Psychology - Forensic Psychology

What is Custodial sentencing?

This is where the court is requires that the offender be held in prison or some other closed institution like hospital, the length of sentencing often is based upon the severity of the crime. This is seen as positive punishment and negative punishment - operant conditioning

What is deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation, and retribution?

• Putting people off crime, ‘deterring’ people from being in prison prevents crime and reoffending.

• Reforming behaviour of criminals, in hopes that the criminal will leave a better person and have skills to take part in society through education

• Enacting revenge for the victim ‘an eye for an eye’ the suffering should relate to the seriousness of the crime

• Individuals are taken out of society in order to protect the public from harm

What are some of the Psychological impacts of being In Prison?

• Poor mental health, Singleton et al in 1998 found that 80-90% of prisoners experienced anxiety and depression. Suicide and self harm are far more common, 15x more likely compared to the general population

• Institutionalisation, when the offender takes on the roles and norms of prison life, they may find it more difficult to adapt to normal life, this leads to reoffending. For instance, Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment could show how prison takes over individuals lives as 90% of the inmates based their conversations around prison life

• Overcrowding and privacy, the majortity of prisons are overcrowded and full, Calhoun in 1962 found that overcrowding with rats led to increased aggression, hypersexuality, stress, physical illness

• Family effects, children with parents in prison are deeply affected and many end up in the system themselves

What is recidivism?

Recidivism rates in ex-prisoners tell us to what extent prison acts as an effective deterrent. In Norway, reoffending rates are low, 20% compared to 76.6% in the USA. In Norway there is more focus on rehabilitation but less on on restorative justice.

How can we evaluate custodial sentencing?

• One limitation of custodial sentencing is the negative psychological effect on prisoners. Bartol (1995) has suggested that, for many offenders, imprisonment can be ‘brutal, demeaning and generally devastating’. According to the Ministry of Justice a record 119 people killed themselves in prisons in England and Wales in 2016- an increase of 29 (32%) on the previous year (The Guardian 2017). This supports the view that oppressive prison regimes may be detrimental to psychological health which could impact on rehabilitation.

• One strength of custodial sentencing is it provides opportunity for training and treatment. Many offenders access education and training whilst in prisonincreasing the possibility that they will find employment upon release. The Vera Institute of Justice (Shirley 2019) claims that offenders who take part in college education programmes are 43% less likely to reoffend following release, and that prisons who offer these programmes report fewer incidents of violence. This suggests prison may be a worthwhile experience assuming offenders are able to access these programmes.

• It is hard to measure retribution, there is no way we can be sure we are inflicting the same (legal) level of suffering on criminals compared to what they caused

What is offender profiling?

identifying a person who committed a crime, characteristics are used to identify a criminal, the police use profiling to solve crimes and create a list of suspects and narrow lists down

Characteristics are based upon age, background, occupation all from witness reports

What is the top down approach used by the FBI?

originated in the USA based upon the FBI in the 1970s. the behavioural science unit of the FBI used 36 interview with murderers including Ted Bundy and Charles Manson, they concluded that data could be categorised into disorganised/organised murders. If data from one crime scene matched characteristics of a catagory, we can predict other characteristics, this could be used to identify criminals

Offender profilers will use the top down method through collecting data

What is organised and disorganised types of offender?

Serious offenders will have a signature way of working (modus operandi) amd these correlate with a paticular set of social and psychological characterisitics that relate to an individual

Organised

• Show evidence of having planned the crime in advance, the crime is targetted with a motive/paticular victim. They often will have a high level of control and operate with precision. There is little evidence of clues as the offender has a high IQ, they may come from a middle class background with a skilled job. They often have healthy relationships and may be married with children

Disorganised

• Show little evidence of planning indicating the case is spontanous, there is little control over the situation from the offender. They often have a lower IQ, unskilled or unemployed and have a history of failed relationships and live alone. Usually closer to where the crime happened

How do we contruct an FBI profile?

There are 4 main stages of constructing an FBI profile

1) Data assimilation, the profiler reviews the evidence like crime scene photographs, pathology reports, witness reports

2) Crime scene classification, whether it’s organised or disorganised

3) Crime reconstruction, hypothesis in terms of the sequence of event, victim behaviour

4) Profile generation, hypotheses related to the likely offender, e.g demographic background, physical characteristics, behaviour

How can we evaluate Top down profiling?

• There is supporting evidence for distinct organised category for an offender, David Canter et al in 2004 conducted an analysis of 100 US murder. ‘smallest space’ analysis was used which identified correlations across samples of behaviour. Analysis was used to assess the co-occurance of 39 aspects of several killings. This included such things as whether there was torture, if there was a weapon. it has been found that there is a subset of features matching FBI typology for organised offenders, key component of approach has some validity

• However, there is evidence suggesting that organised and disorganised types are not mutually exclusive. Godwin in 2002 argues that it is dificult to classify killers as one of the other. For instance, they may have high IQ but commit the crimes spontaneously

• Another strength is that this can be adapted to different types of crime, e.g burgalary. Meketa in 2017 found that top down profiling can be applied to burgalary leading to an 85% rise is resolved cases in three US states