Make Your Own List. There's more to criminal psychology than Mindhunter and Silence of the Lambs would have you believe, says the offender profiling pioneer David Canter. Here, he selects five of the best books on forensic psychology. Interview by Cal Flyn.

Before good criminal psychology books to read get to the books, let me first ask: what is forensic psychology, and what does it encompass? This is not as easy a question as you might think, because it has quite an involved history and the term takes on slightly different meanings in different countries.

In fact, a lot of that work in the early days was done by forensic psychiatrists�people with medical degrees who specialized in mental illness in a legal context.

Psychiatrists often relied on assessments made by psychologists. So slowly it became the case that psychologists would make the assessments for the courts, as well as or instead of psychiatrists. This was part of the scientific psychological process of developing various forms of assessments that could be used, for example, to tell whether somebody was mentally disturbed or whether or not they had particular psychological problems.

Even issues such as whether the defendant was especially vulnerable to influence and may have falsely confessed were turned into standard assessment protocols used by forensic psychologists in court. It even went so far as to encompass psychologists working with offenders in prisons. Dealing with things like aggression management, or relationship training sessions, also began to be called forensic psychology.

So, it took on a rather broad definition. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter. Some countries, notably the British Psychological Society about 40 years ago, established a distinct division of Forensic Psychology. Up until that point, forensic psychologists had actually been clinical psychologists, in other words, their training had been in working with people with various sorts of mental good criminal psychology books to read or mental illness.

Those good criminal psychology books to read dealt with patients that came through the courts, for one reason or another�say somebody who had an alcohol problem and the court required them to go into some sort of alcohol rehabilitation sessions run by clinical psychologists�those were called forensic psychologists.

In other words, forensic psychology was a branch of clinical psychology. But much to the annoyance of the clinical psychologists, the British Psychological Society recognised that there was a distinct profession of forensic psychology for people who were not initially trained as clinical psychologists. This has all sorts of implications for the way the discipline is dealt. Forensic psychology still has a very strong clinical orientation: looking at things like psychopathy and dealing with crimes that have a very clear, disturbed-personality quality.

Rape and murder are very dominant in studies by forensic psychologists. Criminology is the study of crimes; criminologists tend to study common crimes. They study things like delinquency and patterns of burglary. But in Britain, criminology tends to be more sociological in nature, or even an aspect of socio-legal studies. My most recent book is Criminal Psychologywhich takes on an even broader range of issues. For instance, victimology, the study of who becomes victims and what the experience of being a victim is.

But you would find some forensic psychologists interested in the consequences of crimes good criminal psychology books to read victims.

Offender profiling, as you say, has become part of the public imagination. Whenever I give talks about offender profiling�unlike any other area of the social sciences I can think of�I have to start off by saying: actually, offender profiling is not good criminal psychology books to read you think it is. There is a very strong mythology built around the concept of offender profiling, which is being fed good criminal psychology books to read fictional accounts.

I always point out that the fictional accounts actually owe more to Sherlock Holmes than they do to what psychologists might do in relation to police investigations. I talked about three broad areas of police investigations that psychology can contribute to. One is the effective collection and management of information about a crime, to make it as useful as possible. This includes interview techniques, detecting deception�false allegations, confessions and other aspects of the material central to an investigation.

That turns out to be a very complex process, and very challenging. One of the problems is that there are a lot of people who will go out and claim they are offender profilers, and will be very happy to give opinions to the police.

In fact, in some cases, what they offer is less informed and more good criminal psychology books to read than an experienced detective. The third area is supporting police decision-making. This is based on an understanding of the complexities of an investigation. These may be check-lists of how to prioritise suspects or more complex computer-based systems such as my Dragnet software that uses where crimes occur to help to indicate where an offender is based.

It is important to emphasise that investigative psychology really is relevant to any investigation, not just criminal investigations. Even work on behaviour in emergencies, and crowd behaviour and management�which was where I started and how I was drawn into offender profiling�is part of investigative psychology. I would say all of these are real-world challenges, where the psychological contribution to those investigations makes special demands.

This really makes investigative psychology a particular approach to problem-solving outside of the university laboratory that has dominated much of pychology.

The �for Dummies format is a very strong format. They have very clear guidelines, and a team of people working on it to make sure you fit the guidelines.

They also have external assessors who will look at everything that you write to ensure it is valid. When I was given the task of putting Forensic Psychology for Dummies together, I really had to embrace the whole discipline and find a way of dealing with it that was engaging and scholarly, without being pompous.

They like, quite appropriately, to have case studies and additional anecdotes, so I was quite intrigued by being able to find enough material to fill the book. Forensic Psychology for Dummies was such a boot camp. I had to broaden my range of knowledge and issues, and find ways of illustrating them that would reach a popular audience.

So obviously it is reaching a wide market, people obviously find it intriguing and useful, and so do I! Perhaps we should move on to your second choice, a book first published in Could you tell me about it, and why it remains relevant? And The Criminal by Havelock Ellis is a remarkably sensible, well-informed book.

Writings from over a century ago do suggest that criminality is almost an inherent part good criminal psychology books to read society, and that the idea of getting rid of it or of reducing it is a very optimistic one. We have far fewer serial killers in Britain. The good criminal psychology books to read for this is complex, because it relates partly to what is legal or illegal in different countries.

Obviously, if homosexuality is illegal, you get a very different pattern of criminality. But even if you take something fairly clearcut�like murder�the rates vary enormously between different countries. That is partly the legal system, partly the whole socio-cultural process. It does, to some extent, relate to how effective the police forces are. The differences between countries do indicate something important about the culture of those countries.

He sounds like a fascinating character. He was also a sexologistand later wrote what was probably the first non-moralistic study of homosexuality, Sexual Inversion.

He broadened out into the early, systematic and non-moralistic studies of human sexuality. That was important, in late Victorian times, to begin to talk about issues that were just not spoken of. But he pulled away from it. He decided that the direction it was going in was quite wrong. Like all of the major scientists and thinkers of the late Victorian era, he was very influenced by Darwin.

He was alert to the idea that human genetics were likely to be distorted by the fact good criminal psychology books to read certain subgroups might have more children than. But once they started talking about sterilization, he pulled away from it. He had a good criminal psychology books to read more ethical stance on eugenics than others at the time, seeing it good criminal psychology books to read an issue to consider rather than something that should shape policy.

He was alert to the social processes that generate good criminal psychology books to read, and the fact that these were likely to be reproduced within society, but I was pleased to see that he took a moral stance on how you deal with.

What I like about it is the honesty with which, as psychologists, they described their interactions with criminals. They discuss, initially, various attempts to get people to stop being criminals. Broadly speaking, they kept finding that all they were doing was making them more plausible criminals good criminal psychology books to read, that is, they were giving them a vocabulary or way of thinking about things.

In other words, they would think the criminals had decided not to offend anymore, and when interviewed they said all the right things to get parole, but in fact they continued to commit crimes. This led Samenow to emphasize the thought processes that underlie criminality, the way criminals convince themselves that what they are doing is acceptable.

These are factors like poverty or an otherwise disadvantaged childhood. How do you feel about that? A lot of the sociological explanations ignore the fact that people from very similar backgrounds can end up very differently.

The difference is not in their nature or nurture, but decisions they make for themselves. These much more psychological explanations about agency are very healthy. In fact, I have argued that the social sciences generally are at variance with the legal approach to being human. The legal approach is entirely about agency�about the individual knowing what they were doing, knowing its consequences, and therefore they are guilty.

But most social science explanations, in a sense, take away the agency. All of these are external to the individual making the decision to good criminal psychology books to read the crime or not.

He worked with these individuals over many years, and brought it all together in a very thorough account of all the clinical perspectives there are on criminal behaviour. As you would expect, it tends to emphasise criminal activity that has a very strong psychological disturbance component to it; a lot of coverage of personality disorder, for instance, good criminal psychology books to read well as sexual offences and violence.

Do you think that books like this are of interest to a layperson too? Or is this too much a specialist subject; should it stay in the hands of experts? No, I think this whole area good criminal psychology books to read to be taken much more seriously by law enforcement agents and policymakers. Law enforcement, in particular, is way out of touch with developments in forensic psychology, investigative psychology and criminal psychology.

Its very frustrating. Well, the law, broadly speaking, and law enforcement�the police�do not understand the scientific method. That was when they first introduced the idea of mental illness good criminal psychology books to read a defence in a strong way.

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