Forensic Psychology For Dummies (16 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
In contrast to burglary, a carefully planned identity theft is more likely to attract a criminal looking to acquire a steady income. The criminal need have no direct contact with the victim, who’s more than likely in a different country. He may tell himself that everything’s covered by insurance and so cares nothing about the victim’s feelings.
Keeping bad company
Mixing with bad company can so easily lead a person off the straight and narrow. The interesting question, though, is what leads some people into bad company in the first place.
Of course, some people are ‘born’ into a life of crime. Family and close friends are criminals and so a person discovers how to be a criminal as he grows up, whatever his own psychological make-up.
Crime movies are fond of depicting the dark underworld of the criminal community and the difficulty of quitting and becoming a law-abiding citizen. A type of moral code exists within the criminal community, but the code is a distortion of what’s legally acceptable. The many countries in which corruption is endemic show clearly that what a community accepts can be at variance with what the law requires.
In some cases, certain aspects of personality may make a person more prone to accept the opportunities provided by criminal contacts. The person joins in because of the excitement or status a life of crime provides, when a more cautious person likely turns away. This is particularly true of young offenders as I show in Chapter 16.
Abusing substances
Alcoholism and drug abuse are problems closely associated with criminals and crime, although neither conditions are usually regarded as being a form of mental illness and are certainly not a defence in law. However, alcoholism and drug abuse can rapidly lead to crime through:
Needing a lot of money to feed the habit.
How female offenders differ from males
Statistics record that men commit eight out of every ten crimes. The crimes that women commit are generally different from those of men. Women commit far fewer violent crimes and are less likely to be involved in gang crimes or have long careers as criminals. If a woman commits a crime, it’s more likely to be fraud of one sort or another, except of course for the illegal activity dominated by women – prostitution (although here, again, who ends up convicted of prostitution varies enormously depending on the local laws).
The criminal justice system tends to deal with convicted women differently from convicted men, with court decisions often being more lenient for women. This leniency is sometimes because of the effect on children of being separated from their mother while she’s in prison, or even the assumption that women aren’t inherently wicked and that there are some exonerating circumstances which can lower the severity of a woman’s sentence. Not uncommonly, people assume that for a woman to commit a crime she must be mentally disturbed, and so she may get a sentence that’s regarded as a form of treatment. Courts accept a whole host of psychological conditions as explanations for a woman’s illegal actions, which I talk about in Chapter 11.
Sometimes the leniency of the courts can only be put down to a form of ‘chivalry’, with the judge taking pity on an apparently defenceless, seemingly harmless woman as against the glowering, burly, tattooed man!
Not all alcohol and drug addicts become criminals. If the person who’s addicted can afford to pay for his addiction through legitimate means and manages his intake so that it doesn’t interfere with his work, he may never become a criminal other than in the act of purchasing illegal drugs. These addicts are more likely to destroy their relationships and health, becoming a social burden rather than a criminal.
As well as alcoholism or drug addiction causing crime, the opposite may also be true: criminals becoming addicts. From the proceeds of crime a criminal can afford to get hold of substances previously out of reach and by mixing with addicted criminals he gets drawn into addiction himself. Drugs may well be easier to obtain in prison than outside, and so a term inside can open the way to addiction.
Passing it on in the blood
Every now and then a pundit comes up with yet another attempt to explain the causes of crime by citing some aspect of the criminals’ biological or physiological make-up. These include: