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Criminal Psychology

Criminal psychology is the study of the views, thoughts, intentions, actions and reactions of criminals or suspects. It is a subfield of criminology and applied psychology.

Criminal psychologists have many roles within legal courts, including being called upon as expert witnesses and performing psychological assessments. Some types of psychiatry also deals with aspects of criminal behavior. Several definitions are used for criminal behavior, including behavior punishable by public law, behavior considered immoral, behavior violating social norms or traditions, or acts causing severe psychological harm. Criminal behavior is often considered antisocial in nature.

Criminal psychology started in the late 18th century. There were four key aspects of the development of criminal psychology: philosophical, medical, legal and biological. Before criminal psychology, there was a conflict in criminal law between medical experts and court judges on determining how to proceed with a majority of cases which necessitated the development of a specialized field for individual investigations and assessments of suspects. It is generally accepted that criminal psychology was a predecessor to the broader field of criminology, which includes other fields such as criminal anthropology which studies more systematic aspects of crime as opposed to individual suspects and court cases.


Criminal profiling, also known as offender profiling, is a form of criminal investigation, linking an offender's actions at the crime scene to their most likely characteristics. This is used in criminal psychology to help law enforcement investigators narrow down and prioritize a pool of suspects. Part of a subfied of forensic psychology called investigative psychology, criminal profiling has advanced substantially in methodology and grown in popularity since its conception in the late 1800s. However, there is a substantial lack of empirical research and effectiveness evaluations validating the practice of criminal profiling.

Criminal profiling is a process now known in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as criminal investigative analysis. Profilers, or criminal investigative analysts, are trained and experienced law enforcement officers who study every behavioral aspect and detail of an unsolved violent crime scene, in which a certain amount of psychotherapy has been left at the scene. The characteristics of a good profiler are discussed. Five behavioral characteristics that can be gleaned from the crime scene are described:
  1. the amount of planning that went into the crime,
  2. degree of control used by the offender,
  3. escalation of emotion at the scene,
  4. risk level of both the offender and victim, and
  5. appearance of the crime scene (disorganized versus organized).
The process of interpreting the behavior observed at a crime scene is briefly discussed.

In a 2017 article by Pew research center, it was found that federal and state prisons in the United States held 475,900 inmates who were black and 436,500 who were white. Similar historical data supports the substantially higher incarceration of black people. This is in contrast with census data which has placed the percentage of black people or African American people at about 12% of the US population. Negative ethnic stereotypes contribute to this disproportionate incarceration; it has served as a justification for the unofficial policies and practices of racial profiling by criminal justice practitioners.

The cultural, environmental and traditional concepts of communities play a major role in individual psychology, providing profilers with a potential basis for behavioral patterns learned by offenders during their upbringing. They also evaluate the safety of prisons for those incarcerated, as some individuals may be predisposed to recidivism (the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have experienced negative circumstances of that behavior) if the prisoner's mental heath is not or not adequately addressed. There are many individual factors contributing to developing a criminal profile that both meets legal requirements and treats profiled individuals humanely.

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Picture from Pexels.

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