Criminological Psychology Unit 3 Notes with
summary (100% Well Enlightened)
Forensic Psychology
Part 1: Defining and Measuring Crime:
Part 2: Offender Profiling: The Top-Down Approach:
Part 3: Offender Profiling: The Bottom-Up Approach:
Part 4: Biological Explanations: Atavistic Form:
Part 5: Biological Explanations: Genetic and Neural Explanations:
Part 6: Psychological Explanations: Eysenck’s Theory:
Part 7: Cognitive Explanations for Offending Behaviour:
Part 8: Psychological Explanations: Differential Association Theory:
Part 9: Psychological Explanations: Psychodynamic Explanations:
Part 10: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Custodial Sentencing:
Part 11: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Behaviour Modification in Custody:
Part 12: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Anger Management:
Part 13: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Restorative Justice:
Part 14: Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony: Misleading Information:
Part 15: Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony: Anxiety:
Part 16: Improving the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony: Cognitive Interviews:
Part 17: Introduction to a Key/Contemporary Study:
,Part 1: Defining and Measuring Crime:
• Crime is considered as any illegal act which is punishable by incarceration or another type of
punishment, after consideration by a judge and jury in a legal trial. However, there exist historical and
cultural issues with defining ‗crime‘.
• Historical issues show that what was considered a crime at one point in history, may not be
considered a crime according to modern standards e.g. homosexuality only being illegalised in the UK in
1967, through the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.
• Similarly, cultural issues in crime face this same problem. For example, smacking a child in one
culture may be seen as acceptable or even encouraged as a form of ‗tough love‘, whereas this is not the
case in the UK - smacking a child so that a mark is left is now punishable by law, according to the 2004
Child‘s Protection Act.
• As well as issues in defining crime, there are also issues in measuring crime, for which there are 3
main methods: Official Statistics, Victim Surveys and Offender Surveys.
• Official Statistics describe the number of crimes reported to and recorded by the police, which
have been processed and published by the Home Office on an annual basis.
• Victim surveys involve 50,000 randomly selected households to self-report the number and types
of crimes which have been committed against them during the past year, and is published by the Crime
Survey for England and Wales annually.
• Lastly, offender surveys target a randomly-selected cohort of criminals, who give details of the
types and frequency of crimes they have committed across a set time period (e.g. during the last year), as
recorded by The Offender Crime and Justice Survey. This is particularly useful for governmental
organisations as a view of the patterns and risk factors for crime at a national scale, and so can be used to
inform crime prevention/management strategies.
— A particular problem associated with official statistics is its susceptibility to concealing the ‗dark
figure‘ of crime i.e. where 75% of crime goes unreported. This may be due to a lack of standardisation of
police recording policies in relation to crime, as well as the victim fearing revenge/retribution or feeling
untrustworthy of the police. The effects of these indiscrepancies was demonstrated by Farrington and
Dowds (1985) who found that sudden increases in incidence rates of theft could be explained by a change
in police recording policies, where thefts under £10 were recorded. This therefore suggests that official
statistics may be an inaccurate representation of crime!
+ Victim surveys have the advantage, over official statistics, that the ‗dark figure‘ of crime is less likely to
be concealed or evident due to the self-report technique, where individuals may feel that there are less
repercussions for their actions.
— However, victim surveys suffer from the serious methodological problems associated with self-
report techniques and, specifically, the idea of ‗telescoping‘, where the victim may mistakenly believe
that a crime had been committed against them significantly more recently than it actually had been, due to
the trauma and distress associated with it. Therefore, victim surveys may be no more accurate than official
statistics.
+ Offender surveys have been particularly useful in informing crime prevention and management
strategies due to showing the patterns and risk factors of offending behaviour. Therefore, this
demonstrates a real-life practical application.
— On the other hand, the data collected from Offender Surveys may be distorted or biased because it
has been collected from offenders. These offenders may want to over-exaggerate their crimes to give
, themselves a feeling of accomplishment and grandeur, or under-exaggerate their crimes to diminish
responsibility. This means that too much reliance cannot be placed upon the honesty and integrity of
offenders in self-report measures.
Part 2: Offender Profiling: The Top-Down Approach:
• The top-down approach uses a pre-established typology and the FBI method of profile generation
to assign offenders to one of two categories: organised or disorganised offenders.
• Profile generation includes 4 steps: crime scene classification, crime reconstruction, data
assimilation and profile generation.
• Organised offenders are socially and sexually competent, showing evidence of planning and so
are unlikely to leave the body or clues at the crime scene. They tend to have a specific ‗type‘ of
Forensic Psychology
victim (e.g. just like in the case of Ted Bundy) and appear to carry out the attack in an almost surgical
manner.
• Disorganised offenders have the opposite characteristics, showing no evidence of planning and so
frequently leave the body and clues at the crime scene e.g. blood or hair. Their attacks appear to be
random, with no specific target and more likely to occur close to their own home or operational base
(thus, they are described as ‗marauders‘). They are socially and sexually incompetent, often living alone
and
being unemployed.
• This is all in line with the aims of offender profiling - by reducing the list of suspects, the police
can investigate a narrower field of enquiry and so increase the likelihood that the case will be solved.
— The main limitation is that the top- down approach can only be used to explain crimes where
there have obvious, visible characteristics (e.g. rape and sadistic murder) and so are unlikely to be
effective in identifying criminals who are responsible for burglary or middle-class crimes,
such as financial fraud. This means that the top-down approach may only be an effective method of
offender profiling for ‗blue-collar‘ crimes.
— It is unlikely that all offenders are able to be identified as either organised or disorganised.
Therefore, due to this oversimplication of the classification system, it may be more useful to study the
motives that each criminal has, as suggested by Keppel and Walter (1999). In this way, seemingly
contradictory crimes can still be explained e.g. a criminal who leaves no clues at the crime scene but
appears to be sexually incompetent and who carried out an impulsive attack on a stranger.
— There is evidence to support the existence of an organised offender type, but the same cannot be
said for the disorganised type, as suggested by Canter et al (2004). These researchers used the statistical
technique of smallest space analysis to analyse the data from 100 murders in the US, with comparisons of
each made to 39 typical traits of both offender types. The fact that disorganised offenders cannot be
identified as distinctly different from organised offenders suggests that this system lacks validity and
breadth.
Part 3: Offender Profiling: The Bottom-Up Approach:
• The bottom-up approach, in contrast to the top-down approach, uses no pre-established typology
but develops a profile as the crime scene and eyewitness testimonies are increasingly analysed. The two
hallmarks of the bottom-up approach are investigative psychology and geographical profiling.
• Investigative psychology is the process whereby each crime is recorded onto a database. Then,
the details of each new crime are matched with this database in order to develop hypotheses about the
summary (100% Well Enlightened)
Forensic Psychology
Part 1: Defining and Measuring Crime:
Part 2: Offender Profiling: The Top-Down Approach:
Part 3: Offender Profiling: The Bottom-Up Approach:
Part 4: Biological Explanations: Atavistic Form:
Part 5: Biological Explanations: Genetic and Neural Explanations:
Part 6: Psychological Explanations: Eysenck’s Theory:
Part 7: Cognitive Explanations for Offending Behaviour:
Part 8: Psychological Explanations: Differential Association Theory:
Part 9: Psychological Explanations: Psychodynamic Explanations:
Part 10: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Custodial Sentencing:
Part 11: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Behaviour Modification in Custody:
Part 12: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Anger Management:
Part 13: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Restorative Justice:
Part 14: Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony: Misleading Information:
Part 15: Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony: Anxiety:
Part 16: Improving the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony: Cognitive Interviews:
Part 17: Introduction to a Key/Contemporary Study:
,Part 1: Defining and Measuring Crime:
• Crime is considered as any illegal act which is punishable by incarceration or another type of
punishment, after consideration by a judge and jury in a legal trial. However, there exist historical and
cultural issues with defining ‗crime‘.
• Historical issues show that what was considered a crime at one point in history, may not be
considered a crime according to modern standards e.g. homosexuality only being illegalised in the UK in
1967, through the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.
• Similarly, cultural issues in crime face this same problem. For example, smacking a child in one
culture may be seen as acceptable or even encouraged as a form of ‗tough love‘, whereas this is not the
case in the UK - smacking a child so that a mark is left is now punishable by law, according to the 2004
Child‘s Protection Act.
• As well as issues in defining crime, there are also issues in measuring crime, for which there are 3
main methods: Official Statistics, Victim Surveys and Offender Surveys.
• Official Statistics describe the number of crimes reported to and recorded by the police, which
have been processed and published by the Home Office on an annual basis.
• Victim surveys involve 50,000 randomly selected households to self-report the number and types
of crimes which have been committed against them during the past year, and is published by the Crime
Survey for England and Wales annually.
• Lastly, offender surveys target a randomly-selected cohort of criminals, who give details of the
types and frequency of crimes they have committed across a set time period (e.g. during the last year), as
recorded by The Offender Crime and Justice Survey. This is particularly useful for governmental
organisations as a view of the patterns and risk factors for crime at a national scale, and so can be used to
inform crime prevention/management strategies.
— A particular problem associated with official statistics is its susceptibility to concealing the ‗dark
figure‘ of crime i.e. where 75% of crime goes unreported. This may be due to a lack of standardisation of
police recording policies in relation to crime, as well as the victim fearing revenge/retribution or feeling
untrustworthy of the police. The effects of these indiscrepancies was demonstrated by Farrington and
Dowds (1985) who found that sudden increases in incidence rates of theft could be explained by a change
in police recording policies, where thefts under £10 were recorded. This therefore suggests that official
statistics may be an inaccurate representation of crime!
+ Victim surveys have the advantage, over official statistics, that the ‗dark figure‘ of crime is less likely to
be concealed or evident due to the self-report technique, where individuals may feel that there are less
repercussions for their actions.
— However, victim surveys suffer from the serious methodological problems associated with self-
report techniques and, specifically, the idea of ‗telescoping‘, where the victim may mistakenly believe
that a crime had been committed against them significantly more recently than it actually had been, due to
the trauma and distress associated with it. Therefore, victim surveys may be no more accurate than official
statistics.
+ Offender surveys have been particularly useful in informing crime prevention and management
strategies due to showing the patterns and risk factors of offending behaviour. Therefore, this
demonstrates a real-life practical application.
— On the other hand, the data collected from Offender Surveys may be distorted or biased because it
has been collected from offenders. These offenders may want to over-exaggerate their crimes to give
, themselves a feeling of accomplishment and grandeur, or under-exaggerate their crimes to diminish
responsibility. This means that too much reliance cannot be placed upon the honesty and integrity of
offenders in self-report measures.
Part 2: Offender Profiling: The Top-Down Approach:
• The top-down approach uses a pre-established typology and the FBI method of profile generation
to assign offenders to one of two categories: organised or disorganised offenders.
• Profile generation includes 4 steps: crime scene classification, crime reconstruction, data
assimilation and profile generation.
• Organised offenders are socially and sexually competent, showing evidence of planning and so
are unlikely to leave the body or clues at the crime scene. They tend to have a specific ‗type‘ of
Forensic Psychology
victim (e.g. just like in the case of Ted Bundy) and appear to carry out the attack in an almost surgical
manner.
• Disorganised offenders have the opposite characteristics, showing no evidence of planning and so
frequently leave the body and clues at the crime scene e.g. blood or hair. Their attacks appear to be
random, with no specific target and more likely to occur close to their own home or operational base
(thus, they are described as ‗marauders‘). They are socially and sexually incompetent, often living alone
and
being unemployed.
• This is all in line with the aims of offender profiling - by reducing the list of suspects, the police
can investigate a narrower field of enquiry and so increase the likelihood that the case will be solved.
— The main limitation is that the top- down approach can only be used to explain crimes where
there have obvious, visible characteristics (e.g. rape and sadistic murder) and so are unlikely to be
effective in identifying criminals who are responsible for burglary or middle-class crimes,
such as financial fraud. This means that the top-down approach may only be an effective method of
offender profiling for ‗blue-collar‘ crimes.
— It is unlikely that all offenders are able to be identified as either organised or disorganised.
Therefore, due to this oversimplication of the classification system, it may be more useful to study the
motives that each criminal has, as suggested by Keppel and Walter (1999). In this way, seemingly
contradictory crimes can still be explained e.g. a criminal who leaves no clues at the crime scene but
appears to be sexually incompetent and who carried out an impulsive attack on a stranger.
— There is evidence to support the existence of an organised offender type, but the same cannot be
said for the disorganised type, as suggested by Canter et al (2004). These researchers used the statistical
technique of smallest space analysis to analyse the data from 100 murders in the US, with comparisons of
each made to 39 typical traits of both offender types. The fact that disorganised offenders cannot be
identified as distinctly different from organised offenders suggests that this system lacks validity and
breadth.
Part 3: Offender Profiling: The Bottom-Up Approach:
• The bottom-up approach, in contrast to the top-down approach, uses no pre-established typology
but develops a profile as the crime scene and eyewitness testimonies are increasingly analysed. The two
hallmarks of the bottom-up approach are investigative psychology and geographical profiling.
• Investigative psychology is the process whereby each crime is recorded onto a database. Then,
the details of each new crime are matched with this database in order to develop hypotheses about the
