manipulate the way he presented arguments to them so they would take his side. I won’t tell you how it all pans out in case you want to watch the film or read the book, but you can be sure it was not as you might expect.

Plenty of professional psychologists in the US, while not going as far as the characters in the film, do endeavour to help attorneys in selecting who should be eliminated from a jury and how to present the case to take account of how and what a jury understands of a case.

Reviewing the origins of forensic psychology

Although professional forensic psychologists have only been operating in any numbers over the past 25 years, activity that can be recognised as forensic psychology is as old as modern psychology, going back to the latter half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, just about any development in scientific psychology quickly finds an application in some aspect of the legal process. Many well-known psychological studies started in the university and found their way into court as evidence. (I describe some of these landmark cases in Chapter 20.) Also, clinical practitioners working directly with patients have also contributed to developments in forensic psychology. In this section, I review these two parallel disciplines of psychology.

The academic strand

All the applications of psychology to crime and law that I discuss in this section have their origins in the research laboratories of universities. New procedures have come from the products of careful study independently of the cut and thrust of legal debate or the challenges of a particular case. Later on, these procedures were applied directly to actual cases as illustrated in the nearby sidebar ‘Defending a mayor from a charge of obscene behaviour’.

The law deals with all aspects of people in all the situations they find themselves. No surprise, therefore, that every major area of psychology and every significant psychologist has found relevance in some consideration of crime, criminality, investigation and prosecution. As a result, the links of psychology to the law are most notable in those countries where psychologists have been most numerous and active. Sigmund Freud, for example, told judges in Vienna in1906 that they needed to be aware of how witnesses can inadvertently distort information because of unconscious processes.