Crime evaluation

Question 1

defining and measuring crime

Answer 1

Evaluation of defining a crime
Universal concepts
- Despite variations in how crime are identified there are some behaviours that are universally regarded as unacceptable such as murder, rape and theft
- However even within these categories there are cultural variations in the law for example the French concept of a crime of passion may lead to a more lenient sentence for a murder if the court decides the murder acted on unplanned impulse

Evaluation of measuring a crime
Official statistics
- Only a certain number of crimes make it through the crime funnel and get reported to the police
- May be for a variety of reasons for example a victim may not feel the police will take it seriously enough so therefore do not report it or they may wish to avoid the stigma of being a victim or a person may not even be aware that a crime has been committed
- Walker et al found that only 42% of crimes reported in the British crime survey were reported to the police, this is called a dark figure of unreported crime and means that official statistics only represent a part of criminal activity on the other hand general trends reported from both kinds of statistics tend to be in agreement such as increases vehicle thefts

Victim Surveys

• Provides information about the dark figure of unreported crime
• Depends on the honesty of answers provided to interviewers, people may still prefer not to report crimes with a stigma attached such as rape or which they feel are trivial
• Victim surveys may be more consistent than official statistics when making comparisons over time because official statistics vary with changes in laws and reporting practises
• On negative side issues with sampling, random sampling aims to identify a representative sample but in fact that only about 75% of those contacted take part means that the final sample is biased and the same is only drawn from those with a postal address which biases the sample even more
• Further criticism is that the number of crimes reported from any one individual in the Crime Survey is capped at five in any one year which leads to an underestimate of actual crime
• For example in domestic abuse an individual may experienced more than 5 incidents in any year but this would not be reported, one estimate suggests that as many as three million incidents may not be included in the overall figures of crime because of this cap

Offender Surveys

• Lack of accuracy in answers
• People may underplay their criminal involvement and other behaviours such as drug use
• However the OCJ’s report that the participants said they were honest in their answers

Question 2

offender profiling: the top down approach

Answer 2

Is the method useful?

• Police who have used FBI methods believe it was useful
• Copson questions 184 police officers who 82% said that the technique was useful and over 90% said that they would use it again
• Technique may not result in an actual identification of the offender but it looks at other potential contributions beyond the identification of the offender, for example the approach offers investigators a different perspective, opens up new avenues and may prevent wrongful predictions

The basis of the method flawed

• Original data on which the organised/disorganised classification came from the interviews with 36 of the most dangerous and sexually motivated murders including Ted Bundy and Charles Manson
• Data was used to identify characteristics that would help police read a crime scene
• These individuals may not be the best source of reliable information and their approach and rationale may be quite different to more typical offenders

Potential harm caused by using top-down approaches

• Brent Snook et al argued that profilers actually do little more than physics who it could equally be argued, they often have a wealth of experience in reading behaviour
• Not based on scientific theory
• Eth believability of profiles based on the top down approach might be explained in terms of the Barnum effect, ambiguous description can be made to fit any situation such as in the case of horoscopes this explains why they seem to be right
• Might be acceptable but it has the approach to be wrong, and it can mislead investigators
• Bekerian suggest that smart offenders read about how profiles are constructed and can deliberately mislead with clues
• Raises the question of whether this information should be given to the public

Measuring the accuracy of the approach

• Data can also be questioned in terms of how usefulness is measured
• Alison et al shows that judgements are not reliable, in this study police officers were given a profile along with one of two versions of the offenders actual characteristics for example in the real version they were told the offender was 37 they knew the victim and in the fake version participants were told the offender was 19 and did not know the victim, over 50% of the officers rated the profile they were given as generally or very accurate even though half of them were given a fake version

Distinguishing between organised and disorganised types of offender

• Turvery suggest that a dichotomy is false as it is more likely to be continuum rather than two distinct categories
• Further supported by the fact that descriptions are generalised as they use phrases
• Douglas et al was to have a third category called the mixed offender this lessens the usefulness of the classification because there is now a kind of dustbin category
• David Canter et al provided evidence that the classification has little basis in reality, they analysed 39 aspects of serial killings in murders committed by 100 US serial killers, their analysis revealed no clear division between organised and disorganised types of offenders, instead the found a number of subsets of organised type crimes and little evidence for disorganised types

Question 3

offender profiling: the bottom up approach

Answer 3

Evaluation
Scientific basis of the bottom-up approach
- One advantage claimed from bottom-up approaches is that they are considered to be more scientific than top down approaches because of the use of objective statistical techniques and computer analysis
- Techniques are only as good as the data that is input and underlying assumptions used to work out links between data items
- One issue is that the data that is used to drive such systems is only related to offenders who have been caught and therefore this tells us little about patterns of behaviour related to unsolved crimes
- Someone has to develop the formula and this may be incorrect
- This means that bottom-up approaches may have the potential to be objective and systematic but in practise they are inevitably biased

Is investigative psychology useful
- Canter very first attempt at profiling was very impressive and led to police interest in the method
- Some research supports the usefulness of the approach, Gary Copson surveyed 48 UK police forces using investigative profiling and found that over 75% of the police officers questioned said that the profilers advice had been useful
- Only 3% said that the advice had helped identify that actual offender but said that they would use it again
- This suggests that the method may not be useful in actually catching offenders but the slight benefit that it
affords makes it worthwhile

Is circle theory successful

• Canter and Larkin studied 45 sexual assaults and showed support for their model by distinguishing between marauders and commuters
• 91% of the offenders were identified as marauders, if almost all offenders are marauders then the classification doesn’t seem particularly useful
• Pentherick pointed to a number of flaws with the model for example if a persons home base is not actually at the centre of the circle this means that police may look in the wrong place
• Representing ranges in terms of circles is over simplistic and cities the patterns may form an ellipse or some other shape

Is geographic profiling generally successful

• Rossmo is a key supporters of the geographical approach and claims that while it may not solve crimes specifically, can be used in prioritising house to house searches or identifying a geographical area where DNA could be collected
• One issues is that they cant distinguish between multiple offenders in the same area and also the method is simply limited to spatial behaviour
• Rossmo worked for many years for the Vancouver police department and introduced geographical profiling to the department and in 2001 he was dismissed and the department ceased using his methods as they did not feel enhanced policing outcomes

Final conclusions

• Taken overall the success rates for offender profiling and the views of police forces who have used the techniques suggest that what profiling cant reliably do is identify an offender
• Assist police in narrowing down the field possibilities
• Big danger lies in sticking too closely to any one profile

Question 4

Biological explanations of offending behaviour: A historical approach

Answer 4

contribution to the science of criminology

• many writers praised Lombrosos approach as he brought science to the study of crime
• regarded as the founder of the modern criminology
• prior to his work the criminal schools studied crime but not the criminal and assumed that crime was a choice which could be deterred if punished,
• Lombroso believed in less harsh treatment for criminals and a more humane view that both believed in less harsh treatment for criminals and a more humane view that both biology and environment may remove the option of free will
• used an evidence based approach and based his ideas on empirical evidence and detailed measurement - raised the possibility of scientific studies of the criminal mind

criticisms of Lombroso’s methods

• a key failure was the lack of adequate controls, when he studied prisoners he did’nt pay the same kind of attention to non-prisoners, he would have found as many non prisoners with the same characterstics as he found in prisoners
• Charles Goring compared 3000 convicts with a group of non convicts and found no difference except for the fact that the convicts were slightly smaller

Gender bias

• Lombroso wrote teh book La Donnar Delinquente, this set up his ideas about female criminality
• he ad androcentric ideas about women which were inexcusable as he didnt study women directly
• he believed that women were less evolved than men and were naturally jealous and insensitive but were more passive had lower intelligence and had a maternal instinct which neutralised there negative traits meaning that they were less likely to be criminals
• women who did become criminals had masculine characteristics which were beneficial in a man but in a women created a monster

Criticisms of somatotypes

• Kretschemr evidence had been criticised because it has never been presented for scrutiny and therefore it is not clear if it was based on fact
• some evidence to support link between body type and criminality for example Glueck and Glueck found that 60% of delinquents were mesomorphs roughly equivalent to the athletic type
• Sheldon created a fairly similar set of somatotypes based on his own study of 200 young adults, he concluded that there were differences between delinquents and non delinquents in terms of body type, the delinquents tended to be mesomorphs which supports the notion of criminal types identified by their physical features

Links between personality type and criminality

Question 5

Biological explanations of offending behaviour: Genetic

Answer 5

Genetic explanations
research support from adoption studies
- twin studies are not the only kind of genetic research undertaken that indicates there is some element of inheritance in offending behaviour
- another line of evidence comes from adoption studies
- Crowe found that adopted children who had a biological parent with a criminal record had a 50% greater risk of having a criminal record by the age of 18 whereas adopted children who didnt have a criminal mother only had a 5% risk
- Mennick et al study of 14,000 adoptees found that 15% of sons adopted by a criminal family went on to be criminals compared to 20% whose biological parents were criminals suggesting that inherited genes are marginally more significant factor

can genetic and neural explanations explain non violent crimes

• most of the genetic research relates to the association between offending and violent aggressive behaviour
• offending behaviour includes theft fraud drug use and bigamy which are non violent
• biological explanations may just account for certain kinds of crime such as those involving violence and psychopathy - a psychopath is a person who lacks empathy with what other people feel and thus is more likely to commit crimes
• evidence that this personality trait is inherited for example Blonigen et al found support for a genetic basis looking at over 600 male and female twins
• Lynn Findlay points out that people have created the category of criminal behaviour and it includes many different types of crime making it difficult to argue that such as behaviour can simple explained in terms of genetics and its interaction with the environment

problems with determinism explanations

• genetic explanations are presented as if the genes a person is born with determine later behaviour
• stephen Molbey
• behaviour outside the persons control

Question 6

Psychological explanations of offending behaviour: Eysenck;s Theory

Answer 6

research on the genetic basis of personality

• key element of Eysencks theory is that personality types have a biological basis, support for this comes from twin studies for example Zuckerman found a +52 correlation for identical MZ twins on neuroticism compared with 24 for non identical twins showing a large genetic component, for extraversion the figures were +51 and _12 respectively
• even those this shows a considerable genetic component it is not as high as eysencks had claimed, a +50 correlation means that about 40% of the variance in these traits is due to genes, this figure may also be slightly inflated because MZ twins tend to be treated more similarly

personality may not be consistent

• any theory based on personailty assumes that personailty is consistent in other words a person who is lively or anxious is like that all the tine
• a number of psychologists support the situational persepective suggesting that people may be consistent in similar situations but not across situations for example someone may be relaxed and clam at home but quite neurotic at work
• Walter Mischel supported this stiautional theory with research, Mischel and Peake asked family, friends and stranger to rate 63 students in a varient of situations and found that there was no correlation between traits displayed, any regularity of behaviour is likley to be due to teh fact that we often tend to be in similar situations
• means that the notion of a criminal personality is flawed as people don’t simple have the one personality

personality tests may not be reliable

• further issue with any theory of personaility is that the score or label given to any person depends on the answers that they provide on a personality questionnaire such as EPQ
• when a person answers the EPQ they are responding to the demands of a questionnaire , select traits that apply to them but there responses might not represent their reality,
• yes and no answers may not apply to all questions
• countered by the use of lie scales in questionnaires this is a set of questions such as are all your habits good and desirable - a person who says yes consistently to lie scale items is probably being dishonest through the questionnaire tending towards socially desirable answers

support for link between personality and criminal behaviour

• there has been research comparing the personalities of criminals and non criminals
• Dunlop et al found that both extraversion and psychoticism as well as lie scales were good predictions of delinquency
• but in this study all participants were students and their friends and delinqeuncy was an assessment of minor offences in the previous 12 months

basis as a theory of offending behaviour

• Eysnecks theory is a theory of personaility rather than one of offending behaviour, there is some merit in the idea that certain traits such as pschoticism would be found in crminals as such people are aggressive and lack empathy
• however it is difficult to know what we can actually do with this information
• even though the three traits are good predictors of delinquency it is not close enough to use as a means of detecting who is likely to become an offender
• it may provide some useful ideas of how to treat offenders for example by modifying the socialisation experiences of children who may have the potential to become offenders

Question 7

Psychological explanations of offending behaviour: Cognitive distortions

Answer 7

Research support for hostile attribution bias

• schonenberg and aiste showed emotionally ambiguous faces to 55 violent offenders in prison and comapred their repsonses to matched control normla participants, the faces showed angry happy or fearful emotions in varying levels of intensity of the target emotion
• the offender were more likely to interpret any picture that had some expression of anger as an expression of anger
• researchers concluded that such misinterpretation of non-verbal cues may at least partly explain aggressive impulsive behaviour in susceptible individuals

research support for minimalisation

• Kennedy and Grubin found that sex offenders accounts of their cimres often downplayed their behaviour for example the offenders suggested that the victims behaviour contributed in some way to the crime
• Maruana and Mann suggested that this is a part of normal behaviour were people try to blame events on external sources as a way to protect the self in this way it is not especially deviant behaviour

real world application

• understanding the cognitive distortions cant be used in the identification of criminals or potential criminals
• although it can be used in treatment
• Heller et al worked with a group of young men who were mainly from disadvantaged groups from Chicago, they used cognitive behavioural techniques to reduce judgement and decision-making errors
• those participants who attended 13 one hour sessions had a 44% reduction in arrests compared to a control group

Question 8

Psychological explanations of offending behaviour: Level of moral reasoning

Answer 8

research support
limitations of Kohlbergs theory
Real world application

Question 9

Psychological explanations of offending behaviour: Psychodyanmic

Answer 9

important consideration of emotion

• only explanation for offending behaviour that deals with the role of emotional factors
• does not overlook how emotion impacts behaviour
• includes how anxiety and feelings of rejection contribute to offending behaviour
• recognises the role of biological influences and the importance of early childhood experiences in moulding adult personality both of which have been shown to be important in other theories

not causal findings

• Bowlbys theory just demonstrates that there is an association between separation and emotional problems
• there may be other variables that cause the emotional problems for example it may be that discord in the home caused prolonged separations between mother and child and also caused the affection less nature of some of the children
• could also be that the affectionless character caused some separation for example difficult child may be more likely to be put into care

real world application

• Bowlby can be used to treat emotional problems, you can do this by preventing separation in the first place
• Bowlby together with James and Joyce Roberstson demonstrated that the key was emotional separation rather than just physical separation
• they showed that children coped reasonably well with separations from parents as long as alternative emotional care was provided

gender bias in Freud’s theory

• Freuds explanation of events during the phallic stage proposed that women should develop a weaker superego than men because they dont identify as strongly with their same sex parent as boys do
• partly due to the effect that the resolution of the electra complex is less satisfactory and partly because of her lower status
• represent an alpha bias - exaggerating the difference between men and women and devaluing women
• if Freuds theory was correct then we would see more woman criminals when in fact we see the opposite

complex set of factors
- Bowlby acknowledged that juvenile delinquency is undoubtedly the consequence of many complex factors such as poverty, bad housing and lack of recreational facilities, none of these actually figure in psychodyanmic explanations but still has a contribution to make
Farrington et al did a 40 year longitudinal study in the UK with 400 boys from South London
- study concluded that the most important risk factors at age 8-10 for later offending was
1. family history of criminality
2. daring or risk taking personality
3. low school attainment
4. poverty
5. poor parenting
- shows explanations can be combined

Question 10

Dealing with offending behaviour: Custodial sentencing and recidivism

Answer 10

the effectiveness of punishment

• high rate of recidivism suggest that for at least 50% of the prison population
• punishment is most effective when it occur immediately which doesnt happen in the case of a custodial sentence, an offender might actually see the sentence as punishment for getting caught rather than the offending, therefore what is learnt is to avoid getting caught
• we would expect the severity of punishment to be a deterrent yet the US statistics show that murder rates are not lower in states were there is the death penalty
• when a crime is committed a person is in a high emotional state and does not pause to consider negative consequences

other benefits of custodial sentencing

• incapacitation - only relevant to a small range of dangerous prisoners and not relevant to reducing recidivism therefore it has a limited benefit
• retribution is another potential benefit but can be achieved without a custodial sentence, it may be achieved through restorative justice where offenders have to make amends to their victims and face there own conscience this offers the changed attitudes towards re-offending
• the final potential benefit is rehabilitation in the context of a custodial sentence - offenders cannot be forced to take part in programmes and if they do then it is a superficial involvement, with the aim of reducing their sentence rather than a wish to change

prisons as a training ground for crime

• prisons can increase the likeihood of re-offending rather than decrease it
• according to sutherlands differential association theory this would happen because offending behaviour is a consequence of increased association with people who have pro-criminal attitudes, this affects both an individuals attitudes towards crime and provides opportunities for learning about how to be more successful at committing crimes
• Latessa and Lowenkamp concluded that placing low risk offenders with high risk offenders makes it more likely that the low risk individuals will re-offend
• other explanations to why imprisonment may encourage increased criminal behaviour on release for example it leads to low self esteem and reduced empathy for others or anger towards the system

individual differences in recidivism

• custodial sentence may be more effective with some offenders than others
• walker et al found that the length of sentence made little difference to habitual offenders who were just likely to re-offend no matter what their sentence was
• rates of recidivsim vary in age and crimes, younger people more likely to re-offend and those committing drug of sexual offences
• target different groups of criminals

the benefits of non custodial sentencing

• the cost of prison care and the problems associated with it means alternatives might be preferred
• alternatives include probation, compensatory penalties, electronic monitoring, fines, community service and anti-social behaviour orders
• evidence suggests that cautions are more effective deterrents than arrests and that offenders sentenced to community rehabilitation were less likely to re-offend
• non custodial sentence is that problems that occur in prison can be prevented

Question 11

Dealing with offending behaviour: Behaviour modification in custody

Answer 11

advantages over other methods of rehabilitation

• appeal of a token economy system is that it is clearly defined and relativley easy to implement
• works without trained psychologists
• sufficient pre-planning needs to happen and staff must remain consistent in the way that they reward tokens

success of token economies in custody

• successful for schools and dealing with people with autism
• less successful with prison populations
• became popular in US and was used in nearly all states
• research showed that socially approved behaviours were enhanced and criminal behaviours were diminished
• fell out of favour because good results did not persist

short versus long term goals

• in short term it improves behaviour in the prison environment and this goal seems achievable
• bigger question is whether a system can have long term effects on offenders when they return to their natural environment - have little effect on re-offending rates
• bad behaviour outside the prison might be more rewarding than good behaviour therefore more likely to re-offend
• rewarded tokens for more complex normal behaviours

individual differneces

• some people respond better to operant conditioning than others
• for example programmes with young delinquents have been reasonably successful but there is less success with violent offenders
• Cohen and Filipcjak found that juvenile delinquents who had been trained with a token economy system were less likley to re-offend after one year and in contrast rice et al studied 92 men in a Canadian maximum security psychiatric hosiptial and fond that 50% of men treated in this way re-offended

ethical issues
- violation of human rights
- individual behaviour is being manipulated not with their agreement
- need a annual review of procedures and goals to be agreed upon by prisoners, officers and administrators
- use of punishment is unethical
(expand on this)

Question 12

Dealing with offending behaviour: Anger management

Answer 12

success of anger management programmes

• Taylor and Novaco reported a 75% improvement in rates using programmes with offenders also appears on average to be successful
• Landenberger and Lipsey analysed 58 studies using CBT with offenders 20 of which used anger control as part of a therpay - this was related to improvement
• not all studies have been positive for example Howells et al cite five meta-analytic studies which show only moderate benefit

methodological issues with research

• brief sessions only last a few days and some may last years
• hard to compare
• run by psychologists or less experienced prison staff
• differnet kinds of offender and different types of anger management
• one issue is the way that anger is assessed - done using a self report measure or observations by prison staff which are subject to bias
• might portray themselves in a more positive light and then return back to there ordinary selves

limitations of anger management programmes

• CBT is not for everyone and some offenders dont like having to reflect on their styles of thinking and find it difficult to make the effort involved in changing behaviours
• can use drama based coruses whcih are less relinat on verbal ability and more engaging - this has proved successful
• one way to cope with dropout is to assess readiness to change before the start of an anger management programme rather than waste time with individuals who wont benefit
• scales to measure change such as the anger readiness to change questionnaire

short versus long term goals

• most assessments of the success of anger management programmes focus on the short term goal of reducing aggression in prison
• fewer studies have looked at long term effects on recidivism rates as it is difficult to follow up
• Mcguire looked at a number of studies and found that some instances of reduction in re-offending after one year compared with individuals just on probation
• success may be linked to therapeutic support

the relationship between anger and aggression and crime

• we are trying to reduce aggression so if anger doesnt contribute to aggression then anger manmagement is irrelevant
• Loza and Loza-Danous claim that research that linked anger and crime is based on lab studies using students, in their own study of 300 males in priosn they found no differences between violent and non-violent offenders in terms of anger
• this may be because violent individuals mask their anger,
• they further suggest that one danger with anger management prorammes is that such programmes can be harmful because offenders attribute their violent behaviour to anger rather than taking personal responsibility
• Howells et al concluded that anger is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for aggression and violent crime - much violence can take place without anger