Are Criminals sick

Are Criminals “Sick”?

In a previous commentary ("Providing a Balance") I wrote about the conservative approach to crime causation, noting that “people commit crime because they think they can get away with it, largely because the pleasure they get from committing the crime is greater than the potential pain they would receive if caught and punished.” This way of looking at crime is a variation of one of three major factors used to explaining crime. These factors focus on the offender's body (biological), the mind (psychological), or the environment (sociological).

Since the subject of mental illness and crime has been in the news lately (a CNN special report was devoted to this), especially in light of the recent school shootings, I will devote this column to a brief examination of this subject.

There are many variations of the more general perspective that criminal behavior stems from various problems associated with an individual’s mental makeup, such as a low IQ, various personality characteristics, etc. Much has been made over the years of the claim that offenders are suffering from some sort of “mental illness.” While it is true that some offenders have, to put it bluntly, “lost it,” these kinds of individuals are a rare minority within the total criminal population, which is why they get the most attention from the news media. It is often incorrectly assumed that these are “typical criminals,” which they are not. In fact, offenders are not more "mentally ill” than the general population.

When attempting to explain why some people commit violent crime, it is impossible to ignore the concept of antisocial personality. This is also sometimes referred to as psychopathy or sociopathy. Individuals who suffer from this disorder often have above-average intelligence, are risk-takers, egocentric, manipulative, and show little emotion. They suffer from an inability to be remorseful or empathetic. Psychopaths are hedonistic, yet they do not respond to punishment. A variety of factors may contribute to the development of psychopathy, including neurological disorders, brain abnormality, and traumatic socialization. Many researchers believe that sociopaths are chronic offenders, meaning that they engage in criminality throughout their lives.

Do some people commit crimes because they are insane? Yes. We can state unequivocally that Jeffery Dahmer, the Unabomber, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy and those recently involved in the shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University suffered from serious psychological problems. They may even meet the definition of a sociopath. Offenders that meet these criteria, however, shed little real light on the problem of crime because they are so rare. Can these theories explain all crime? No. Does everyone who catches fish barehanded in Indiana suffer from a flawed psyche? It is highly unlikely.

Many researchers have more or less resurrected some of the old IQ and feeblemindedness tests (developed during the late 19^th century) and applied them to the study of “personality traits.” Various standardized tests have been devised for this purpose, the most famous of which is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which consists of over 500 true and false questions. Several different "scales" have been used, corresponding to the responses to certain questions. One such scale is the so-called “psychopathic scale” or “Scale 4.” However, one problem here is that this test asks questions about one's involvement with the criminal justice system, which resulted in the fact that inmates and former inmates scored lower on this test, thus “proving” they are “different” from the rest of us. A variation is the California Psychological Inventory (CPI).

Part of the problem with these theories is that there is an assumption that we can easily distinguish between “criminals” and “non-criminals.” If we give the MMPI or CPI or some other test to a group of prison inmates and a group of college or high-school students, how do we know the extent of involvement in crime by the college or high school students? Simply put, we don’t. In fact, as self-report studies have shown, most high school and college students have done something that could have landed them in jail, and yet they are viewed, during these kinds of research projects, as the “non-offender” control group. One criminologist summarized the research on this issue as follows: “The research using personality inventories and other methods of measuring personality characteristics have not been able to produce findings to support personality variables as major causes of criminal and delinquent behavior.”

One problem of these types of theories is what criminologist Elliot Currie has called the “fallacy of autonomy,” or the idea that people act totally on their own, without the influence of others and totally unaffected by their surrounding culture and social institutions. This issue will be the subject of another column.