Inside the Criminal Mind

"Yes, that’s one of a number of books that Samenow and his colleagues have written. What I like about it is the honesty with which, as psychologists, they described their interactions with criminals. They discuss, initially, various attempts to get people to stop being criminals. Broadly speaking, they kept finding that all they were doing was making them more plausible criminals , that is, they were giving them a vocabulary or way of thinking about things. In other words, they would think the criminals had decided not to offend anymore, and when interviewed they said all the right things to get parole, but in fact they continued to commit crimes. They had just learnt the answers they should give from the psychological interventions they’d been subjected to. This led Samenow to emphasize the thought processes that underlie criminality, the way criminals convince themselves that what they are doing is acceptable. He was one of the first people to start talking about ‘distorted cognition’ being part and parcel of criminal activity. In my more recent work, I’ve looked at the personal narratives that criminals have: the storyline they think they’re living. That’s actually a development of those early notions that you’ve got to look at criminals in terms of their agency: what they decide to do, and how they justify to themselves that what they’re doing is acceptable. That’s what made me think this book, of all the books I’ve read about the psychology of crime, was the one that was the most honest and revealing about ways of thinking about criminality. It’s breaking away from the clinical psychologist view and the public view, that criminals are somehow or other mentally disturbed, or that it’s some sort of personality problem. As Stanton Samenow points out, that’s not very helpful. Yes, well, that’s what I like about it, that it emphasises agency. A lot of the sociological explanations ignore the fact that people from very similar backgrounds can end up very differently. There are some nice studies of brothers, for example, one of whom becomes a murderer, and another who doesn’t. The difference is not in their nature or nurture, but decisions they make for themselves. Although poverty and social processes can increase the probability of somebody becoming a criminal, it’s certainly not the whole explanation. These much more psychological explanations about agency are very healthy. In fact, I have argued that the social sciences generally are at variance with the legal approach to being human. The legal approach is entirely about agency—about the individual knowing what they were doing, knowing its consequences, and therefore they are guilty. If they didn’t, if they were mentally ill, and didn’t know what they were doing, then fine. That can help explain why they are not guilty (although in some legal systems you may be found ‘guilty but insane.’) But most social science explanations, in a sense, take away the agency. They say it’s genetics, it’s personality, it’s hormones, it’s social upbringing, it’s culture, it’s context. All of these are external to the individual making the decision to commit the crime or not. I feel it’s very important to redress that balance."