Understanding Criminal Behaviour: Psychosocial Approaches to Criminality

Our understanding of criminal behaviour and its causes has been too long damaged by the failure to integrate fully the emotional, psychological, social and cultural influences on the way people behave.

Criminology as a discipline has been dominated by sociological thinking that has emphasized socially structured inequalities as the chief causes of crime, and has lacked the tools to grasp the significance of the internal and emotional worlds of individual offenders. Psychologists with an interest in criminality have not had much impact on mainstream criminological thought. The preoccupation of the academic discipline of psychology with mimicking the experimental methods of the natural sciences has meant that significant internal and emotional forces in people’s lives have been ignored. Those psychologists with more clinical perspectives have focused on the affective lives of individuals but without engagement with wider theory or evidence. Neither psychological approach has lent itself well to also understanding the wider context in which individuals live their lives.

This book aims to integrate psychological and criminological perspectives in order to better understand the nature of criminal behaviour. In particular it aims to explore the range of psychological approaches that seek to understand the significance of the emotions that surround criminal behaviour, allowing for an exploration of individual differences and social and cultural issues which help to bridge the gaps between disciplinary approaches.

The book puts forward a model for understanding behaviour through a better grasp of the link between emotions, morality and culture. It argues that crime can often be viewed as emerging from disordered social relationships. In order to understand the roots of those disorders, we need to be able to explore the emotional worlds of those individuals and how morality, crime and violence are hewn from feelings of anger, shame and guilt that develop in relation to others.

Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction: Psychological perspectives on criminal behaviour
1 The relationship of psychology and sociology in the study of crime
Beccaria and the study of crime
Ninteenth-century positivism
Twentieth-century positivism
Twentieth-century sociological criminology
Twentieth-century psychological approaches to crime
2 Mental disorder: madness, personality disorder and criminal responsibility
A brief history of criminal responsibility and mental disorder
Diminished responsibility and medical definitions
The problem of psychopathy and personality disorder
3 The contribution of criminal career research
The London Longitudinal Study
Heterogeneity of offenders: adolescent limited vs. life course persistent offenders
Explaining the links between childhood anti-social behaviour and adult offending
4 Familial and parental influences
Family structure and delinquency
Parenting styles and early family experience
Child effects
5 Youth crime
Age and criminal responsibility
Why do young people commit crime?
6 Gender and crime
Men, masculinity and crime
Women and crime
7 Understanding violence: learning from studies of homicide
Scenarios of homicide
Confrontational homicide
Personality types and confrontational rage-murder
8 Intimate violence and sex crime
Domestic violence and violence in the context of sexual intimacy
Sexual crimes: rape
Paedophilia and sexual offences against children
9 Conclusions
Overview
Psychosocial understanding of criminal behaviour: the significance of emotion and personality in conditions of 'high modernity'
Reducing crime
References
Subject index
Author index