David Canter's Reading List

"The …for Dummies format is a very strong format. They have very clear guidelines, and a team of people working on it to make sure you fit the guidelines. They also have external assessors who will look at everything that you write to ensure it is valid. I always have to apologize to people when I say: ‘You should read my book, Forensic Psychology for Dummies ’ because in Britain, dummy is a term of insult. I always have to say, ‘actually, in America, it just means somebody who’s not an expert!’ When I was given the task of putting Forensic Psychology for Dummies together, I really had to embrace the whole discipline and find a way of dealing with it that was engaging and scholarly, without being pompous. They like, quite appropriately, to have case studies and additional anecdotes, so I was quite intrigued by being able to find enough material to fill the book. I’ve run courses now with non-specialists, the public at large. And I’ve turned to that book, from time to time, to decide what I’m going to do. Quite honestly, I read bits of it and think, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that!’ I tend to write books on things I don’t know an awful lot about, as a way of getting on top of the material and getting to understand it. Forensic Psychology for Dummies was such a boot camp. I had to broaden my range of knowledge and issues, and find ways of illustrating them that would reach a popular audience. The book has done very well, by the standards of the sorts of books I publish; I think it hasn’t done quite as well as my book Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer , which won the Gold Dagger award , but it has sold more copies than any other academic books I’ve written. So obviously it is reaching a wide market, people obviously find it intriguing and useful, and so do I!"

"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."

"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."

"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."