Forensic Psychology For Dummies (4 page)

You’re studying psychology and are fed up with artificial laboratory experiments and details of which area of the brain lights up when people do odd things, and so you want to know what psychologists do in the real world.

You’re studying crime or the law, writing an article or book, or making a documentary, and you want to know more about psychology and how it connects with the law.

How This Book Is Organised

Except for the first and last parts, each part of this book deals with a different context in which forensic psychology happens. So you can choose the area that you’re most curious about and start there.

Part I: Nailing Forensic Psychology: A Moving Target

Forensic psychology is a rapidly expanding area and takes on different forms in different places. This part, therefore, gives you an ‘efit’ of forensic psychology to help you recognise it when you stumble across it. Chapter 1 examines what forensic psychologists do (and don’t do) and who they deal with, Chapter 2 describes some of the aspects of what makes someone break the law and Chapter 3 shows how forensic psychology relates to the legal process.

Part II: Helping the Police Solve Crimes

Many fictional accounts of crime investigations use some sort of psychological intervention to help solve the case. In truth, this aspect is a minutely small part of what forensic psychologists do, but it does get the juices flowing and is a crucial point on your journey into the world of forensic psychology.

Getting good information from victims and witnesses during interviews (which I discuss in Chapter 4) isn’t as easy as the movies may have you believe. Not everyone the police talk to tells the truth, and so detecting deception (or indeed bare-faced lying) is a challenging topic, to which I devote Chapter 5. Making use of the information the police do collect opens up the topic often referred to as ‘offender profiling’ (see Chapter 6). Chapter 7 covers the important but often neglected subject of helping the victims of crime and Chapter 8 discusses crime prevention and reduction.

Part III: Measuring the Criminal Mind

Like every science, forensic psychology relies on precise and reliable measurement. But people, especially criminals, aren’t static lumps of material that can be plonked on a laboratory bench to have refined measuring tools applied to them. Therefore, various assessment procedures have been developed to weigh up important characteristics of offenders, such as determining their mental state and its relevance to the legal process, a subject I describe in Chapter 9. A small, but crucial, subset of criminals have no obvious mental problems and are often characterised by commentators as ‘evil’. Chapter 10 looks directly at what this description can mean and offers a less sensational account.

Part IV: Viewing Psychology in Court

Forensic psychology started life as guidance to legal proceedings and is now a common feature of many court hearings. I describe how this process works in Chapter 11. The new developments, especially in the US, of guiding lawyers to be as effective and understandable as possible are covered in Chapter 12.

Part V: Helping and Treating Offenders

Many forensic psychologists end up in prison . . . to help prisoners, of course, and sometimes prison management. Chapter 13 looks at the different forms of psychological help and treatment that are now available for offenders. Two particularly important areas are violence and sex offending, and so they have their own chapters (14 and 15, respectively). Youngsters who become involved in crime pose a particular challenge and so I devote Chapter 16 to them.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

If you want to know more about the professional aspects of forensic psychology, I describe ten vital aspects in Chapter 17. Chapter 18 lists ten stages in the career of many people who become professionals in this area. But because forensic psychology is such a rapidly evolving profession, I also list ten areas that are emerging in Chapter 19. In Chapter 20, I describe ten great examples of cases in which forensic psychology successfully made a significant contribution.

Icons Used in This Book

This book uses different icons to highlight important information. Here’s what they mean:

This icon indicates stuff that’s really worth bearing in mind.

This icon indicates where I set the record straight on common misconceptions.

I use this icon to show you where I draw on my own experience to bring you real-life stories.

This icon tips you off to where I describe differences across the globe or where I focus on one country or jurisdiction.

This icon reveals unusual nuggets from the realms of criminal investigation and behaviour.

Where to Go from Here

You can read this book in any order you like, because I write it so that the text makes sense wherever you start. You can flick through and look at the cartoons (which to be honest is how I explore
For Dummies
books) or just go straight to the Part of Tens for some useful summaries. But if you’re new to the subject, I think you’ll get more out of it if you read Chapter 1 first. Most importantly, though, enjoy!

Part I

Nailing Forensic Psychology: A Moving Target

In this part . . .

The work done by forensic psychologists covers an increasingly wide range of topics; everything from exploring how to detect deception and malingering all the way through to helping families who have juvenile delinquents in their midst. Other examples are helping witnesses to remember and assessing how dangerous a person really is. These professional contributions occur in many different institutions: law courts, prisons, special secure hospitals for people sent there by the courts, in the community at large and on rare occasions even as part of police investigations. They concern themselves with all sorts of criminals from arsonists to terrorists and crimes starting with every letter of the alphabet in between.

At the heart of what forensic psychologists do is an understanding of criminals, their actions and the causes of their behaviour. This links to many other people who are interested in criminals such as criminologists, lawyers and even doctors and geographers. The difference is that psychologists focus on the person rather than patterns of crime, with that person’s thoughts and emotions rather than physical or sociological processes. To get started, there is a lot of ground to clear about what forensic psychology is and the basis of what forensic psychologists do. In this part, I map out the fundamentals to get you ready for the more detailed stuff later.