Brain injuries and disorders

• Damage to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain may cause individuals to have an altered behaviour pattern, such as becoming more immature and having an increased loss of self-control, as well as having an inability to modify behaviour
• Prisoners are more likely than non-prisoners to have suffered brain injuries
• Raine et al (1994) used PET scans to study the living brains of impulsive killers, finding that there was often damage to their pre-frontal cortex
• Mclsaac et al (2016) found that people who have suffered serious head injuries are twice as likely to end up in prison (0.5% compared to 0.2%)
• For women with these injuries, the risk of ending up in a Canadian federal prison was 2.76 times higher than it was for uninjured women