psychology a level edexcel criminal

• • Huw Williams et al (2010) analysed data from 196 inmates from a single UK prison in 2010 
  • 60% of the sample recalled a history of one or more head injuries in their youth
  • This group tended to be younger at the time of their first offence, recorded higher rates of reoffending, and spent more time in prison in the last 5 years than the rest of the sample
• • Fazel et al (2011) analysed the data from the Swedish population register from 1979 to 2009
  • They examined the association between traumatic brain injury and convictions for violent crime, including murder, sexual offences, robbery and assault
  • Of those individuals who had experienced an ABI, 8.8% had committed a violent crime compared to 3% in a matched control group
• • Kreutzer et al (1991) were unable to prove or disprove a cause and effect between traumatic brain injury and violence
  • In their investigation of 74 patients, they found that 20% had been arrested pre-injury and 10% post-injury
  • Most arrests occurred after use of alcohol or other drugs
• • Williams et al (2010) point out that there is a lack of research on women who offend and ABI, but what there is suggests similar effects to those observed in males
  • That said, males are more at risk of ABI as they are more likely to engage in the kinds of physical behaviours - sport, fighting, horseplay - that bring these about, especially during youth
• Aaron Josef Hernandez 

  • An American football tight end and convicted murderer
  • He played in the National Football League for three seasons with the New England Patriots until his career came to an abrupt end after his arrest and conviction for the murder of Odin Lloyd
• • Pardini et al (2014) found those with reduced amygdala volume were 3 times more likely to be aggressive, violent and show psychopathic traits than the others
  • They therefore suggest that amygdala size can predict future violence
• • Raine et al (1990) investigated a fear response in 1795 3-year-olds
  • Electrodes were placed on each child’s fingers and two distinct tones were played 
  • One tone was followed by a loud unpleasant sound, and the other tone was followed by silence
  • Two decades later those children who had gone on to commit crime were more likely to be those who had failed to exhibit a fear response to the first tone
  • This was explained by Raine et al as due to abnormal functioning of the amygdala, illustrated by the lack of fear at age 3
• • Damasio (1994) wanted to build a model of Gages’ skull so they could map out how the iron rod passed through the brain, found damage was only to frontal lobe
• • Brower and Price (2001) undertook a literature review of documented brain injuries and this revealed many case studies show antisocial personality can arise after frontal lobe injury
• • Narabayashi et al (1963) conducted psychosurgery on human patients with aggressive behaviour by severing their amygdala from the remaining limbic system and found a mood-stabilising effect in the majority of patients over time
• • Jacobs et al (1965) conducted a chromosome survey of male patients at a state hospital in Scotland
  • The researchers found that men with the XYY chromosomal pattern were over-represented in prison populations (around 15 per 10,000) compared to the general population
• • Re & Birkhoff (2015) considered 50 years of evidence and concluded that there is no link between XYY and offending behaviour
• • Williams et al (2010) argue for increased awareness of brain injuries throughout the criminal justice system, including standard screening of young people when they first offend
  • Their recommendation is that neural injury should be viewed in the same way as mental health is in court, reduced as the individual has less responsibility for their crime
• • David Farrington et al (1982) reviewed lots of studies that compared offenders with non-offenders
  • They found a relationship between high P and N scores and criminal behaviour
• • Boduszek et al (2013) investigated the prevalence of Eysenck’s personality traits among repeat offenders (recidivists)
  • 133 violent and 179 non-violent male prisoners in a high security prison were studied
  • Boduszek et al suggested - in accordance with Eysenck that a criminal thinking ‘style’ is correlated with high levels of psychoticism, extraversion and neuroticism
  • This suggests that Eysenck’s theory has validity as the personality types he identified are associated with repeat offending
• • Raine et al (1990) took psychological measures from participants aged 15 years and related these to later criminal status
  • Those with a criminal record 24 years later had recorded more signs of under-arousal in the nervous system when aged 15, such as lower resting heart rate, than non-criminals
  • This does suggest a link between biological factors and offending
• • Farrington et al (1982) found very little evidence that Eysenck’s questionnaire (the EPI) was an adequate measure for predicting offending, in juveniles or adults
• Digman (1990) accepts Eysenck’s concepts of extraversion and introversion, but also adds openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness
• Lipsey and Derzon (1998) claimed that impulsivity is a better predictor of anti-social behaviour
• •  Becker (1963) argues that powerful groups in society create deviance by making up rules and applying them to people they see as ‘outsiders’ - what counts as criminal behaviour only becomes so when labelled by others. Crime is a social construct
• • Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968)
  • Teachers at a primary school were told that a group of children in their class were gifted ‘spurter’ and were about to ‘bloom’ (the kids were actually chosen at random)
  • At the end of the school year, those same children had improved IQ significantly more than children identified as ‘standard’ at the beginning of the year. Teachers’ expectations, and subsequent behaviour, living up to the children’s labels
• • Jahoda (1954) studied the Ashanti of Ghana where boys are named after the day they are born
  • Monday boys are thought to be even-tempered compared to aggressive and volatile boys who are born on a Wednesday
  • Jahoda observed that Wednesday boys were over 3 times more likely to be involved in violent crime than Monday boys over a 3-year period
• • Zebrowitz et al (1998) found that boys with a ‘baby face’ were more likely than their mature-faced peers to be delinquent and involved in crime
  • The researchers suggested that the baby faced boys were overcompensating for the perception that they may be ‘weak’ or ‘childlike’, rather than accepting and living up to the ‘baby/innocent’ label
• • Knowledge of labelling may help reduce the negative effects of labelling
  • According to Braithwaite (1989) societies have lower crime rates and reoffending if they communicate shame about crime effectively - reintegrative and disintegrative
• • Geiselman et al (1985) showed participants a film of a violent crime and later, they were interviewed by an officer either using the CI or a standard interview or an interview using hypnosis
  • The average number of correctly recalled facts for the CI was 41.2, for the standard interview it was 29.4 and for hypnosis it was 38.0
• Kohnken et al (1999) recorded an 85% increase in correct information using CI techniques but this was offset by a 61% increase in incorrect information
• • Milne and Bull (2002) observed that any of the individual elements of CI in isolation tend to be more effective in eliciting accurate information than standard interview techniques
  • However, the researchers also noted a combination of report everything and context reinstatement particularly was most fruitful
• • Kebbell and Wagstaff (1999) found police officers report that the CI requires more time than is often available and that instead they prefer to use deliberate strategies aimed to limit an eyewitness' report to the minimum amount of information that is necessary
  • Cognitive interviews require special training however, many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours for this
• • Baldwin (1992)
  • Reviewed 400 videos and 200 audio recordings of police interviews and concluded that the standards were low
  • No rapport with suspect
  • Looking for confession
  • Attempts to get suspect to accept interviewers interpretations of events
  • Interviewers not appear to listen, often interrupt
  • Some were aggressive and took a macho approach
• • Kebbell et al (2010) 
  • Found that presenting ethical interviewing techniques is more likely to get a confession compared to interviewer dominance
• • Walshe and Milne (2010) 
  • Challenges the effectiveness of the ethical interview
  • Found that interviewers trained in ethical interviewing were not that good at building the rapport required
  • Also found that the planning component is not being used correctly in the real world
  • This lack of rapport may negatively affect confession or that rapport is not necessary to gain a confession
• For some offenders, criminal behaviour may be similar to an addiction, fulfilling a craving or need (Hodge et al, 2011)
• most reoffending goes undetected, so what is actually being measured is reconviction rates rather than reoffending (Duwe and Clark, 2014)
• • Aaron Beck - Cognitive Triad
  • (C) Cognition (belief)
  • (A) Affective (emotions)
  • (B) Behavioural
• • Raymond Novaco (1975) suggests that some offenders are more likely to see certain situations as threatening and stressful, and this leads them to react aggressively or violently, rather than rationally
  • The offender's appraisal of a situation acts as a trigger for anger, and so is cognitive in nature
  • From a behaviourist perspective, anger is reinforced by the offender's feelings of control that anger gives them in that situation
• • Jane Ireland (2004)
  • The treatment group were given 12 sessions of anger management and there were 3 measures of progress
  • nearly all of the treatment group showed significant improvement on at least one measure (92% improvement), and nearly half (48%) showed improvement on the questionnaire and the behaviour checklist
  • This improvement was most marked for those offenders judged to be violent before the investigation began
  • The control group failed to show improvement on any of the 3 measures whilst waiting
• • Mark Holbrook (1997) - study where 26 male prisoners with a history of aggression were chosen for training in anger management
  • The prisoners were required to fill out a vengeance scale, measuring their desire for revenge, before and upon completion of the treatment
  • The results showed a significant reduction in post-treatment vengeance scores
• • Ronald Blackburn (1993) argued that anger management may help offenders control their conduct in the short term, but may have little impact on long-term reoffending rates
  • One explanation for this may be that there isn’t a causal relationship between anger and offending (Loza and Loza-Fanous, 1999) - doesn't get to the root cause of the irrational thoughts and anger, treating the symptoms not the cause 
• Simon Moore et al (2009) found that among a group of violent offenders, 69% reported eating ‘confectionary’ (defined as sweets or sugary snacks) pretty much every day during childhood
• • David Benton et al (1996) found that children playing a video game become more aggressive as their blood sugar level decreased, suggesting that the blood sugar level does indeed impact on behaviour