Understanding Criminal Behaviour:

Our understanding of criminal behaviour and its causes has been too long damaged by the failure to integrate fully the emotional, psychological, social and cultural influences on the way people behave.Criminology as a discipline has been dominated by sociological thinking that has emphasised socially structured inequalities as the chief causes of crime, and has lacked the tools to grasp the significance of the internal and emotional worlds of individual offenders. Psychologists with an interest in criminality have not had much impact on mainstream criminological thought. The preoccupation of the academic discipline of psychology with mimicking the experimental methods of the natural sciences has meant that significant internal and emotional forces in people's lives have been ignored. Those psychologists with more clinical perspectives have focused on the affective lives of individuals but without engagement with wider theory or evidence. Neither psychological approach has lent itself well to also understanding the wider context in which individuals live their lives.This book aims to integrate psychological and criminological perspectives on order to better understand the nature of criminal behaviour. In particular it aims to explore the range of psychological approaches that seek to understand the significance of the emotions that surround criminal behaviour, allowing for an exploration of individual differences and social and cultural issues which help to bridge the gaps between disciplinary approaches.

David W. Jones is Principal Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at the University of East London. He has previously taught at the Open University and the London School of Economics, and is the author of Myths, Madness and the Family: The impact of mental illness on families (Palgrave, 2001).

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Introduction: psychological perspectives on criminal behaviour	p. xiii
The relationship of psychology and sociology in the study of crime	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
Beccaria and the study of crime	p. 3
Nineteenth-century positivism	p. 6
Twentieth-century sociological criminology	p. 10
Twentieth-century psychological approaches to crime	p. 20
Conclusion: psychology and criminology - a psychosocial perspective	p. 34
Mental disorder: madness, personality disorder and criminal responsibility	p. 37
Introduction	p. 37
A brief history of criminal responsibility and mental disorder	p. 42
Diminished responsibility and medical definitions	p. 48
The problem of psychopathy and personality disorder	p. 55
Conclusion	p. 70
The contribution of criminal career research	p. 72
Introduction	p. 72
The London Longitudinal Study	p. 74
Heterogeneity of offenders: adolescent-limited versus life-course-persistent offenders	p. 86
Explaining the links between childhood antisocial behaviour and adult offending	p. 91
Conclusion	p. 101
Familial and parental influences	p. 104
Introduction	p. 104
Family structure and delinquency	p. 106
Parenting styles and early family experience	p. 112
Child effects	p. 121
Conclusion	p. 126
Youth crime	p. 128
Introduction	p. 128
Age and criminal responsibility	p. 130
Why do young people commit crime?	p. 132
Conclusion	p. 152
Gender and crime	p. 154
Introduction	p. 154
Men, masculinity and crime	p. 155
Women and crime	p. 170
Conclusion	p. 177
Understanding violence: learning from studies of homicide	p. 178
Introduction	p. 178
Scenarios of homicide	p. 180
Confrontational homicide	p. 182
Personality types and confrontational rage murder	p. 188
Conclusion	p. 201
Intimate violence and sexual crime	p. 203
Introduction	p. 203
Domestic violence and violence in the context of sexual intimacy	p. 204
Sexual crimes: rape	p. 213
Paedophilia and sexual offences against children	p. 228
Conclusion	p. 237
Conclusions	p. 239
Overview	p. 239
Psychosocial understanding of criminal behaviour: the significance of emotion and personality in conditions of 'high modernity'	p. 244
Reducing crime	p. 253
Further work	p. 262
References	p. 263
Author index	p. 295
Subject index	p. 307
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Understanding Criminal Behaviour: Psychosocial Approaches to Criminality

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