Criminal behaviour and violence are increasingly viewed as worldwide public health problems. A growing body of knowledge shows that criminal behaviour has a neurobiological basis, and this has ...intensified judicial interest in the potential application of neuroscience to criminal law. It also gives rise to important questions. What are the implications of such application for predicting future criminal behaviour and protecting society? Can it be used to prevent violence? And what are the implications for the way offenders are punished?
The return of emotions to debates about crime and criminal justice has been a striking development of recent decades across many jurisdictions. This has been registered in the return of shame to ...justice procedures, a heightened focus on victims and their emotional needs, fear of crime as a major preoccupation of citizens and politicians, and highly emotionalised public discourses on crime and justice. But how can we best make sense of these developments? Do we need to create "emotionally intelligent" justice systems, or are we messing recklessly with the rational foundations of liberal criminal justice? This volume brings together leading criminologists and sociologists from across the world in a much needed conversation about how to re-calibrate reason and emotion in crime and justice today. The contributions range from the micro-analysis of emotions in violent encounters to the paradoxes and tensions that arise from the emotionalisation of criminal justice in the public sphere. They explore the emotional labour of workers in police and penal institutions, the justice experiences of victims and offenders, and the role of vengeance, forgiveness and regret in the aftermath of violence and conflict resolution. The result is a set of original essays which offer a fresh and timely perspective on problems of crime and justice in contemporary liberal democracies.
Draws on experience working with men, and particularly indigenous men, in prison in Aotearoa New Zealand to explore the idea of the self as a performative assembly. Challenges the more common ...developmental perspective found within psychotherapeutic clinical and theoretical realms regarding the emergence of the self. Utilises the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Nikolas Rose to offer a lens which perceives the self, and in particular the criminal self, as a construction. Suggests that the 'criminal self' might develop as a product of incarceration and as a natural extension of the self in the neoliberal era, with implications for why this may significantly limit the impact of psychotherapeutic intervention. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Crime is a major threat to society's well-being but lacks a statistical characterization that could lead to uncovering some of its underlying mechanisms. Evidence of nonlinear scaling of urban ...indicators in cities, such as wages and serious crime, has motivated the understanding of cities as complex systems-a perspective that offers insights into resources limits and sustainability, but that usually neglects details of the indicators themselves. Notably, since the nineteenth century, criminal activities have been known to occur unevenly within a city; crime concentrates in such way that most of the offenses take place in few regions of the city. Though confirmed by different studies, this concentration lacks broad analyses on its characteristics, which hinders not only the comprehension of crime dynamics but also the proposal of sounding counter-measures. Here, we developed a framework to characterize crime concentration which divides cities into regions with the same population size. We used disaggregated criminal data from 25 locations in the U.S. and the U.K., spanning from 2 to 15 years of longitudinal data. Our results confirmed that crime concentrates regardless of city and revealed that the level of concentration does not scale with city size. We found that the distribution of crime in a city can be approximated by a power-law distribution with exponent α that depends on the type of crime. In particular, our results showed that thefts tend to concentrate more than robberies, and robberies more than burglaries. Though criminal activities present regularities of concentration, we found that criminal ranks have the tendency to change continuously over time-features that support the perspective of crime as a complex system and demand analyses and evolving urban policies covering the city as a whole.
After the World War II, new laws were formed, and psychological jobs were established. The Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice, National Police Agency and the Child Guidance Centers were employ ...psychological professioners. As a result, the number of universities with Psychology related departments increased. After the certified clinical psychologists were institutionalized, graduate schools with department of clinical psychology also multiplied. The Japanese Association of Criminal Psychology was established in 1963. Now universities which have lectures on criminal psychology by JACP members have spread throughout Japan. Many specialized books on criminal psychology are published, and criminal psychologists play an active part in mass communication fields.
Several legal interventions under the police power and parens patriae functions of the state depend partially on judgments that an individual is dangerous. Psychological research regarding risk ...assessment can provide relevant evidence regarding the appropriate application of these interventions. Developing, interpreting, and presenting relevant research regarding risk assessment in a manner that enhances the ability of courts to make accurate determinations of dangerousness requires clarification of the risk presented by this individual and explanation of how this person generates this risk. Testimony regarding such research can enhance the ability of the courts to make accurate judgments regarding the relationship between the risk presented and the justification for the specific intervention at issue. This article examines the justificatory functions of judgments of dangerousness for various police power and parens patriae interventions in order to clarify the manner in which psychological research and testimony can contribute to the ability of the courts to accurately assess the risk presented by an individual in making a judgment of dangerousness for a specific form of legal intervention.
Few studies have identified factors that may promote criminal persistence. One such influence may be acquired neuropsychological deficits, or subtle changes to brain structure or functioning stemming ...from detrimental experiences. Head injuries represent one source of acquired neuropsychological deficits that have been linked to increased levels of offending and are differentially concentrated within justice involved populations. Making use of the Pathways to Desistance study (1,336 individuals across 84 months), this study examines the impact of head injuries on criminal persistence. The results of multilevel longitudinal models revealed that within-individual changes in head injury were associated with increases in self-reported offending, and violent offending in particular. A less consistent pattern was observed for arrest and nonviolent offending, indicating that head injury may differentially impact specific forms of criminal persistence. These results provide preliminary evidence suggesting acquired neuropsychological deficits, and head injuries more directly, result in prolonged periods of criminal persistence.
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterised by two underlying factors. Factor 1 (affective and interpersonal deficits) captures affective deficits, whilst Factor 2 (antisocial and ...impulsive/disorganised behaviours) captures life course persistent antisocial behaviours. Impaired processing of threat has been proposed as an aetiologically salient factor in the development of psychopathy, but the relationship of this impairment to the factorial structure of the disorder in adult male offenders is unclear.
To investigate whether threat processing deficits are characteristic of psychopathy as a unitary construct or whether such deficits are specifically linked to higher scores on individual factors.
A systematic review of the literature was conducted by searching PubMed, Web of Science and PsycINFO.
Studies were included if they (1) reported physiological measures of threat response as the primary outcome measure (2) indexed psychopathy using a well-validated clinician rated instrument such as the PCL-R (3) investigated male offenders between 18 and 60 years of age (4) reported threat processing analyses using both Factor 1 and Factor 2 scores (5) provided sufficient data to calculate effect sizes and (6) were published in English-language peer-reviewed journals. We identified twelve studies with data on 1112 participants for the meta-analysis of the relationship with Factor 1 scores, and nine studies with data on 801 participants for the meta-analysis of the relationship with Factor 2 scores. We conducted the meta-analyses to calculate correlations using random-effects models.
PCL-R/SV Factor 1 scores were significantly and negatively related to threat processing indices (r = -0.22, (95%CI -0.28, -.017). Neither PCL-R/SV Factor 2 scores (r = -0.005, 95%CI -0.10, 0.09), nor PCL-R total score (r = -0.05, (95%CI -0.15, -0.04) were related to threat processing indices. No significant heterogeneity was detected for the Factor score results.
The meta-analyses of the distinct psychopathy factors suggest that the threat processing deficits observed in male offenders with psychopathy are significantly associated with higher scores on Factor 1. A similar relationship does not exist with Factor 2 scores. Our findings highlight the importance of investigating the potentially discrete relationships between aetiological variables and the two factor constructs in the disorder.
The field of sexual homicide research is relatively recent, with many existing studies limited by small sample sizes and sampling bias. In Australia and New Zealand specifically, only one study to ...date addresses this phenomenon but there is a lack of comprehensive descriptive data. This study aims to fill this research gap using a representative sample gathered from public legal databases. A total of 118 cases of sexual homicide offenders are described to create a portrait of this type of offender, their victims and their offence behaviour. Findings are similar to those found in other large samples from the UK, Canada and Germany. Because this crime is rare and practitioners tend to have limited experience of them, the findings of this research have the potential to inform investigative, criminal justice and clinical practice.
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