Criminal Psychology is an increasingly central area in the contemporary criminal justice system of investigation of crime, assessment of offenders, trial and rehabilitation. This paper reviews six related topics: the theoretical underpinnings of criminal behaviour, offender typology (with particular emphasis on psychopathy), investigative issues such as profiling and interrogation science, courtroom involvement (eyewitness evidence, competency assessment, jury decision-making), risk assessment and offender rehabilitation (based on the principles of risk-need-responsivity), and new and developing areas of research including neurocriminology and developmental prevention. The analysis highlights the substantial progress that has been made in applied criminal psychology over the last century, while also emphasizing the rather enduring limitations, such as the translation of generally applicable scientific results into a specific legal decision, the difficulty of assigning a single individual to a specific risk of offending, and the normative aspects of issues which are not amenable to empirical investigation. The paper concludes that the single greatest value that criminal psychology brings to justice is as a catalyst for both technical production and ethical reflection on the nature of justice institutions and the functions they serve.
Sharma et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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