critical introduction to forensic psychology Flashcards
1
Q
myths about forensic psychology
A
- Forensic Psychology is the same as forensic science
- As a Forensic Psychologist, most of your time is spent on crime scenes
- All Forensic Psychologists are profilers
- Forensic Psychologists solve criminal cases
- As a Forensic Psychologists, you will only work with the most serious and dangerous offenders e.g. serial killers
- Not the case- if you work with offenders in treatment you work with a wide variety of clients with different risk levels
Forensic Psychology is glamorous/exciting
- Not the case- if you work with offenders in treatment you work with a wide variety of clients with different risk levels
2
Q
forensic psychology
A
- Forensis meaning “of or before the forum” (i.e., the place where Roman trials were conducted).
- Refers more to legal terms or matters- relates back to the trials were conducted in roman times
- Means legal more than physical evidence
- At the intersection of psychology, legal systems and criminal justice.
- Any application of psychological knowledge or methods to the legal system.
Deals with evidence, witnesses, and the courts (legal psychology), and understanding/reducing criminal behaviour (criminological psychology)
3
Q
psychology and legal issues
A
- 19th-20th century: increasing interest in the application of (experimental) psychology to legal issues- at this time lots of experimental psychologists were interested in understanding legal matters and courts through psychology, most specifically eyewitness testimony
- Eyewitness testimony- testing under what type of conditions this was reliable and valid
- Interviewing procedures
- False confessions
- Suggestive questioning
- Detecting deception
- Devlin Enquiry (1976): called for psychological research into identification of suspects.
- Enquiry that investigated multiple cases of mistaken identity (identified by eyewitnesses to be involved in a crime falsely)
- This advocated for the use of psychology to understand how miss identification happens- new guidelines put in place e.g. cannot base decisions solely on eyewitness testimony
Large interest in applying psychological theory to court proceedings and police investigations
4
Q
psychology and criminal behaviour
A
- 19th-20th century - Application of psychological theory to criminal behaviour:
- Biological aspects, e.g., physiognomy (physical appearance), heritability, personality.
- Environmental factors, e.g. attachment, social learning theory, operant conditioning- nature nurture debate
- Internal processes, e.g. cognitions and emotions, moral development.
- All of these theories and perspectives were developed to explain criminal behaviour
- 20th century - From “nothing works” (Martinson, 1974) to “what works” (Andrews & Bonta, 1994; McGuire, 1995).
- Whether we can rehabilitate or treat offenders
- 21st century - Positive and strength-based treatment approaches (e.g. Good Lives Model; Ward & Gannon, 2006).
- The way that we should treat people that have behaved criminally in order to reduce reoffending
Shifted from thinking about reducing risk factors/engagemt with risk factors to focusing on skills people have to protect them from criminal behaviour
- The way that we should treat people that have behaved criminally in order to reduce reoffending
- Forensic psychology applicable to every aspect of the criminal justice system e.g. trying to understand the motivations for crime to the stages where the suspect has not been identified or looking at the police in practice
- Other areas focus on what happens in the court e.g. evidence presented, jury decisions
Not restricted to working with offenders but can also work with victims and people who have been harmed through criminals/victims
5
Q
roles and remits
A
- Psychological assessment in the criminal justice system
- Evaluating someone often to address the very specific question you might be asked in the context of court proceedings e.g. someone’s mental health before going on trial, someone’s personality and how it might have influenced criminal behaviour or if someone is capable of having custody over their children
- Acting as an expert witness/advisor in court
- Provide evidence about an area of your expertise e.g. eyewitness testimony
- Risk assessments for the parole board process and attendance at parole board hearings
- Often done at various stages but typically when someone is due to be released e.g. what is their risk of reoffending but also directing people to certain treatments for certain risk levels
- Piloting, implementing and delivering treatment programmes for offenders
- Might help to implement new treatments to be run in prisons and evaluating how effective it is about a period of time
- Not about conducting it yourself but implementing and then training others
- Delivery/facilitation of offender treatment
- Supporting the recovery of crime victims or family members
- Supporting staff working with offender populations
- Crime analysis and offender profiling
- Work with police to look at crime patterns in a certain area then advise about resourcing
- Advising police forces on interviewing techniques
- Act as consultants/advisors to key organisations (i.e. Police; Home Office; Prison/Probation Service; CPS)
- Train other Forensic Psychologists
- Conduct applied research into Forensic Psychology issues
Carrying out research to support policy and practice
6
Q
police interviewing
A
- Long and winding path of suspect interrogations, including dark pages like the MK Ultra Program e.g. torture and abuse
- Serious ethical and legal ramifications in terms of quality of evidence collected
- Alternative proposals based on humanistic psychology and rapport–based methods.
- Observing Rapport Based Interpersonal Techniques (ORBIT; Alison et al., 2013; Alison et al., 2021).
- Based on Motivational Interviewing (MI) and the Interpersonal Behaviour Circle (IBC) model.
- Motivational interviewing- increasing a suspects motivation to disclose information
- Also importance about developing a good relationships with suspects- from clinical approaches
- Great interest in FP into research on all aspects of police interviewing:
- False confessions, e.g. coercive methods.
- Interviewing vulnerable suspects, e.g. persons with intellectual disabilities, juveniles.
- Psychological impact of interviewing techniques.
Detecting deception, e.g. polygraphs.
7
Q
do lie detectors work?
A
- Polygraph measures.
- Does not detect lies but physical signs someone could be lying
- Physiological responses – heart rate, palmar sweating, blood pressure, etc.
- Detects bodily signs thought to be associated with lying.
- Can be used in the UK in the context of sex offender management.
- Can opt to have polygraph tests as part of their treatment
- Thought to encourage disclosures about certain behaviours they carry out that are risky e.g. being in contact with minors
- Problems with validity and reliability (BPS, 2004)
- Quality of evidence, issues with generalisation
- Insufficient evidence to recommend use
- Supportive tool for risk-relevant disclosures (Wood et al., 2020)
- Ethical issues
Not admissible as evidence in UK courts
8
Q
offender profiling
A
- Using information at the crime scene (where, when and how) to build a profile of the possible perpetrator (personality, behavioural tendencies, demographic variables).
- Will not identify one particular person but will help narrow down the suspect list
- Different approaches, views, and practices:
- Investigative or clinical experience – like the FBI approach.
○ Use experience of past cases to find them- potential for bias - Statistics and research –Investigative Psychology.
○ A profiler will look at statistics and work out how likely the behaviour was done by a man etc
- Investigative or clinical experience – like the FBI approach.
- Geographical profiling uses the locations of a connected series of crime sites to determine the most probable area of an offenders’ residence.
- Used for a series of crimes more so than an individual crimecc
- Using spatial and temporal (e.g., where and when the crime occurred) behaviour to inform investigatory hypotheses.
- Based on psychological theory.
- Helps target resources.
- Validity and accuracy.
Data and assumptions
9
Q
evidence based policing
A
- Understanding “what works” to reduce crime and disorder to make the most efficient use of police resources.
- Examples:
- Hot Spot Policing- increase police presence in areas with higher crime rates and see if that reduces crime or pushes it to other areas
- Longer or more frequent patrols?
Effectiveness of Body Worn Cameras (BWC’s)
10
Q
are body worn cameras effective?
A
- Over 70% of UK police forces use BWC’s.
- Public sector service pilots.
- Implications for the use of force, public confidence and transparency/accountability.
- Can be used as evidence in courts
- RCTs (Ariel et al., 2016; Yokum et al., 2019)
- Select a certain police force- half of them use body worn cameras and half don’t then evaluate effects of this e.g. less complaints, less aggressions
- Systematic reviews (Lum et al., 2020)
- Looked at all the evidence to see how effective body worn cameras are
- Reduction in police use of force when using body worn cameras
- Literature suggests there is less citizen complaints when wearing a BWC.
- Vary in terms of discretion
- Some groups have to always activate their body worn camera, in other studies they turn them on when they deem it needed
- Reduces force when police have to activate them for every incident
- Taking the possibility od discretion away then they reduce the use of force
- Problems with bias and methodology e.g. more similarities and control, selection of participants
Evidence is inconclusive
11
Q
missing people
A
- > 350,000 people reported missing every year in the UK, estimated cost £700 million per year.
- Represent a high workload for police forces in the UK
- Reasons why people go missing / types of missing people
- Underlying motivations and categorise those into different groups
- Based on data from cases they link to risk of harm for that missing person e.g. more or less likely come to harm
- Risk assessment factors and practices
- Allocated a risk level based on the characteristics of a case e.g. missing child
- Psychologists look at whether these risk levels are effective based on data
- Look at ways in which systems can be more effective
- Spatial patterns in missing people’s behaviour
- How far do people tend to travel and does that vary based on the type of person who goes missing
- Can predict how far they have travelled based on demographics
- Optimisation of appeals (cognitive processes, memory, social media,…)
- What can we do to make investigations more effective e.g. how they direct attention, retain information
What type of appeals are most effective and how appeals can be distributed e.g. posters vs social media
- What can we do to make investigations more effective e.g. how they direct attention, retain information
12
Q
cyber crime
A
- Cybercrime typologies and motivations
- What are the motivations of perpetrators e.g. fraud
- Evidence-based policing in cybercrime
- Indecent imagery in children- how should police deal with this and prioritise suspects
- Effects of harm on victims
- Comparing the harms of online crime vs offline crime- research on stalking and whether this online is more or equally harmful to victims compared to offline stalking
- Victimisation risk and prevention
Who is more vulnerable to be victimised and preventative measures for the police
13
Q
critical incident decision making
A
- Research into responses to major incidents such as major police investigations, CT operations, and disaster response.
- Could also be linked to terrorism/disaster response
- Analysis of decision-making environment, e.g. uncertainty, time-pressure.
- very specific and unique- quick decisions with limited information
- Also have to work together with multiple organisations
- Factors influencing decision-making, e.g. personality, communication skills, information availability, inter agency working.
- Look at how time pressure/uncertainty influences decisions
- How do agencies communcate with each other and how this can be improved
- Application of decision-making theories, including heuristics and biases.
- Look at individual differences in decision making skills and whether that helps people make decisions
Knowledge in cognitive psychology and how this can effect decisions we make
- Look at individual differences in decision making skills and whether that helps people make decisions
14
Q
eyewitness testimony
A
- Accounts given by people of a crime, including identification of suspects or victims, details of the crime scene and so on.
- Important factor in miscarriages of justice: according to the Innocence Project (2012), around 75% of overturned convictions in the US linked to flawed EW testimony.
- Really crucial factor in miscarriages of justice
- Cognitive and social factors in attention, memory storage and retrieval.
- Remembering and recognising others (the misidentification problem).
- Pros and cons of identification procedures such as show ups and line ups
- Is it better to show multiple people at once or show people sequentially
- Researching new procedures, e.g. “Mystery Man” (Havard & Memon, 2012).
- For child witnesses
- showed children a video of a theft and 2-3 days later asked children to identify suspects in a line up
- Half children showed people where the suspect was not present and the other half had he suspect present
- Told to use the cardboard mystery man if the suspect was not present
- Compared how accurate children were at identifying suspects
When the suspect was not there, there were far less inaccurate identifications
15
Q
jury decision making
A
- Ongoing debate regarding jury functioning among legal scholars and in the political arena.
- Great interest in how jurors form judgments (juror decision-making) and how juries collectively come to a verdict (jury decision-making).
- How they process informationa nd potentially could be biased
- How they deliberate and come to a decision
- How jurors are selected.
- Factors affecting juror decision-making, e.g. juror and defendant characteristics, witness credibility, evidence strength, pre-trial publicity.
- Pre-existing attitudes jurors have, biases e.g. believing in the defendant regardless
- Also might be about the criminals- factors affecting jurors decisions e.g. attractiveness, age, race, socioeconomic status
- Also based on EWT- whether they are expert or not and how that affects their decisions
- Developing models of how jurors form judgments and deliberate.
Factors that improve juror decision-making, e.g. written instructions.
