The Criminal

"It’s always intriguing to see the ways in which we rediscover things. I’ve been around long enough to hear people presenting ideas today, as if they were new, that I know we were talking about in the 1960s. Consequently, it’s always very healthy to look back at serious writing that deals with topics of the day. And The Criminal by Havelock Ellis is a remarkably sensible, well-informed book. One thing that is fascinating in it, and it’s a very simple point, is that these days there are often processes set in place that will try and reduce recidivism. Typically, they say that they’ve been reasonably successful if about two thirds of the offenders reoffend. And if you’re looking at Ellis’s book, he talks about the reoffending rate being about two thirds. So it’s very salutary in that regard. Many of the discussions about the backgrounds of these offenders and their particular characteristics are discussions that we’d recognize today. It’s a reminder that in many ways, we’ve not moved on tremendously in understanding criminality. Perhaps we understand it, but we’ve not really found a way of dealing with it. Or at least we’ve not found a politically acceptable way of dealing with it. Writings from over a century ago do suggest that criminality is almost an inherent part of society, and that the idea of getting rid of it or of reducing it is a very optimistic one. Yes, if you want to find the really nasty serial killers—enough of them to study—you’ve got to go to America. We have far fewer serial killers in Britain. There’s much more violent crime in America than there is in Europe, partly because of the access to firearms. And if you look at the crime rates of different countries, you’ll find they vary considerably. The reason for this is complex, because it relates partly to what is legal or illegal in different countries. Obviously, if homosexuality is illegal, you get a very different pattern of criminality. But even if you take something fairly clearcut—like murder—the rates vary enormously between different countries. That is partly the legal system, partly the whole socio-cultural process. It does, to some extent, relate to how effective the police forces are. The differences between countries do indicate something important about the culture of those countries. That’s the sort of thing that criminologists will look at, although I do deal with them, to some extent, in Forensic Psychology for Dummies . That’s right. He broadened out into the early, systematic and non-moralistic studies of human sexuality. That’s what he’s most known for, his work on sexuality, and particularly what he then called ‘pathological’ sexuality. That was important, in late Victorian times, to begin to talk about issues that were just not spoken of. I was a bit worried when I discovered that—I didn’t want to support a eugenicist. But he pulled away from it. He decided that the direction it was going in was quite wrong. Like all of the major scientists and thinkers of the late Victorian era, he was very influenced by Darwin. He was alert to the idea that human genetics were likely to be distorted by the fact that certain subgroups might have more children than others. But once they started talking about sterilization, he pulled away from it. He had a much more ethical stance on eugenics than others at the time, seeing it as an issue to consider rather than something that should shape policy. He was alert to the social processes that generate criminality, and the fact that these were likely to be reproduced within society, but I was pleased to see that he took a moral stance on how you deal with that."