He was first convicted at age 10, for smashing the window of a car and attempting to steal a radio. He was convicted for similar offences at ages 11 and 12, and was given a probation order. At age 13 he burgled a house, and at age 14 he was convicted for possessing an offensive weapon (a knife), at which point he was sent to an Approved School. At age 16, he was convicted for stealing car tyres and wheels, and then at ages 16, 17, 18 and 19 he was convicted for stealing cars. He was given a fine or probation for these offences. Finally, he was convicted at age 20 of robbery of a valuable case of jewellery (with an accomplice who had a sawn-off shotgun) and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He had no further convictions up to age 56.
2.4 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES
Psychological theories aim to explain why some individuals, rather than others, become offenders. They always include postulates about psychological or individual difference factors such as impulsiveness, personality factors or intelligence, and about family factors such as parental supervision or discipline. They sometimes also include postulates about biological, peer, school, community, neighbourhood and situational factors. Chapter 1 by Emma Palmer reviews some psychological theories. Four more will be briefly reviewed here.
2.4.1 Bowlby: Attachment Theory
Bowlby (1969) emphasised the importance of the attachment between a child and a primary caretaker (usually the mother). He argued that it was very important for a child to have a continuous, warm, loving relationship with a mother figure during the first five years of the child’s life, and especially during the first two years. He further argued that mother love in infancy and childhood was just as important for mental health as were vitamins and proteins for physical health. If a child suffered a prolonged period of maternal deprivation during the first five years of life (especially a “broken home”), this was likely to have irreversible negative effects, including becoming a cold “affectionless character” and a delinquent.
PHOTO 2.2 Bowlby argued that it was very important for a child to have a continuous, warm, loving relationship with a mother figure during the first five years of the child’s life, and especially during the first two years.
Source: © Brand X/Getty Images
Bowlby’s theory was greatly influenced by his empirical study of 44 juvenile thieves and 44 control children referred to the same clinic for emotional problems (Bowlby, 1951). He interviewed the parents of both groups of children and found that almost 40% of the juvenile thieves had been separated from their mothers for more than six months during their first five years of life, compared with only two of the controls. One-third of the juvenile thieves had an “affectionless character”, compared with none of the controls. However, by modern standards, this study was methodologically poor. For example, the numbers were small, there were no controls for other variables that might have influenced delinquency, many of the children from broken homes had been reared in institutions (so the active ingredient may have been institutional rearing and constantly changing caretakers rather than a broken home), and the parents were reporting retrospectively (so their reports may have been biased by the knowledge that their child had become a delinquent).
Most studies of broken homes have focussed on the loss of the father rather than the mother, because the loss of a father is much more common. In prospective longitudinal studies, it is found that children who are separated from a biological parent are more likely to offend than children from intact families. For example, in the Newcastle (UK) Thousand Family birth cohort study, Kolvin, Miller, Fleeting and Kolvin (1988) discovered that boys who experienced divorce or separation in their first five years of life had a doubled risk of conviction up to age 32 (53% as opposed to 28%). In the CSDD, 60% of boys who had been separated from a parent by their 10th birthday were convicted up to age 50, compared with 36% of the remainder (Farrington et al., 2009a). In the Dunedin study in New Zealand, Henry, Caspi, Moffitt, and Silva (1996) found that boys from single-parent families were particularly likely to be convicted.
McCord (1982) in Boston carried out an innovative study of the relationship between homes broken by loss of the biological father and later serious offending by boys. She found that the prevalence of offending was high for boys from broken homes without affectionate mothers (62%) and for boys from unbroken homes characterised by parental conflict (52%), irrespective of whether they had affectionate mothers. The prevalence of offending was low for boys from unbroken homes without conflict (26%) and – importantly – similarly low for boys from broken homes with affectionate mothers (22%). These results suggest that it might not be the broken home that is criminogenic but the parental conflict that often causes it. They also suggest that a loving mother might in some sense be able to compensate for the loss of a father.
Explanations of the relationship between broken homes and delinquency fall into three major classes. Trauma theories (such as Bowlby’s) suggest that the loss of a parent has a damaging effect on a child, most commonly because of its effect on attachment to the parent. Life-course theories focus on separation as a sequence of stressful experiences, and on the effects of multiple stressors such as parental conflict, parental loss, reduced economic circumstances, changes in parent figures and poor child-rearing methods. Selection theories argue that disrupted families produce delinquent children because of pre-existing differences from other families in risk factors such as parental conflict, criminal or antisocial parents, low family income or poor child-rearing methods.
Hypotheses derived from the three theories were tested in the CSDD (Juby & Farrington, 2001). In agreement with Bowlby’s theory, loss of the mother was more damaging than loss of the father in predicting delinquency. However, while boys from broken homes were more delinquent than boys from intact homes, they were not more delinquent than boys from intact high conflict families. This result suggests that the key factor may be family conflict rather than loss of a parent. Interestingly, this finding was replicated in Switzerland (Haas, Farrington, Killias, & Sattar, 2004).
Overall, the most important factor was the post-disruption trajectory. Boys who remained with their mother after the separation had the same delinquency rate as boys from intact low conflict families. Boys who remained with their father, with relatives or with others (e.g. foster parents) had high delinquency rates. It was concluded that the results favoured life-course theories rather than trauma or selection theories.
2.4.2 Eysenck: Personality Theory
Psychology assumes that behaviour arises from the interaction between the individual and the environment. Studies show that behaviour is remarkably consistent over time; or, to be more precise, the relative ordering of individuals is remarkably consistent over time (Roberts & Del Vecchio, 2000). It is assumed that this behavioural consistency depends primarily on the persistence of underlying tendencies to behave in particular ways in particular situations. These tendencies are termed personality traits, such as impulsiveness, excitement seeking, assertiveness, modesty and dutifulness. Larger personality dimensions such as extraversion refer to clusters of personality traits.
PHOTO 2.3 Eysenck viewed offending as natural and even rational, on the assumption that human beings were hedonistic, sought pleasure and avoided pain.
Source: © Joshua Resnick/Shutterstock
Before 1990, the best-known research on personality and crime was undoubtedly that inspired by the Eysenck theory and the Eysenck personality questionnaires (Eysenck, 1996). Eysenck viewed offending as natural and even rational, on the assumption that human beings were hedonistic, sought pleasure and avoided pain. He assumed that delinquent acts such as theft, violence and vandalism were essentially pleasurable or beneficial to the offender. In order to explain why everyone was not a criminal, Eysenck suggested that the hedonistic tendency to commit crimes was opposed by the conscience, which was viewed as a conditioned fear response.
Eysenck proposed that the conscience was built up in childhood. Each time a child committed a disapproved act and was punished by a
parent, the pain and fear aroused in the child tended to become associated with the act by a process of classical (automatic) conditioning. After children had been punished several times for the same act, they felt fear when they next contemplated it, and this fear tended to stop them committing it. According to this theory, this conditioned fear response was the conscience, and it would be experienced subjectively as guilt if the child committed a disapproved act.
On the Eysenck theory, people who commit offences are those who have not built up strong consciences, mainly because they have inherently poor conditionability. Poor conditionability is linked to Eysenck’s three dimensions of personality, Extraversion (E), Neuroticism (N) and Psychoticism (P). People who are high on E build up conditioned responses less well, because they have low levels of cortical arousal. People who are high on N condition less well, because their high resting level of anxiety interferes with their conditioning. Also, since N acts as a drive, reinforcing existing behavioural tendencies, neurotic extraverts should be particularly criminal. Eysenck also predicted that people who are high on P would tend to be offenders, because the traits included in his definition of psychoticism (emotional coldness, low empathy, impulsiveness, egocentricity, tough-mindedness, high hostility and inhumanity) were typical of criminals. However, the meaning of the P scale is unclear, and it might perhaps be more accurately labelled as psychopathy (discussed in Chapter 1). Zuckerman (1989) suggested that the P scale should be termed “impulsive unsocialized sensation-seeking”.
A review of studies relating Eysenck’s personality dimensions to official and self-reported offending concluded that high N (but not E) was related to official offending, while high E (but not N) was related to self-reported offending (Farrington, Biron, & LeBlanc, 1982). High P was related to both, but this could have been a tautological result, since many of the items on the P scale describe antisocial behaviour or were selected because of their ability to discriminate between prisoners and non-prisoners. Later systematic reviews by Miller and Lynam (2001) and Cale (2006) also concluded that P was strongly associated with antisocial behaviour but the relationships with E and N were much less strong.
More recently, the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality has replaced Eysenck’s three-factor theory as the most popular model of personality traits (McCrae & Costa, 1997). The FFM includes the dimensions of E and N (defined similarly to those of Eysenck), as well as Agreeableness (A; altruism, modesty), Openness (O; imagination, aesthetic sensitivity) and Conscientiousness (C; self-discipline, competence). Costa and McCrae (1995) argued that Eysenck’s P dimension was a combination of low agreeableness and low conscientiousness.
In the CSSD, those high on both E and N tended to be juvenile self-reported offenders, adult official offenders and adult self-reported offenders, but not juvenile official offenders. These relationships held independently of other criminogenic risk factors such as low family income, low intelligence and poor parental child-rearing behaviour. However, when individual items of the personality questionnaire were studied, it was clear that the significant relationships were mainly caused by the items measuring impulsiveness (e.g. doing things quickly without stopping to think). Hence, it seems likely that research inspired by the Eysenck theory essentially reflects the link between impulsiveness and offending.
It is generally true that impulsiveness is the most crucial personality dimension that predicts offending. Unfortunately, there are a bewildering number of constructs referring to a poor ability to control behaviour. These include impulsiveness, hyperactivity, restlessness, clumsiness, not considering consequences before acting, a poor ability to plan ahead, short time horizons, low self-control, sensation-seeking, risk-taking and a poor ability to delay gratification.
There are also many different ways of operationally defining and measuring these constructs, including psychomotor tests such as the Porteus Mazes (which measure clumsiness, motor coordination and the ability to plan ahead), self-report questionnaires (including items such as “I often do and say things without thinking”), ratings by parents, teachers and peers, and various psychological tests (e.g. where a child chooses between a small immediate reward and a large delayed one, in order to measure the ability to delay gratification). Virtually all these constructs, measured in different ways, are consistently related to measures of offending (Blackburn, 1993, pp. 191–196; Jolliffe & Farrington, 2009).
In the CSSD, boys nominated by teachers as lacking in concentration or restless, those nominated by parents, peers or teachers as the most daring or risk-taking, and those who were the most impulsive on psychomotor tests at age 8–10, all tended to become offenders later in life. Later self-report measures of impulsiveness were also related to offending. Daring, poor concentration and restlessness all predicted both official convictions and self-reported delinquency, and daring was consistently one of the best independent predictors (Farrington, 1992).
2.4.3 Patterson: Social Learning Theory
Patterson (1982) and Patterson, Reid and Dishion (1992) developed a version of social learning theory focussing on ideas of coercion, based on systematic observation of interactions between parents and children. Patterson found that parents of antisocial children were deficient in their methods of child-rearing. These parents failed to tell their children how they were expected to behave, failed to monitor their behaviour to ensure that it was desirable, and failed to enforce rules promptly and unambiguously with appropriate rewards and penalties. The parents of antisocial children used more punishment (such as scolding, shouting or threatening), but failed to use it consistently or make it contingent on the child’s behaviour.
The basic idea of social learning theory is very simple: actions that are rewarded are more likely to occur subsequently, and actions that are punished are less likely to occur subsequently. Patterson especially emphasised the importance of coercive actions by parents and children. If a parent behaves coercively towards a child (for example, by shouting or threatening), the effect depends on the reaction of the child. If the child reacts coercively (for example by yelling or arguing), and if the parent then stops being coercive, the child learns to use hostile reactions to terminate hostile situations. The main idea is that children who are raised in coercive families learn to use coercive behaviour. In contrast, skilful parents use positive reinforcement (rewards) for desirable behaviours and ignore or use time out (sending the child to his/her room) for undesirable behaviours. According to the theory, consistent and contingent reactions by parents, and careful monitoring of children, are effective in preventing delinquency (Snyder, Reid, & Patterson, 2003).
In agreement with this theory, research shows that many different types of child-rearing methods predict offending. The most important dimensions of child-rearing are supervision or monitoring of children, discipline or parental reinforcement, warmth or coldness of emotional relationships, and parental involvement with children. Parental supervision refers to the degree of monitoring by parents of the child’s activities, and their degree of watchfulness or vigilance. Of all these child-rearing methods, poor parental supervision is usually the strongest and most replicable predictor of offending (Smith & Stern, 1997). Many studies show that parents who do not know where their children are when they are out, and parents who let their children roam the streets unsupervised from an early age, tend to have delinquent children. For example, in McCord’s (1979) classic Cambridge-Somerville study in Boston, poor parental supervision in childhood was the best predictor of both violent and property crimes up to age 45.
Parental discipline refers to how parents react to a child’s behaviour. It is clear that harsh or punitive discipline (involving physical punishment) predicts offending (Haapasalo & Pokela, 1999). In their follow-up study of nearly 700 Nottingham children, John and Elizabeth Newson (1989) found that physical punishment at ages 7 and 11 predicted later convictions; 40% of offenders had been smacked or beaten at age 11, compared with 14% of non-offenders. Erratic or inconsistent discipline also p
redicts delinquency. This can involve either erratic discipline by one parent, sometimes turning a blind eye to bad behaviour and sometimes punishing it severely, or inconsistency between two parents, with one parent being tolerant or indulgent and the other being harshly punitive.
The classic longitudinal study by Robins (1979) in St. Louis shows that poor parental supervision, harsh discipline and a rejecting attitude all predict delinquency. Similar results were obtained in the CSDD. Harsh or erratic parental discipline, cruel, passive or neglecting parental attitudes, and poor parental supervision, all measured at age 8, all predicted later juvenile convictions and self-reported delinquency (West & Farrington, 1973). Generally, the presence of any of these adverse family background features doubled the risk of a later juvenile conviction. Furthermore, poor parental supervision and harsh discipline predicted convictions not only for the original sample of CSDD males but also for their sons, showing the similarity of childhood risk factors in two successive generations of males (Farrington, Ttofi, Crago, & Coid, 2015).
Patterson applied his theory by developing parent management training. He aimed to train antisocial parents in effective child rearing methods, namely noticing what a child is doing, monitoring behaviour over long periods, clearly stating house rules, making rewards and punishments contingent on behaviour, and negotiating disagreements so that conflicts and crises did not escalate. His treatment was shown to be effective in reducing child stealing and antisocial behaviour over short periods in small-scale studies (Dishion, Patterson, & Kavanagh, 1992; Patterson, Chamberlain, & Reid, 1982). Other types of parent training, such as those devised by Webster- Stratton (2000) in Seattle, and by Sanders, Markie-Dadds, Tully and Bor (2000) in Brisbane, Australia, are also effective in reducing child antisocial behaviour (see Piquero, Farrington, Welsh, Tremblay, & Jennings, 2009).
Forensic Psychology Page 13
