Forensic Psychology Flashcards
Walker et al. (2006)
Only 42% of crimes reported in the British Crime Survey (BCS) were reported to the police.
Farrell and Pease (2007)
The number of crimes people can report to the BCS is limited to 5 per year.
Hales et al. (2007)
The offenders who answered the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS) were apparently accurate in their answers.
Douglas et al. (2006)
Came up with the six main stages of the top-down approach to offender profiling.
Copson (1995)
82% of police officers said that the top-down method was operationally useful and 90% said they would use it again.
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75% said that the bottom-up approach was useful but only 3% said it had helped identify the criminal.
Scherer and Jarvis (2014)
Top-down approach offers investigators different perspectives and prevents wrongful conviction.
Snook et al. (2008)
Top-down approach is flawed: ambiguous descriptions can fit any crime and offender, just like horoscopes (Barnum effect).
Jackson and Bekerian (1997)
Intelligent offenders will study psychological profiling and will use this knowledge to deliberately mislead authorities.
Alison et al. (2003)
1/2 of the police officers were given inaccurate profiles but more than 1/2 thought they had accurate profiles. Therefore police officers do not necessarily notice when they have poor profiles.
Turvey (1999)
There is a false separation between organised and disorganised offenders. Behaviour is in fact on a continuum.
Douglas et al. (1992)
A third category, “mixed offender”, should be added to the top-down approach.
Canter et al. (2004)
There is no clear distinction between organised and disorganised offender behaviour. Very few criminals are disorganised.
Davies et al. (1997)
Rapists who concealed fingerprints often had prior burglary convictions.
Salfati and Canter (1999)
Hundreds of cases are compared to check for any similarities or connections, making it easier to catch a perpetrator
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‘Instrumental opportunistic’, ‘instrumental cognitive’ and ‘expressive impulsive’ themes were found.
Canter and Larkin (1993)
Most criminals have an awareness of the geography of their crimes. 91% were ‘marauders’ and only some were ‘commuters’ (some were neither).
Rossmo (1999)
Came up with Criminal geographic targeting (CGT). It does not specifically solve crimes but us useful for prioritising house-to-house searches.
Petherick (2006)
If the person’s home is not the centre of the crimes, police will have difficulty finding the perpetrator. Also, circles are overly simplistic.
Turvey (2011)
Vancouver PD (where Rossmo was based) stopped using geographical profiling and fired Rossmo because it wasn’t helpful.
Lombrosso (1876)
Atavistic traits indicate criminal personality and behaviour.
Lombrosso (1897)
There are ‘born criminals’, ‘insane criminals’, and ‘criminaloids’ (predisposed to criminality and triggered by the environment).
Kretschmer (1921)
There are somatotypes of criminals, based on body shape.
Carrabine et al. (2014)
Although incorrect, Lombrosso was the first to bring science to criminology and hold a more deterministic view of crime.
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Restorative justice programmes are now the focus of criminology because of the failures of traditional incarceration.
Goring (1913)
There are no real differences between the physical characteristics of convicts and non-convicts. Convicts were just slightly smaller.
Lombrosso and Ferrero (1893)
Women are less evolved than men. When they have masculine characteristics they become criminals.
Glueck and Glueck (1970)
60% of criminals were mesomorphs/athletic.
Sheldon (1949)
Delinquents were more likely to be mesomorphs than non-delinquents.
Canter (2010)
The idea of criminal types has not gone away, it has just become more sophisticated.
Raine (1993)
Delinquent behaviour was 52% concordance rates for MZ twins and 21% for DZ twins.
Brunner et al. (1993)
Men in an aggressive Dutch family have a gene which leads to low levels of MAOA.
Tiihonen et al. (2015)
5 - 10% of Finish crime is down to low levels of MAOA activity and CDH13 gene activity.
Caspi et al. (2002)
12% of the low MAOA participants also experienced childhood maltreatment. This group was responsible for 44% of the violent convictions in the study.
Harmon (2012)
8.5% of the US population have a brain injury but so do 60% of US prisoners.
Raine et al. (2004)
Murderers and violent psychopaths have reduced functioning in the prefrontal cortex.
Raine et al. (1997)
Murderers found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) had abnormal asymmetries in the limbic system and the amygdala.
Seo et al. (2008)
Low levels of serotonin causes aggression, especially if dopamine is high.
Wright et al. (2015)
Increased noradrenaline activates the sympathetic nervous system and the fight-or-flight response; this leads to to aggression.
Crowe (1972)
Adopted children with criminals as biological parents are 50% more likely to be criminal by the age of 18.
Mednick et al. (1987)
15% of adoptees raised in criminal families became criminals compared to 20% of adoptees who were in normal families but had criminal biological parents.
Blonigen et al. (2005)
Found support for genetic basis to offending behaviour.
Findlay (2011)
Crime is not a ‘natural’ category of behaviour, it is a social construct and so a biological approach can never fully explain criminal behaviour.
Curran and Renetti (2001)
Research into neurochemical explanations of offending behaviour normally use animals and so cannot be generalised.
Eysenck (1967, 1978)
Theory of personality.