NATURE OF CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY

SARDAR PATEL SUBHARTI INSTITUTE OF LAW

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA SUBHARTI UNIVERSITY

CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY
TOPIC – NATURE OF CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY

SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:

Abu Talib Ali
(Lecturer) B.A.LL.B. (VIIth Semester)

Enrolment Number:1905000000142

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

At the very outset, I would like to pay thanks to the almighty God. It gives me immense
pleasure to acknowledge and to say thanks to the ones who helped me throughout the course
of my work. I am really thankful to our respected subject teacher under whose learned and
scholarly guidance the present work has been completed. She helped us in a passive way. She
gave me moral support and guided me in different matters regarding the topic. She had been
very kind and patient while suggesting me the outlines of this Project and correcting my
doubts.

I express my sincere gratitude’s to, __________(Lecturer) granting permission of proper

under the above-mentioned supervision.

I thank her for overall supports. Constructive suggestions have always been soothing and
desired effect, hence it my duty to express my gratitude for his constant support and
encouragement.

I want to pay my sincere thanks to Dean, Faculty of Law, all the teachers of Sardar Patel
Subharti Institute of Law, Swami Vivekananda Subharti University. I want to thank all
my friends who helped me in completing my work. Last, but not the least, my thanks to all
who have helped directly or indirectly in the completion of my work.

Abu Talib Ali

BA.LLB (VIIth Semester)

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TABLE OF CONTENT

1. Introduction
2. Criminology
3. Criminal Psychology
4. Role of Criminal Pychologists
5. Investigation challenges in criminal psychology
6. Offender profiling
7. Psychological criminal investigation intervention techniques
8. Nature of Criminal Psychology
9. Criminal Psychology and its relevance in social work
10. Bibliography

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Introduction
Crime can be defined as an act of divergence from the accepted societal norms,
morals, and behavior that results in a harmful impact on the whole society.
Different countries have their own criminal code which codifies these crimes
and states ways to prevent further, the occurrence of such acts. The word
‘crime’ is derived from the Latin word “crimen” which means “ to charge”.

Criminology and criminal psychology are two fields of crimes that are often
misunderstood and mixed with each other. The difference between both the
branches of criminal law is explained below.

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Criminology
Criminology is an interdisciplinary field of study of crimes and the social responses
followed by these criminal acts. It is a study from a sociological viewpoint. Individuals
who study criminology are called criminologists. Their work is to study why the crimes
are committed, who commits the crime, the root cause of the criminal activity, the
impact of the criminal activities in the society, and how crimes can be prevented.
Criminology is the scientific study of crime and criminals and their motivations for
criminal behavior. Psychopathology is the study of personality factors that are
somewhat out of regular conscious awareness and that lead to behavior outside the
norm in a particular social group. It studies abnormal emotional or personality
phenomena that underline symptoms or behavior. Psychopathology provides
criminology with methods to analyze elements of a criminal act within the personality
structure and aims to find out the motivations for the crime. The interest is centered
on the individual, or criminal, as somebody who is different from the rest because of
personal or social deficiencies that have led him or her to commit a criminal act. Act
and actor are the focus of study and intervention. In this type of criminology of
difference the crime is a fact, and the criminal is singled out as an object of study.

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Criminal psychology
What is a criminal psychology
Criminal psychology also known as forensic psychology, focuses on studying the mind
patterns of a criminal and his/her behaviour. A criminal psychologist is interested in
the question of what may have led an individual to commit a crime rather than the
question of why. It deals with the thoughts, behaviour, feeling, emotions of an
individual to study the criminal circumstance that led him/her to commit a crime. By
studying the mind pattern of a criminal the criminal psychologists can identify the
criminal’s chance of committing a crime again and again.

Criminal psychology, also referred to as criminological psychology, is the study of the views,
thoughts, intentions, actions and reactions of criminals and 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 deal 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.

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Role of criminal psychologists

A criminal psychologist’s role is to aid in criminal investigation by helping law
authorities in solving crimes and analyzing the behavioural patterns of the suspects.
They play an important role in the investigation of criminal profiling, also known as
offender profiling. The investigation of criminal profiling deals with individuals who
commit crimes at hand. This type of investigation helps in identifying serial cases of
criminal activities as the details of multiple cases are compared in this investigation.
This investigation aims to categorize the suspect’s behavioural tendencies,
demographics, and geographical variables. It forms a framework of the suspect’s life
and his/her psychological state of mind.

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Investigation challenges in criminal psychology

The challenges that are faced by the criminal psychologists while interrogating a
suspect is that sometimes the suspect tries to be hostile, distrustful, and
uncooperative to save themselves from the criminal charges. The suspects become
deceitful, cunning, and try to save themselves from the situation. Sometimes the
biases of the psychologists also affect the interrogation process. The most common
approaches adopted by the suspects to deceive the criminal psychologist –

The logical and realistic approach

This approach is based on relating the events or scenarios that happened by the
suspects to persuade the psychologist of their inability to commit the crime. The
suspects also resist answering the questions of the interviewer which makes the
process long and tiresome. Suspects by using this approach become very
uncooperative and the process of obtaining truth becomes challenging.

interviewee should be allowed to narrate the whole scenario or situation without any
interruption. This technique is based on the contextual connectivity which is built
when an interviewee narrates the situation. It is also used to infer relatedness or
connectivity between the suspect’s statement, witness’s statement, and victim’s
statement. This technique helps to ensure that the testimony given under the
interrogation is reliable and is not staged by any of the interviewees.

Assessment of statements validity

This technique can be used to assess the validity of the testimonies given by the
victims in the case of sexual assault kidnapping Child labour etc. It comprises three
types of techniques-

Statements are taken in the form of interview

In this technique, the questions are asked from the witness in a structured or
unstructured way that is related to the situation in a manner to ascertain the truth.
The interviewer asks lead questions that are salient to the investigation and reads
non-verbal and verbal cues to ascertain the reliability of the testimony.

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Criteria-based content analysis

In this technique, the content of statements made by the witness or suspect is
evaluated by the clinical forensic experts. The content from the statements is
structured on the features of the statements made by the suspect or witness using
the precise content of the testimonies given. Some examples can be a description of
the appearance of the suspect, description of the standbys of the crime, objects used,
etc.

The use of the content checklist

In this technique, a checklist is prepared of content that is inferred from the criteria-
based content analysis. The checklist prepared is tested through a systematic process
by formulating questions based on the resulting content and interviewing the
interviewee again.

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Offender profiling
As discussed above, in this technique the accused profiles are segmented based on
certain criteria or characteristics. Two approaches to offender profiling are –

Inductive method
This technique of offender profiling relies on the criminal psychologist’s competency,
knowledge, and skills. This technique is often referred to as being clinical in nature as
it is logically used to persuade the interviewee to spill the truth.

Deductive method
This type of technique is often referred to as being statistical in nature. The deductive
method relies only on the forensic evidence and facts, the evidence obtained from
crime scenes, and empirical data such as fingerprints, video recordings related to the
offence.

Some of how offender profiles are segmented using both the approaches are –

1. Profiling based on historical figures and political data

2. Profiling based on criminals and the crime scenes.
3. Profiling based on common features of the criminals – some of the
features can be:

(i) Psychopathic behaviour

(ii) Impulsive low attention hyperactive behaviour
(iii) Family history of criminal behaviour
(iv) Financial instability
(v) Lack of parenting

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Psychological criminal investigation intervention techniques

Criminal psychologists are often involved in the study of assessment, management,
research, and prevention of crime. Therefore, implementing methods to modify the
behaviour can result in the prevention of crime and intervene in the study of
criminologists, social workers, etc. The techniques to control and manage criminal
behaviour using criminal psychology are –

Aggression replacement training

This technique was developed in the United States. It is used to correct the behaviour
of violent criminals. This technique contains three components –

Techniques of skill streaming

This technique includes training the accused in replacing aggressive behaviour and
antisocial skills.

Training techniques for anger management

This technique identifies the criminal’s triggers that lead to anger issues. After
identifying the triggers the anger management training is executed including the
following –

1. Improving the knowledge about the trigger using emotional factors.

2. Teaching skills and strategies to cope
3. Giving exposure by training skills
4. Self-instruction training
5. Social – solving problem

Training techniques for moral reasoning

This type of training aims at improving moral skills and reasoning skills. The objective
of this training is to enhance the offender’s understanding of the effect of their
behaviour on society as a whole and individuals.

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Nature of Criminal Psychology

Whenever a person commits crime there are always some reasons behind it. Reasons are
basically the building blocks of psychology. whenever any person feels that he has so strong
reasons behind which he can hide and commit the crime than these reasons are nothing short
of criminal psychology of that person. And whenever the questions comes that what all things
can be done to prevent or lessen the ever increasing crime rate. Than the first step which
should be taken to prevent the crime rate is to understand the psychology of the criminal
because psychology ultimately develops from reasons and unless the reasons are known it
is just impossible to stop the crime rate. So for this particular reason the role of criminal
psychologist comes into play. This paper describes the character and role of criminal
psychologist in today’s world in which the crime rate is increasing like never before. From
starting with the basic notions of criminal psychology till the duties or functions which are
required to be performed by criminal psychologist each and every thing has been discussed
in this paper in detail. History of criminal psychology has been discussed in depth. The
reasons behind the growth of this branch of criminal science have been elaborated. While
discussing all these aspects of criminal psychology there is one major sub-topic in this paper
which has been described in detail which often creates confusion in the mind of people that
is differences in criminal psychology and forensic psychology. Generally people
misunderstand this concept because these two branches are so similar in nature that often
people end up getting consfused while reading this concept. But on the other hand it is true
that these two have some distinct and unique features of their own and the same have been
discussed in the paper in detail.

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Criminal psychology and its relevance in social work

Social work is dependent on studying the psychological aspects of a human.
Psychological factors are needed to understand issues like parenting styles, traumatic
experiences that an individual has gone through, and suicidal tendencies that lead to
criminal behaviour in the individuals. Criminal psychology helps social workers to
understand and train on issues that govern psychological criminal behaviour. Criminal
psychology helps the social worker to detect and be able to manage formation, biases
of attribution, past impressions, prejudice, etc.

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Conclusion
Criminology and criminal psychology are different branches of study under the law of
crime. They are often confused together, however, both have a huge variation.
Criminology is the study of crime and its impact and criminal psychology is the study
of the human psyche which influences humans to commit crimes. Social work is
dependent on studying the psychological aspects of a human. Psychological
factors are needed to understand issues like parenting styles, traumatic
experiences that an individual has gone through, and suicidal tendencies that
lead to criminal behaviour in the individuals. Criminal psychology helps social
workers to understand and train on issues that govern psychological criminal
behaviour. Criminal psychology helps the social worker to detect and be able to
manage formation, biases of attribution, past impressions,

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://blog.ipleaders.in/criminal-psychology-an-important-area-in-the-field-of-criminology/

https://www.legalserviceindia.com/legal/article-1024-scope-of-criminal-psychology.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/criminologist

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Thank you

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