The Psychology of Criminal Conduct: Theory, Research and Practice

"This is a real compendium: a clinical psychologist’s perspective on criminal behaviour. And it’s a very thorough account. Blackburn was a very experienced clinical forensic psychologist in, if you like, the old tradition: he worked in a facility, what we call a ‘special hospital,’ but is really a prison for people who are regarded by the courts as mentally ill. He worked with these individuals over many years, and brought it all together in a very thorough account of all the clinical perspectives there are on criminal behaviour. As you would expect, it tends to emphasise criminal activity that has a very strong psychological disturbance component to it; a lot of coverage of personality disorder, for instance, as well as sexual offences and violence. No, I think this whole area needs to be taken much more seriously by law enforcement agents and policymakers. Law enforcement, in particular, is way out of touch with developments in forensic psychology, investigative psychology and criminal psychology. Its very frustrating. I’ve done various projects with the police that have shown how we could improve their effectiveness, and they don’t take any notice. Well, the law, broadly speaking, and law enforcement—the police—do not understand the scientific method. They do not understand how you develop a systematic account of a person’s activities. The legal process, in particular, still thinks of the way in which psychology may contribute as if it’s a branch of medicine. They’re always looking for some sort of disease or syndrome that they can use. I’ve had some court cases in which it’s very obvious to me that there is a psychological contribution, but because I’m not prepared to say this person is ill in some way, it is not accepted by the court. I’ve often suggested that the legal process in particular is up to date with the psychology of about 1840. That was when they first introduced the idea of mental illness as a defence in a strong way. The legal system has not moved on from that. “The legal process is always looking for some sort of disease or syndrome that can be used in court” One of the consequences is that there are a lot of people who give expert opinion in court—in America in particular—who introduce all sorts of syndromes that are, from a scientific point of view, rather spurious and not very well established. But they’re able to take them into court, particularly if psychiatrists are presenting them, because they can say: ‘this is some sort of disease.’ Parental-alienation syndrome is a good example. This is where families are breaking up, and one of the parents is trying to alienate the child from the other parent. Well, that’s an understandable social process. But if you can put a label on it and say ‘it’s a syndrome,’ you can then get the courts to listen to it. What is changing in Britain is that the police are becoming much better educated. They are talking about evidence-led policing. In America, they’re talking about predictive policing. Consequently, the newer generation of officers are beginning to understand the potential of contributions from psychology, but there’s still a long, long way to go. it’s just looking at the patterns of where crime occurs, and predicting where the next crime is going to happen so that police can be put in place to deal with it. Because they’ve got large datasets now, they can do it. Although actually, they don’t understand what they’re doing. And there are lots of confusions. At a conference I was at recently, in Iceland, there was a very interesting presentation about how distorted all of that stuff is. There are problems, for example, of repeating the mistakes of the past by going to places where crimes have been detected and thus recorded, rather than identifying unreported crimes. ‘Evidence-led policing’ is also often misunderstood by the police because they think that’s what they’re always collecting: evidence that can be used in court. They don’t understand what scientific evidence is. Interestingly, the senior police officer on the very first case I contributed to really put his finger on it. He said, ‘you know, up until now, we’ve been collecting evidence, but what we should be collecting is data.’ Thinking of it as a research process, rather than as just a legal process. But they’re still not there. They’re still not doing that."