What is Criminal Psychcology

Forensic Psychology I find extremely interesting.  It just intrigues me why criminals would do what they do.  I am aware that TV shows like Criminal Minds dramatize this drastically but I still find the shows that portray this very interesting.  They show the crimes and how they happen and then go about trying to profile the perpetrator, when in reality criminal psychologist don’t normally set up profiles and more often they decide if the criminal was sane at the time of the crime.  They show up in court and give their professional opinions to the judge on whether or not they believe that they knew what they were doing wrong at the time of crime.  Also for the court room they will do research on previous cases like the current one in order to use that as sort of a precedent.  They can also assist the police in investigations by advising what questions they should ask, they work in hospitals to assess individuals with different tests in order to deem their sanity and the likelihood of them reoffending.  Some do however profile criminals if there is a linkage case, which is where they have a crime and they check it in the database in order to see if there are any other similar crimes that could have been done by the same person, and when profiling these cases they use things such as motive and where it was done and how it was done to try and decide if it was a male or female, height and build (if possible), and any other little detail that could help them find out who did it.  There is a lot more too it but that is just a quick overview of what they would do in their day-to-day.

 

Criminal Psychology: Beginners Guide

Written by: Ray Bull, Claire Crooke, Ruth Hatcher, Jessica Woodhams, Charlotte Bilby and Tim Grant