What Criminal Psychologists Really Do

Say "criminal psychology" and what comes to mind? The FBI? Personality disorders? The deranged serial killer? The dark side of human nature? Shaped by how the media portrays it, more and more people have grown curious about criminal psychology. But is the field really what the popular imagination makes it out to be? Today, let's get to know this fascinating branch of psychology by looking at what it covers, what the work is like, and how it compares with other related disciplines.

What does criminal psychology study?

Criminal psychology is the discipline that studies the "psychological phenomena" that are "related to crime". "Related to crime" does not just mean an offender's state of mind at the moment of the crime; it also includes how they behave after the offence, in the courtroom and during rehabilitation, the likelihood of reoffending, and so on. "Psychological phenomena" cover motives, behavioural patterns, inner experiences, psychological disorders and more. On screen, criminal psychology is often presented as a specialist field used to help law enforcement crack cases. In reality, criminal psychologists may also testify in court, offering expert judgements on a defendant's mental state and risk of reoffending. They may take part in the rehabilitation process too, drawing on their understanding of criminal behaviour to help offenders turn their lives around.

Criminal psychology differs from social psychology and cognitive psychology: it is a branch of psychology that leans more towards practice than theory. Criminal psychologists commonly draw on theories from other branches of psychology — for example, using psychoanalysis to interpret how an offender's childhood shaped their personality or behavioural patterns, or using Social Learning Theory to explain how, in the past, an offender learned crime-related skills, attitudes and other elements through observation and imitation, ultimately leading to criminal behaviour. As this shows, the point of criminal psychology is not simply the theories of, say, learning psychology, but how those theories are applied in real-world settings.

What criminal psychologists do

Although criminal psychology leans towards theory, criminal psychologists also spend a great deal of their time on academic research. Research work includes reviewing the literature, conducting scientific testing, writing papers and so on. It requires the criminal psychologist to be well versed in psychological theory and sensitive to data and statistics — much like research work in other areas of psychology. Criminal psychologists can also work as consultants, using their grasp of criminal psychology to assess how a person's criminal behaviour might develop in future, or to evaluate an offender's mental state.

This may surprise you: isn't a criminal psychologist's main job to solve cases? Plenty of TV series and films — such as Criminal Minds, The Silence of the Lambs and Mindhunter — tell stories about Criminal Profiling. These stories usually portray how FBI profilers use clues from the crime scene combined with psychology to build a psychological profile of the offender, infer the offender's personality and behavioural traits, and then work out the offender's identity or the time and place of their next crime — until at last law enforcement successfully apprehends the suspect, as though profiling were a kind of magic that brings criminals to justice.

In reality, psychologists have reservations about how effective and reliable criminal profiling is. Because profiling sometimes relies on experience, intuition and guesswork, some have criticised it as a pseudoscience. Research data shows that fewer than half of all criminal profiles are produced by criminal psychologists, and because the steps involved in profiling vary — some draw on large amounts of data to build a model, while others rely on personal experience — the effectiveness of criminal profiling has been called into question. One study found that profiling work grounded in statistics can make a law enforcement department 260% more efficient, yet still not many criminal psychologists engage in this kind of work. At local universities, there are no programmes in criminal psychology, nor courses that members of the public with an interest could enrol in — so readers drawn to criminal psychology by criminal profiling may end up disappointed. (The research data above is taken from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/real-criminal-minds/201904/is-criminal-profiling-dead-should-it-be; readers interested in criminal profiling are welcome to consult it.)

What is the difference between criminal psychology and criminology?

As far as I know, local universities offer courses only in psychology and in criminology. Yet criminology and criminal psychology study quite different subjects. Even though both look at the question of "why people commit crimes", criminal psychology places more emphasis on the individual level, focusing on topics such as personality, trauma and learning; criminology, by contrast, starts from social issues, drawing on more macro-level factors such as race, poverty and culture to understand crime. When it comes to criminal psychology and forensic psychology, the opportunities to develop in this direction are greater overseas. Locally, most of the related work is likely to be carried out by clinical psychologists. As noted above, criminal psychology encompasses different branches of psychology, so readers who are interested can first explore the various psychological theories; once they go on to study criminal psychology, it will naturally come more easily.