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Introduction to
Forensic and Criminal
Psychology
F01 Introduction to Forensic and Criminal Psychology 95787.indd 1 09/02/2022 12:44

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Introduction to
Forensic and Criminal
Psychology
7th Edition
Dennis Howitt Loughborough University
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First published 2002 (print)

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for the print edition is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Howitt, Dennis, author.
Title: Introduction to forensic and criminal psychology / Dennis Howitt,
Loughborough University.
Description: 7th edition. | New York : Pearson Education Limited, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021062747 | ISBN 9781292295787 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Criminal psychology. | Forensic psychology.
Classification: LCC HV6080 .H69 2022 | DDC 364.3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062747
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
26 25 24 23 22
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Print edition typeset in 9.5/12 pt Times LT Pro by Straive
Printed in Slovakia by Neografia
NOTE THAT ANY PAGE CROSS REFERENCES REFER TO THE PRINT EDITION

To the continued memory of Professor Marie Jahoda who died in
2001. I have a big personal debt. Not only did she let me study on the
psychology degree course she had set up at Brunel University, but also
she showed me that some things in life are worth getting angry about.

Brief contents
List of figures, tables and boxes xix

Preface xxvi
Author’s acknowledgements xxviii
1 What is forensic and criminal psychology? 1

2 The social context of crime 16
3 Crime and the public 29
4 Victims of crime 44
5 Theories of crime 66
6 Juvenile offenders and beyond 85
7 Theft and other crimes against property 114
8 Violent offenders 137
9 Sexual offenders 1: rapists 166
10 Sexual offenders 2: paedophiles and child molestation 193
11 Police psychology 221
12 Terrorism and hostage-taking incidents 255
13 Eyewitness testimony 280
14 Profile analysis 1: FBI-style offender profiling 307
15 Profile analysis 2: investigative psychology, statistical
and geographical profiling 324
16 False allegations 343
17 False and true confessions 365
18 Lies, lie detecting and credibility 1: the psychology
of deception 383
19 Lies, lie detecting and credibility 2: the polygraph test,
statement validity analysis and SCAN 403
20 Children as witnesses 425
vii

Brief contents
21 Mental disorders and crime 450

22 Mental, personality and intellectual problems in court 470
23 Judges and lawyers 487
24 Juries and decision making 509
25 Effective prison 533
26 Psychological treatments for prisoners and other offenders 550
27 Risk, recidivism and desistance 572
Glossary 601
References 615
Name Index 698
Subject Index 720
Publisher’s acknowledgements 729
viii

Contents
List of figures, tables and boxes xix

Preface xxvi
Author’s acknowledgements xxviii
1 What is forensic and criminal psychology? 1

Overview 1
Introduction 2
Researcher-practitioners 5
History of forensic and criminal psychology 6
Conclusion 14
Further reading 15
2 The social context of crime 16

Overview 16
Introduction 17
The extent of crime 20
The extent of criminality 21
Crime rates compared internationally 22
Estimating the amount of crime 24
Life-time likelihood of being a crime victim 25
Conservative and radical interpretations 25
COVID-19 and crime 25
International variations in justice systems 26
Conclusions 28
Further reading 28
3 Crime and the public 29

Overview 29
Introduction 30
Knowledge of crime 30
ix

Contents
What is fear of crime? 33

What influences fear of crime? 35
Theories of fear of crime 39
Conclusions 43
Further reading 43
4 Victims of crime 44
Overview 44
Introduction 45
Victim–offender overlap 45
Psychology and the victims of crime 46
PTSD and the victims of crime 47
What leads to a greater likelihood of PTSD? 50
PTSD and re-victimisation 52
PTSD among offenders 53
Post-traumatic anger 53
Psychological help for victims 54
Victim decision making 55
Counterfactual thinking 56
Victim resistance to crime 57
Restorative justice 59
Conclusions 65
Further reading 65
5 Theories of crime 66
Overview 66
Introduction 67
Neuropsychology of offending 69
Intelligence and crime 71
Psychoanalysis and crime 73
Addiction to crime 74
Eysenck’s biosocial theory of crime 76
Social learning theory 80
The social construction of crime 83
Conclusions 84
Further reading 84
6 Juvenile offenders and beyond 85

Overview 85
Introduction 86
International comparisons 86
Adolescents, crime and the family 87
Criminogenic factors in childhood 89

Contents
Continuity of childhood and adult antisocial behaviour 91

Biological factors in antisocial behaviour 92
Two types of delinquents 97
Specific explanations of antisocial behaviour
in childhood 100
Social interventions to reduce delinquency 109
Diversion from the criminal justice system 111
Conclusions 112
Further reading 113
7 Theft and other crimes against property 114

Overview 114
Introduction 115
Illegal downloading 115
Shoplifting 116
Burglary 121
Expertise among criminals 127
Arson and pyromania 130
Conclusions 136
Further reading 136
8 Violent offenders 137

Overview 137
Introduction 138
Are violent criminals specialists? 139
Alcohol and violent crime 141
Anger and its management in violent crime 143
Media influences on violent crime 146
Theories of homicide 150
Domestic violence: forensic issues 156
Domestic violence by women against men 158
Stalking: what sort of crime? 160
Desistance from violent crime 163
Conclusions 164
Further reading 165
9 Sexual offenders 1: rapists 166

Overview 166
Introduction 167
Frequency of rape 167
Youthful sex offenders 169
Sex offenders as specialists and generalists 172
Is rape a sexual orientation? 176
Anger and hostility and sex offending 177
xi

Contents
Patterns in rape 178

The nature of rapists 179
Rape myths 182
Rape myths and policing 184
Socio-cultural factors and sexual violence 184
More on the theory of rape 188
Synthesising explanations of sex offending 190
Offence Seriousness Escalation 191
Conclusions 192
Further reading 192
10 Sexual offenders 2: paedophiles

and child molestation 193
Overview 193
Introduction 194
Classifications of child molesters 198
How common is paedophilia? 200
The normal sex lives of paedophiles 202
The nature of paedophile offences 203
Theories of paedophilia 203
Denial and sex offending 214
Internet paedophile offenders 217
Conclusions 220
Further reading 220
11 Police psychology 221

Overview 221
Introduction 222
Police culture 223
Explaining police bias 227
The cognitive interview 230
Other types of police interview 236
Forensic hypnosis 238
Police as eyewitnesses: how accurate are they? 240
The police caution 242
Use of lethal force 244
Stress and other impacts of police work 247
Conclusions 254
Further reading 254
12 Terrorism and hostage-taking incidents 255

Overview 255
Introduction 256
The consequences of terrorism 257
xii

Contents
The nature of terrorism 258

Mental health and personality problem issues and terrorism 262
The problem of terrorist risk assessment 265
What makes a terrorist? 267
Planning terrorist attacks 271
The end of terrorist organisations 272
Hostage barricade incidents 272
Hostage negotiation 274
Conclusions 279
Further reading 279
13 Eyewitness testimony 280

Overview 280
Introduction 281
Eyewitness testimony as a central issue in forensic
and criminal psychology 281
The accuracy of witness evidence 282
Later intrusions into eyewitness memory 283
Eyewitness evidence in court 287
Improving the validity of the line-up 290
The importance of eyewitness evidence research 298
Facial composites, age progression and identification 304
Conclusions 306
Further reading 306
14 Profile analysis 1: FBI-style offender

profiling 307
Overview 307
Introduction 308
The origins of offender profiling 309
The FBI profiling process 310
The methodology of the FBI profilers 312
Profiling and police investigations 314
An example of FBI profiling 315
What research says about profiles 316
Does profiling work? 317
Conclusions 323
Further reading 323
15 Profile analysis 2: investigative psychology,

statistical and geographical profiling 324
Overview 324
Introduction 325
Geographical profiling 325
xiii

Contents
Criminal profiling – the research-based approach 328

The homology issue and basic theory 335
Consistency in offending 335
Crime linkage 338
Profiling and personality 340
Conclusions 342
Further reading 342
16 False allegations 343

Overview 343
Introduction 344
The police approach to false allegations 344
Pathways to false allegations 346
The recovered memory/false memory debate 348
False claims of abuse and children 355
Suggestibility 357
The diagnosticity of signs of abuse 360
In what ways are genuine allegations different? 362
Conclusions 363
Further reading 364
17 False and true confessions 365

Overview 365
Introduction 366
Methods of inducing confessions 368
Police interrogation and false confessions 370
Demonstrating different types of false confession 375
Distinguishing between true and false confessions 377
Consequences of a false confession 377
Can evidence of a confession be disregarded in court? 379
Conclusions 382
Further reading 382
18 Lies, lie detecting and credibility 1:

the psychology of deception 383
Overview 383
Introduction 384
Ekman’s theory of lie detection 384
Are professional lie detectors really no better? 387
Reliance on invalid cues to deception 390
The quest for lie detection wizards 392
Improving lie detection hit rates – cognitive overload 394
What offenders say about lying 397
Talking more for better lie detection 397
xiv

Contents
Strategic questioning and the Strategic Use of

Evidence (SUE) technique 397
Verifiability approach to lie detection 400
Wider uses of deception research 401
Training in lie detection 402
Conclusions 402
Further reading 402
19 Lies, lie detecting and credibility 2:

the polygraph test, statement validity
analysis and SCAN 403
Overview 403
Introduction 404
The polygraph 404
Problems with the polygraph 405
Studies of the validity of polygraphy 407
Polygraphy and the post-conviction sex offender 411
Alternatives to the polygraph 413
Statement validity analysis: criterion-based content
analysis and the validity checklist 414
The validity of statement validity analysis 418
The status of criterion-based content analysis 420
Scientific content analysis (SCAN) 421
Conclusions 424
Further reading 424
20 Children as witnesses 425

Overview 425
Introduction 426
What is difficult about forensic interviews
with children? 427
The ground rules for interviews 432
Improving forensic questioning of children 434
Interviewing very young children 435
The problem of non-compliance with good questioning 436
The trade-off of accuracy against completeness 437
What do we know about interviewing children? 437
Rapport 438
Children and lying 440
Errors of omission and commission 441
Long-term influences of questioning 443
Children and line-up identifications 444
Facial fit construction 445
Interviewers and child witness testimony 445
xv

Contents
Conclusions 449
Further reading 449
21 Mental disorders and crime 450

Overview 450
Introduction 451
Mental disorders and the criminal justice system 451
Controlling for confounding factors 452
Psychosis and criminal violence 452
Violence in the mentally ill and national trends 453
Confounding by overlapping definitions 454
The confounding effects of medication 454
The clinical sample problem 454
Misclassification of the mentally ill and violence 455
Effects of general social trends 455
Mental illness and violent crime in community samples 458
Post-traumatic stress disorder and crime 459
Clinical aspects of violence 460
Who among the mentally ill is violent? 463
Mental illness and crime in general 463
Why should there be greater criminality among
the mentally ill? 464
Violent victimisation of the mentally ill 464
The special issue of psychopaths and crime 465
Reconviction and mental illness 467
The police and mental illness 468
Conclusions 468
Further reading 469
22 Mental, personality and intellectual problems

in court 470
Overview 470
Introduction 471
Competence/capacity/fitness to stand trial 472
Psychopaths and mental illness 478
Post-traumatic stress disorder as a defence 481
Conclusions 486
Further reading 486
23 Judges and lawyers 487

Overview 487
Introduction 488
The adversarial and inquisitorial types of trial 488
Are trial outcomes predictable? 491
The presentation of evidence in court 492
xvi

Contents
Underlying narrative of legal arguments 493

Other lawyer tactics 496
Is expert evidence understood in court? 500
Judgements 501
Decision making in court 502
Theories of judicial decision making 502
Conclusions 508
Further reading 508
24 Juries and decision making 509

Overview 509
Introduction 510
Scientific jury selection and litigation consultation 510
Simple improvements to aid jurors 514
The effect of jury size and decision rules 518
How real juries make decisions 519
Non-evidential evidence 531
Conclusions 532
Further reading 532
25 Effective prison 533

Overview 533
Introduction 534
Prison as a therapeutic community 535
Violence in prison 536
Therapeutic fixes for prison violence 539
A quick fix for prison aggression? 539
Suicide in prison 540
The effectiveness of prison 545
‘Nothing works’ 545
Prison work works 547
The many dimensions of psychology in prison 549
Conclusions 549
Further reading 549
26 Psychological treatments for prisoners

and other offenders 550
Overview 550
Introduction 551
Sex offender therapy in prison 552
Does treatment work? 554
Treating violent criminals 559
The Aggression Training Programme (ART) 561
Other treatments for violent offending 562
xvii

Contents
Anger and violence 563

Manualisation 563
The high-risk offender problem 565
Conclusions 571
Further reading 571
27 Risk, recidivism and desistance 572

Overview 572
Introduction 573
Risk assessment 574
Just what are dynamic risk factors? 576
What does research say about risk factors? 579
Clinical judgement versus statistical assessment 580
Some structured clinical methods 582
Predictors may be specific rather than general 584
Statistical or actuarial prediction 584
Predictive factors 587
Issues in the assessment of risk and dangerousness 593
Offence paralleling behaviour 596
Protective factors in risk assessment 599
Conclusions 600
Further reading 600
Glossary 601
References 615
Name Index 698
Subject Index 720
Publisher’s acknowledgements 729
xviii

List of figures, tables
and boxes
Figures
1.1 Major components of forensic psychology 6
1.2 Different components in the historical origins of forensic and criminal psychology 7
2.1 Crime as estimated from victimisation survey data 18
2.2 Crime as shown in police recorded crime data 19
2.3 Different ways of estimating levels of crime 19
3.1 Stages in the process of crime described by Ainsworth 31
3.2 Media effects on viewer’s worldview according to the cultivation analysis model 39
3.3 Winkel’s model of the fear of crime 42
4.1 Some diagnostic features of PTSD 48
4.2 Affectivity types and effects of trauma 50
4.3 Counterfactual thinking and victim self-blame 57
4.4 Elements of rational choice theory 58
4.5 The relationship of procedural justice to compliance with the law 61
5.1 How crime can be explained at different levels of analysis 67
5.2 Levels of explanation of crime 68
5.3 Changes and developments in Eysenck’s theory of crime as outlined by Rafter (2006) 77
5.4 Basics of Agnew’s Strain Theory 82
5.5 Agnew’s main categories of strain 82
6.1 Criminal behaviour in the parent and offspring generations of groups of repeat
homicide offenders and matched controls 88
6.2 Kohlberg’s Model of Moral Development 101
6.3 Widely established psychological model of aggression according to Haapasalo
and Tremblay (1994) 104
6.4 Isomorphism versus generalised pathology as a consequence of abuse 105
6.5 Psychological models of the cycle of violence 105
6.6 How anger partially mediates between being a victim of bullying and non-violent
delinquency (based on the work of Sigfusdottir, Gudjonsson and Sigurdsson (2010)) 107
6.7 Theory summary: Agnew’s Strain Theory applied to bullying and its victims 108
7.1 The relationship between personal morality and situational morality and shoplifting 116
xix

List of figures, tables and boxes
7.2 DSM criteria for a diagnosis of kleptomania (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) 119
7.3 Some of the main theories concerning the drugs–crime relationship according to Bennett,
Holloway and Farrington (2008) 122
7.4 The Matching Heuristic Model applied to a burglar’s decision-making process 127
7.5 Background factors in male arsonists 132
7.6 The different trajectories leading to firesetting 133
7.7 Gannon et al.’s model of firesetting 134
8.1 The life-course persistent offenders 140
8.2 Triggers to violence in coding scheme 142
8.3 The relation between threat and violence 144
8.4 Contrasting conceptualisations of anger 144
8.5 Leyton’s epochs of murder 151
8.6 Multi-factorial model of serial killing 155
8.7 The relationship between cycles of abuse and economic stress 156
8.8 Psychopathic stalkers are uncommon but they show some of the characteristics above 162
8.9 The main factors leading to desistance 164
9.1 The process of attrition in the processing of rape allegations 168
9.2 The General Theory of Crime 172
9.3 Rapists and child molesters as versatile and specialist offenders 174
9.4 Crossover behaviours in offenders showing the percentage of crossovers of various types
in the total sample of offenders 175
9.5 Some aspects of criminal careers 175
9.6 Internalisation, externalisation and sexualisation as concepts in the explanation of
sex offending 191
10.1 The main groups of attitude to sex offender items with examples 196
10.2 The preconditions model of molestation 204
10.3 The clinical/cognitive model 205
10.4 Vulnerability factors in the childhoods of young sex offenders 207
10.5 The sexualisation model 209
10.6 Major themes and sub-themes in sex offender denial 215
10.7 Characteristic patterns of offender types 219
11.1 The basic procedural steps for the revised cognitive interview according to Wells,
Memon and Penrod (2007) and Fisher and Geiselman (1992) 233
11.2 Police officers’ perceptions of the effectiveness of different aspects of the cognitive
interview 235
11.3 The sequence of interviews in a police investigation 237
11.4 A model for the effects of police stress 248
11.5 The components of emotional regulation in police officers 251
12.1 Types of terrorist attack according to Yokota et al. (2007) 259
12.2 The process of terrorist identity formation 270
12.3 The sequence of activities planned by the ‘attackers’ 271
12.4 The Behavioural Influence Stairway Model 277
12.5 The four phases proposed by Madrigal et al. (2009) 277
13.1 A model of the effects of CCTV loosely based on Williams (2007) 285
13.2 The perfect calibration between confidence and accuracy 289
xx

13.3 How to plan a satisfactory line-up according to the suggestions of Brewer

and Palmer (2010) 294
13.4 The no-cost view of eyewitness procedure reform 295
13.5 The trade-off view of eyewitness reform 296
14.1 Major stages of FBI crime scene profiling 310
14.2 Features of FBI-style clinical profiling and statistical profiling 312
14.3 Comparing profilers with others in terms of accuracy 321
14.4 The homology hypothesis that there is a convergence between characteristics
of the crime scene and the characteristics of the offender 322
15.1 The basics of geographical offender profiling 326
15.2 The statistical approach to profiling 328
15.3 Schematic representation of crime scene characteristics 329
15.4 Some of the different types of consistency between the crime scene characteristics
and the offender 335
15.5 Consistency of crime scene themes over serial killings 336
15.6 The different typologies of rape evaluated in Goodwill et al.’s (2009) study 337
15.7 Behaviour involves personality characteristics plus situational characteristics 341
15.8 Illustrating the negative relationship between victim and sex offender age 341
15.9 Age of victim and offender relationships taking into account the moderating
effects of planning and gratuitous violence 342
16.1 Possible mechanisms of repressed memories 351
16.2 Two types of recovered memory claims (Geraerts et al.) 2008 352
17.1 Kassin’s argument concerning the power of confession evidence 366
17.2 The major types of reasons given for confessing based on Gudjonsson and
Sigurdsson’s (1999) analysis 367
17.3 The Reid steps during the interrogation process 369
17.4 Some of the differences between false confessors and other youngsters
according to Gudjonnson et al. (2007) 374
17.5 Interrogation tactics and the percentage believing that they would lead
to false confessions 379
18.1 Showing the tendency to invent a ‘false’ postcode but which reveals
the place lived in 386
18.2 Illustrating how false postcodes do not correspond to real ones 386
18.3 Signal detection theory applied to lie detection 388
18.4 The lie detection process according to the RAM model 388
18.5 Possible circumstances where lie detection would be good 394
18.6 The cognitive load approach to making lie detection easier 394
19.1 The phases of the FBI polygraph process 405
19.2 The basic polygraph equation 406
19.3 Possible outcomes of the polygraph test 408
19.4 The accuracy of the CQT polygraph technique based on past studies 410
19.5 The components of a statement validity analysis 414
19.6 The structure of a statement validity analysis 415
19.7 Criterion-based content analysis: some aspects of truthful narratives 416
20.1 Open-ended versus focused/closed questions as they might appear in a child
sexual abuse interview 434
xxi

20.2 Types of question 442

20.3 The inverted pyramid of questioning 442
20.4 The design of London, Bruck and Melnyk’s (2009) study of the long-term effects of
suggestive interviewing 443
20.5 The proposed underlying dimensions of professional attitudes to child protection decisions 448
21.1 How the concept of mental disorder includes mental illness and mental incapacities 452
21.2 The five axes of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 456
21.3 The World Health Organization’s system for classifying mental and related disorders 457
21.4 The Four Factors underlying the PCL-R Measure of Psychopathy 466
22.1 Possible relevance of mental health considerations at the various stages of the criminal
justice system 471
22.2 Varieties of intellectual disability 483
23.1 Adversarial versus inquisitorial trial systems 489
23.2 The stages of examination and cross examination 498
23.3 The four conditions of Jones and Harrison’s (2009) study 499
23.4 What cards need to be turned over to test the rule that if there was a vowel on one
side there is an even number on the other? 505
23.5 The basic signal detection problem applied to judicial judgements 506
23.6 The dangerous decisions theory of how assessments of credibility are used in
the courtroom 507
24.1 Scientific jury selection 512
24.2 The key features of Horowitz’s design to investigate scientific jury selection 513
24.3 Different levels of jury deliberation in psychological research 520
24.4 Kuhn, Weinstock and Flaton’s 1994 theory of juror decision making 523
24.5 When extra-legal or legally irrelevant information may affect jury decisions 528
24.6 Epstein’s Cognitive Experiential Self Theory 529
25.1 A comparison of deprivation theory and importation theory as explanations of
prison violence 537
25.2 Prisoners in general compared with those identified as being a suicide risk on some
clinical indicators 544
26.1 Components of the National Anger Management Package 560
26.2 A summary of the RNR principles 568
26.3 Features of treatment programmes aimed at different offender risk levels 569
27.1 Aspects of the assessment of dangerousness 581
27.2 Some well-known structured risk assessment methods 583
27.3 The key stages in constructing a recidivism prediction instrument 585
27.4 Some of the good predictors of sexual recidivism and some of the poorer ones 588
27.5 The unlikely steps in a juvenile sex offender’s thinking which would lead to a
deterrent effect of sex offender registration and notification laws 593
27.6 One-year and five-year recidivism for sexual offences 598
xxii

Tables
2.1 Generational and racial trends in the likelihood of imprisonment in the United States
by the age of 30–34 years 21
2.2 Prevalence rates of crime for England and Wales, the United States, Australia and
Canada in 2003/4 23
2.3 Some international comparisons of criminal justice systems 27
3.1 Some international comparisons for indicators of fear of crime 33
5.1 Some theories of crime and the types of psychology they involve 69
6.1 Diagnostic criteria for childhood conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder 91
6.2 Major predictors of antisocial personality at different ages 92
8.1 The growth of violent and other crime in the twentieth century 138
9.1 The family and social characteristics of different types of youthful male sexual offenders
obtained from meta-analysis 170
14.1 The relationship between crime scene type and aspects of investigation 311
15.1 The relationship between crime scene theme and offender characteristics 331
15.2 Crime scene characteristics at three different murders 332
15.3 A simple matrix of the co-occurrence of crime scene characteristics 333
16.1 The outcomes of using an indicator (or sign) to predict abuse 361
19.1 The different types of polygraph test question 409
25.1 Treatment strategies associated with criminality 535
27.1 Predicting recidivism 585
27.2 Theoretical accuracy in a sample of 200 recidivists and 200 non-recidivists using a
90 per cent accurate test 585
27.3 Theoretical accuracy in a sample of 40 recidivists and 360 non-recidivists using a
90 per cent accurate test 586
27.4 A simple prediction table based on Gretenkord’s data 587
Boxes
1.1 Forensic psychology in action: The expert witness 4
3.1 Key concept: Moral panics 32
3.2 Key concept: Meta-analysis 34
4.1 Key concept: Procedural justice 60
6.1 Key concept: Factors protecting against delinquency 95
6.2 Controversy: Do predictors predict participation in crime or frequency of participation? 109
7.1 Controversy: Are shoplifters kleptomaniacs? 118
9.1 Forensic psychology in action: Phallometry (also known as plethysmography) 180
9.2 Controversy: Sexual fantasy and sex offending 185
10.1 Controversy: Pornography and sex offending 196
10.2 Key concept: Cycles of abuse 206
10.3 Controversy: Cognitive distortions 211
11.1 Controversy: False facts and forensic psychology 226
11.2 Forensic psychology in action: Why investigations go wrong 251
12.1 Controversy: Is fingerprint evidence unreliable? Confirmation bias in legal settings 259
xxiii

12.2 Key concept: The Stockholm syndrome 274

13.1 Forensic psychology in action: CCTV video evidence 284
13.2 Controversy: Critiques of expert evidence in court 299
14.1 Key concept: Crime signature and modus operandi 313
14.2 Controversy: Is criminal profiling just common sense? 316
15.1 Key concept: Facet theory and smallest space analysis 331
16.1 Forensic psychology in action: Testing for suggestibility 358
17.1 Forensic psychology in action: Who confesses falsely? 373
18.1 Forensic psychology in action: Are people good at telling lies to the police? 385
19.1 Controversy: Statement validity analysis in forensic settings 423
20.1 Controversy: Anatomical dolls and the diagnosis of abuse 429
20.2 Controversy: Communicative competence in the courtroom and those working
with children 438
21.1 Controversy: Psychiatric diagnosis 455
21.2 Controversy: Does research on violence and psychosis need a change of direction? 462
22.1 Forensic psychology in action: Insanity in court 475
22.2 Forensic psychology in action: Victims and learning disability 482
24.1 Controversy: Mock jury studies 515
24.2 Forensic psychology in action: Pre-trial publicity 520
25.1 Controversy: What research designs work? 547
26.1 Forensic psychology in action: A high-risk offender treatment programme 566
27.1 Key concept: Risk management 576
27.2 Controversy: Why is clinical judgement bad at risk assessment? 586
27.3 Forensic psychology in action: Convicted sex offenders back in the community 588
27.4 Key concept: The Good Lives Model of offender rehabilitation 594
xxiv

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Preface
The writing of this seventh edition of Introduction to the contrary, I would argue that the context of the research
Forensic and Criminal Psychology was interrupted by the is integral to a full appreciation of any research. So through-
COVID-19 pandemic, so the updating covers a four-year out the book it should generally be clear just where in the
period. It is important to me that this book reflects the world the research was carried out. This should be informa-
most significant up-to-date research and ideas in the field. tive but is never an excuse for neglecting the research. That
Our understanding of issues gradually evolves with every the research was done, say, in Poland or Australia does not
new theory and research study. Forensic and criminal psy- mean that it has no relevance to the United Kingdom. But
chology is not simply a compendium of settled facts. The its relevance will always need to be considered. Forensic
disparity of voices on a topic is essential and needs to be and criminal psychology is international in its nature and
demonstrated in any textbook. Consequently I have textbooks ought to reflect this.
endeavoured to represent this variety of views as well as The question of the amount of detail to include is a
changes in the dominant views within the field. This is not complex matter. I firmly believe that sufficient detail
entirely an orderly, even and predictable process. What should be provided to enable the reader to do something
appeared to be the case in the first edition of the text may with the material apart from merely citing it. The stimu-
no longer apply or may have substantially reversed. These lus to thought lies in the detail provided. There are many
developments exemplify not a series of errors but the way textbooks which are structured around a commentary or
in which disciplines advance. We can see this both in the linking text bolstered by numerous citations of the litera-
short term and the long term. It should also be possible to ture, with no clear relationship between the two. Some
spot the unevenness of this progress. In its simplest form, academic writing, if not a great deal, is like that. This
over the various editions once-hot topics have gradually imposes severe limits on what the student can learn and
received less attention and Cinderella topics have blos- also constrains the critical thinking which academics cher-
somed markedly. At its most mundane, this means that ish. It is impossible to form an opinion or give a critique
some chapters have been updated with lots of new mate- on something one has only read a sentence about. My
rial, while a very few have changed little. No doubt there preference is to give the reader something to think about
will be a reversal of the fortunes of some of these in future and possibly question. Just how does a particular research
years. Nevertheless, some traditional topics have been study lead to a particular conclusion and is this the only
retained simply because they were important in the early possible conclusion? How did this research develop from
days of the discipline. This is particularly the case with previous research? How does this research lead to future
FBI-style offender profiling. Nevertheless, there is a great research? The questions which the reader should be ask-
deal to be learnt from topics like this so that mistakes and ing are much more obvious when a text provides material
inadequacies are not repeated. to get one’s teeth into. Of course, the text asks critical
I am pernickety about contextualising research. Because questions where these need to be addressed – especially
legal and criminal justice systems are not the same in dif- because they are part of a debate among professionals in
ferent parts of the world, we should acknowledge this fact. the field. When deciding whether to include a new piece
It is important to understand just what this variation is. This of research, the fundamental criterion is whether it intro-
cannot be done by simply ignoring context – as has so fre- duces a significant new idea or question. In what way does
quently been done in the parent discipline, psychology. On the research change the way that we look at things? In
xxvi

Preface
what way does the new work place established wisdom system was the six months I spent at Wakefield Prison, in
on the back foot? Yorkshire. My strongest recollection of this period was
That I rely heavily on the judgement of others when mak- the emerging realisation that, for the most part, the men
ing my decisions is not only self-evident but also unavoidable. there seemed like ordinary men despite the fact that they
What the social network of forensic and criminal psycholo- were incestuous fathers or killers or had committed some
gists collectively judge to be important is one way of defining other unfathomable crime. Nobody at university, staff or
what the discipline is, after all. I also consciously prioritise student, shared my interest in the field of crime and I had no
theory in the text for much the same reason. Theory which idea of how my fumbling research interest could be turned
synthesises what has gone before helps the text tell a coherent into good psychology. Sex offenders fascinated me and I
story. Often the theories, in themselves, are not fully testable tried to research incestuous fathers but this was not a seri-
in the empiricist tradition, but they do have something to say ous topic for research in the prevailing ethos of those days.
and they have to say it about a substantial chunk of research. A few years on and the sexual abuse of children became
Similarly, modern ways of synthesising research findings a massive area for research in several disciplines. Perhaps
such as the systematic review and meta-analysis are integral I could have been responsible for that, but I was not. The
to the presentation of research findings in the text. One rea- boat was missed. Others, a little later, had much better ideas
son is the impossibility of incorporating the vast number of of what were the important things to think about, research
research studies into the text without the compact summaries and practise. But the field of forensic and criminal psychol-
which meta-analysis, for example, provides. Of course, there ogy has, nevertheless, been a stimulus to my own work and
are problems with systematic reviews and meta-analyses but its massive development over the years a delight to watch.
they point in directions which might otherwise have been Psychology students today who study forensic and criminal
obscured by the sheer amount of the evidence. Anyway, psychology are exposed to the power of research and theory
they are part and parcel of modern research and need to be in creating understanding of one of the fundamental institu-
included if only for that reason alone. Researchers refer to tions of the state – the criminal justice system.
them and use them a lot. Better get used to them.
All of this is very different from the situation when Dennis Howitt
I was a student. My first real contact with the criminal justice
xxvii

Author’s
acknowledgements
A curious thing about books is that only the authors’ names are all a joy to work with. Thanks to the internet they are
are to be found on the cover. However, there would be no widely spaced around the world. It is very welcome to work
book to hold in your hands if it were left to the authors with colleagues in India. Several editions of this book were
alone. Authors are dependent on numerous enormously written in Southern India though not this particular one
talented people who make them appear far more able than regrettably.
they actually are. Take proof reading as a simple example. The following is a list of those who I wish to thank but
If I am faced with this task for a manuscript I will miss it is also a list of awesome folk:
the vast proportion of the typos and, worse still, change
Catherine Yates (Portfolio Manager)
the text willy-nilly. That will never do. Fortunately help is
Michael Heritage (Cover Designer)
at hand in the form of people with the proof reading skills
Divya Sharma (Content Producer)
for which I was back of the queue. They also got ahead of
Ajanta Bhattacharjee (Managing Content Producer)
me in the clever queue. And to top it all they are so nice
Straive, Chithra Rajasekaran (Project Manager)
and polite even when exasperation with the author must be
Antonia Maxwell (Copyeditor)
beyond tolerance.
Jonathon Price (Proofreader)
Much the same is true of all of the other individuals
that I wish to thank but in their own distinct ways. They Thank you is not enough – gratitude is closer.
xxviii

Chapter 1
What is forensic and criminal
psychology?
Overview
• The strictest definition regards forensic psychology as psychology applied to the work of courts of law.
Nevertheless, often the term is used more generally to include all aspects of criminal justice.
• The term ‘forensic and criminal psychology’ is used in this book to describe the very wide discipline of
psychology applied to the law, legal system, victims and law breakers.
• The disciplines of psychology and the law both concern human nature but they have many incompatibilities.
When lawyers and psychologists use identical words, different meanings may be intended.
• The twin skills of ‘practitioner’ and ‘researcher’ are involved in the development of forensic and criminal
psychology. Practitioners are routinely expected to pursue research.
• Histories of forensic and criminal psychology depend on the finishing point rather than the starting point.
Clinical psychologists, for example, may see the history primarily in terms of how concepts of mental illness
and other vulnerabilities developed within the legal system and the need for expert advice to inform courts
of law. On the other hand, academic psychologists may see the history as lying in the work of European and
US academics around the start of the twentieth century.
• The growth of forensic and criminal psychology became rapid in the late twentieth century and up to now.
Prior to this interest in the field was somewhat spasmodic, perhaps minimal. Nevertheless, the discipline
had much earlier roots in crucial legal changes which demanded psychological expertise.
• Forensic and criminal psychology benefits from being a truly international discipline. It unites psychologists
from a variety of fields of psychology, though it can now be regarded as a specialism in its own right.
M01 Introduction to Forensic and Criminal Psychology 95787.indd 1 07/02/2022 07:18

What is forensic and criminal psychology?
Introduction are just part. The work of psychologists in the police and
prison services is clearly relevant to courts of law, though
they may only rarely, if ever, work directly in courts. Cur-
As with many aspects of psychology, providing a con-
rently, forensic psychology is defined to also include activi-
cise definition of forensic and criminal psychology is not
ties beyond courts of law by professional associations. It
straightforward. Forensic psychology literally is psychol-
is worthwhile gleaning definitions of forensic psychology/
ogy to do with courts of law. The words ‘forensic’ and
psychologists from their websites:
‘forum’ have the same Latin origins. A ‘forum’ is merely
a room for public debate, such as a court of law is, hence Forensic Psychology is the application of psychology
the word ‘forensic’. Criminal psychology is easier to define within the legal system to create safer communities and
since it is mainly to do with psychological aspects of crim- to assist people to find pathways away from criminal
inal behaviour, such as the origins and development of behaviour.
criminality. It is a long-established term in psychology. In British Psychological Society (2021)
practice, the term forensic psychology is applied far more
Forensic psychology is a specialty in professional psy-
widely than courts of law and includes the entire criminal
chology characterized by activities primarily intended to
justice system, such as prisons and policing. The law deals
provide professional psychological expertise within the
with virtually every aspect of life and forensic and crimi-
judicial and legal systems.
nal psychology reflects this diversity. In court it is likely
American Psychological Association (2021)
that psychologists, no matter what their specialism, will be
asked to provide expert psychological evidence on all sorts Forensic psychologists are scientist-practitioners. They
of matters. Which begs the question of when is and when apply psychological knowledge, theory and skills to the
is not a psychologist a forensic and criminal psychologist? understanding and functioning of legal and criminal jus-
Currently, many psychologists work primarily in the crimi- tice systems, and to conducting research in relevant areas.
nal justice system (i.e. police, criminal courts and prisons). Australian Psychological Society (2021)
Should they all be classified as forensic psychologists?
Terminology has changed somewhat over the years. Collectively, these definitions make it clear that forensic
For example, in the 1980s and 1990s when the field was psychology is an applied, professional discipline with an
fast becoming established, some influential psychologists emphasis on practice. This is what approved training pro-
defined forensic psychology in terms of the professional grammes provide. However, there are many academic psy-
activities of practitioners working primarily or almost chologists who do pertinent research in the field without
exclusively in law courts. Gudjonsson and Haward (1998) this practitioner orientation. The contexts in which practi-
were proponents of such a viewpoint when they defined tioners work are various (Wrightsman, 2001).
‘forensic psychology’ as: Once one could find suggestions that the definition
of forensic psychology lacked consensus (e.g. McGuire,
. . . that branch of applied psychology which is con- 1997) or that the use of the term ‘forensic’ was disorderly
cerned with the collection, examination and presentation and chaotic (Stanik, 1992). Currently, as we have seen,
of evidence for judicial purposes. (p. 1) there seems to be much more agreement, perhaps because
of the very broad definitions currently employed.
Crucial to this definition is the use of the terms ‘evidence’ The organisational infrastructure of forensic psychology
and ‘judicial’. Whether or not they intended this, Gudjon- has developed substantially. It is important to differentiate
sson and Haward appear to limit forensic psychology to between the field of forensic psychology and identifying
legal evidence primarily for the use of lawyers and judges. who should be entitled to call themselves forensic psychol-
Moreover, the phrase ‘judicial purposes’ seems to be con- ogists. The first (establishing what forensic is) is essentially
ceived no more widely than the purposes of courts of law. addressed by all of the definitions discussed so far. The
Some of their contemporaries also defined forensic psy- question of who is qualified to call themselves a forensic
chology as referring to the work of psychologists working psychologist needs to be approached in a different way.
in close collaboration with officials of the court: This involves identifying the nature of the skills and knowl-
edge required by anyone working in the field, apart from a
[forensic psychology is] the provision of psychologi-
basic training in psychology itself. In the United Kingdom,
cal information for the purpose of facilitating a legal
it has been suggested that forensic psychologists (i.e. all
decision.
chartered forensic psychologists) should possess the fol-
(Blackburn, 1996: 7)
lowing knowledge and skills (DCLP Training Committee,
These are narrow and specific definitions. They exclude 1994). The list would probably be much the same else-
much of the criminal justice system of which the courts where in the world, though the precise mix of skills would

Introduction
vary according to the area of practice within the field of individuals that is distinct from the social context of crime
forensic psychology: and the criminal justice system. Thus criminal psychology
involves knowledge and skills which substantially overlap
• An understanding of the conceptual basis of their work
with those of forensic psychologists described above. Per-
context in terms of:
haps the main difference between the two is that forensic
• the psychology relevant to the study of criminal psychology may involve the civil law as well as the criminal
behaviour; law. The phrase ‘forensic and criminal psychology’ used in
• the legal framework including the law and structure this book tacitly acknowledges difficulties in defining the
of the criminal justice system, for example, of the ambits of both ‘forensic’ and ‘criminal psychology’. There
country in which they practise. is no rigid distinction between the two.
• An understanding of the achievements and potential Other terms sometimes used for this field of psychology
achievements of the application of psychology to: include ‘psychology and the law’ and ‘legal psychology’.
• criminal investigation processes; These more clearly hint at an interface between the two
• legal processes; disciplines and practices – psychology and the law. Again,
• custodial processes; there is some merit in a designation of this sort. In par-
• treatment processes (for both offenders and victims). ticular, it stresses the two disciplines in combination. The
implication is that both lawyers and psychologists may be
• A sufficiently detailed understanding of the psychology
interested in similar issues but from their differing perspec-
relevant to the following individuals, including adults
tives. While the terms suggest that researchers/practitioners
and children where appropriate:
should be knowledgeable about both psychology and the
• offenders (whether or not mentally disordered); law, this is also a stumbling block. Very few researchers/
• victims; practitioners are trained in both disciplines in depth. Terms
• witnesses; like ‘psychology and the law’ imply a comfortable relation-
• investigators. ship between the two. In the USA, forensic psychology is
• An understanding of the practical aspects of forensic differentiated from what is termed ‘correctional psychol-
psychology in terms of the following: ogy’ which is essentially psychology applied to the prison
or correctional system (Neal, 2018). Prison psychology
• different demands for assessment;
is the term used essentially for this elsewhere. In recent
• processes of investigation, prosecution and defence;
years there has been a movement to define a field known
• decision making in respect of innocence, guilt, sen-
tencing, custody, treatment and rehabilitation; as investigative psychology, which seems to embrace quite
• approaches to assessment;
a substantial chunk of what forensic psychology covers. So
• professional criteria for report production and giving
topics such as eyewitness testimony and deception detec-
of testimony. tion are included alongside the more statistical forms of
profiling (Granhag and Vrij, 2010) – matters relevant to
• This is combined with an additional requirement of hav- police investigations.
ing had extensive practical experience in at least one Attempts at a marriage between psychology and the
area of forensic psychology. law face difficulties. Both psychologists and lawyers face
Underlying this list is the view that the education and problems with each other’s discipline. Psychology is not a
training of all psychologists working in the forensic field compact discipline united by a single theory or approach –
should be broad and comprehensive, encompassing a wide it is a broad church which psychologists themselves often
range of knowledge, skills and abilities. It is not enough to find lacking in coherence. Clifford (1995) suggested that
know the minimum to function on a day-to-day basis. lawyers should be excused for regarding psychology as a
Defining criminal psychology is not straightforward ‘bewildering confederacy’ (p. 26). Eastman (2000) wrote
because it is not a title that is claimed by any significantly of the two disciplines as if they were different countries –
large or influential group of psychologists. Nevertheless, like Legaland and Mentaland. These differ, as countries do, in
forensic psychology, criminal psychology may be defined terms of their culture, language, history and terrain. When
relatively narrowly or somewhat broadly. The narrow defi- the inhabitants of these two lands mix, things are difficult
nition would merely suggest that it concerns all aspects of because they have big differences of purpose. Neverthe-
the psychology of the criminal. A difficulty with this is that less, there are times when the people of Legaland need the
it seems to concentrate solely on the offender. Does it or help of people from Mentaland but Legaland language is
should it also include psychological aspects of the wider confusing to the people of Mentaland – and vice versa.
experience of the criminal, for example, in courts of law or Baron (2019) characterises the way that legal people under-
prison? Criminality, as we shall see, is not a characteristic of stand human behaviour as being a form of folk psychology.

This, she suggests, is a belief that the causes of a person’s might suggest. Too much emphasis is placed in forensic
behaviour are primarily regarded as being the result of psychology, the argument goes, on the narrow focus of what
mental states. So beliefs, emotions and desires are seen as happens in courts of law. This is to neglect the wider range
commonsense psychological explanations of what causes of settings in which psychologists may have a lot to offer
people to do things. These are attributes of the mind. This in collaborations with lawyers. For example, there might be
form of folk psychology explanation tends to minimise the a great deal to gain when psychologists and lawyers work
importance of other possible causes of our actions such as together and promote legal reforms, both in terms of the
our social environment. contents of the law and the legal procedures through which
For others, such as Carson (2011), ideas of the incom- the law is administered. In addition, civil and criminal cases
patibility of psychological thinking and legal thinking can both involve investigations and psychologists may have a
be overstated. Although the two value different sorts of lot to offer in terms of improving such investigations. That
knowledge and argument differently, this is less serious is, psychology and the law might make better bedfellows
than the general view among psychologists and lawyers away from legal decision making in court.
BOX 1.1 Forensic psychology in action
The expert witness

Given that psychologists are experts in many different The Daubert decision currently influences which
aspects of human nature and behaviour, it is not ‘experts’ may be allowed to give evidence in American
surprising that their knowledge is frequently applicable courts. The Daubert case was about a child, Jason
in court. The extent of their involvement is dependent Daubert, who was born with missing fingers and bones.
on a number of factors. According to Groscup, Penrod, His mother had taken an anti-morning-sickness drug and
Studebaker, Huss, and O’Neil (2002), a quarter of sued the manufacturers. Principles designed to exclude
expert witnesses in American criminal appeal hearings ‘junk’ science were formulated as a consequence of
were from the social and behavioural sciences. Different what happened in court. What is interesting is that the
legal jurisdictions have different requirements of decision stipulated what should be regarded as proper
expert witnesses and certain expert evidence may not scientific methodology. That is, it should be based on
be admissible in all legal systems. An expert witness the testing of hypotheses that are refutable. Furthermore,
differs from any other witness in court since they are in assessing the admissibility of the expert evidence,
allowed to express opinions rather than simply report attention should be paid to issues such as whether the
facts. Expert witnesses are required to establish their research had been subject to review by others working in
scientific credentials in court and their opinions will the field (Ainsworth, 1998). Perry (1997) lists Daubert
normally be supported by scientific evidence. The criteria as including:
expert witness should not offer evidence outside the • whether the technique or theory is verifiable;
range of their expertise. These matters are normally • whether the technique or theory is generally accepted
determined at the stage of the voir dire (usually within the scientific community;
described as a trial within a trial but essentially a • what the likelihood of error in the research study is.
preliminary review of matters related to the trial, such
as jurors and evidence, before the trial proper begins) in This obviously causes problems for expertise that is not
the Anglo-American system. part of this model of science: for example, therapists
giving evidence on the false memory syndrome which
Legal jurisdictions vary in terms of how the expert
involves a fierce debate between practitioners and
witness is employed. In the Anglo-American system,
academics (see Box 16.1).
the adversarial system, this is normally the decision
In England and Wales, the main guidelines according
of the prosecution or the defence. Inquisitorial legal
to Nijboer (1995) are as follows (see also Crown
systems such as those common in Continental Europe
Prosecution Service, 2014):
(Stephenson, 1992) are likely to use experts employed
by the court itself (Nijboer, 1995) and, furthermore, they • Matters that the judge believes are within the capacity
will be regarded much as any other witness. Guidelines of the ordinary person – the juror – in terms of their
for expert witnesses are available (e.g. Brodsky, 2013, knowledge and experience are not for comment by the
British Psychological Society, 2017a). expert witness.

Researcher-practitioners
• The expert witness cannot give evidence that ‘usurps’ of psychologist expert witnesses to reduce complex
the role of the judge and jury in connection with the matters to fixed characteristics of the individual. So the
principal issue with which the trial is concerned. idea of fitness to plead is regarded in the thinking of
• Expert opinion is confined to matters that are some psychologists as a characteristic of some
admissible evidence. individuals – that is, it is a feature of their personality.
A survey of American lawyers (including judges) But the legal definition of fitness to plead (see
investigated how mental health experts were selected to Chapter 22) concerns whether an individual has the
give evidence (Mossman and Kapp, 1998). Their intellectual resources to contribute effectively to their
academic writings and national reputation were rarely own defence. Naturally, this means that fitness to plead
criteria – nor was the fee that they charged. Apart from evaluations should take into account the complexity of
knowledge in a specific area, the key criteria for the trial in question. Someone may be perfectly fit to
selection were their communicative ability and local plead where the trial is simple but unfit to plead in a
reputation. There may be reason to be concerned about complex trial. Furthermore, they may appear competent
the value of some expert testimony since there are many in one area but not in another area. An individual may
examples of what might be described as pseudo-science. be perfectly capable of communicating with their lawyer
Coles and Veiel (2001) took issue with the willingness but unable to understand the purpose of the trial.
Researcher-practitioners another phrase – evidence-based practice – which became

established in the 1990s in medicine and is increasingly
used to describe an ideal relationship between practitioners
The concept of the ‘scientist-practitioner’ originated in
in any discipline and research in that discipline. It means
psychology in the late 1940s among clinical psycholo-
gists seeking to improve both research and practice. Some that practice should be based on what research has shown
argue that the synergy resulting from combining research to be effective.
and practice has not been achieved (Douglas, Cox and So in forensic and criminal psychology, the division
Webster, 1999), though this may be disputed on the basis between researcher and practitioner is breached. It is a gen-
of the extensive research contributed currently by forensic erally accepted principle that training in both research and
psychology practitioners. Historically and traditionally in practice is crucial to effective practice. Practitioners who
psychology, researchers and practitioners were seen as at understand research methods well are much more likely
odds with each other – each side being dismissive of the to be able to incorporate the findings of other research-
contribution of the other. Academics criticised practitioners into their therapies, assessments and when giving their
ers for their lack of knowledge of the pertinent research; professional advice to clients and colleagues. Furthermore,
practitioners criticised academics for their ignorance of practitioners know what sorts of research are needed by
clinical needs and practices. Such polarised views seem them possibly unlike some academics, whose knowledge of
somewhat old-fashioned and inaccurate from a modern practitioner requirements cannot be so direct. Indeed, aca-
perspective. More and more, employers of forensic and demic researchers may have academic and theoretical pri-
criminal psychologists require that practitioners should orities that are different from those of practitioners. There
participate fully in a research-led discipline. Practitioners is nothing wrong with this. Many academic psychologists
do not just apply psychological knowledge; they help create make important contributions despite lacking the practical
it. Appropriately for an applied discipline such as forensic experience and training of practitioners.
and criminal psychology, the usual and preferred term is Figure 1.1 illustrates some of the major components of
researcher-practitioner rather than scientist-practitioner. forensic and criminal psychology. Notice how widely they
The latter reflects a view of the nature of psychology which are drawn from the discipline of psychology. Also note
many practitioners have difficulty relating to. For some, the the underlying dimension of applied research/practice as
purpose of psychology is not to develop scientific laws of opposed to the academic. The distinction is not rigid but
human behaviour but to ground the discipline in social real- nevertheless must be considered as an essential feature of
ity through the effective use of empirical research. There is the field (e.g. British Psychological Society, 2007/8; 2011).

Police Biological
psychology psychology
Recruitment
Stress
Investigative Developmental
psychology psychology
Clinical
psychology Cognitive
Assessment psychology
Prediction
Prison
psychology Social
psychology
Juries
Figure 1.1 Major components of forensic psychology
History of forensic and incorporate. Important events in this history are to be found
in Figure 1.2. Some of them occurred long before psychol-
criminal psychology ogy emerged in broadly its modern form towards the end
of the nineteenth century.
History is written from the viewpoint of the teller and serves
a purpose (Quinsey, 2009). It is almost inevitably partial in
both meanings of the term. It is made up of accounts which Changes in the law
are written through the lens of the present. American and
European academics may give rather different versions of A number of crucial developments in the law that occurred
forensic and criminal psychology’s history – each offering centuries before modern psychology was founded were
versions that stress the contribution of their traditions to vital to the development of forensic and criminal psychol-
the discipline. The self-serving nature of history cannot be ogy. These, in particular, were to do with legal principles
escaped. The history as written by a psychiatrist will be concerning the mentally ill and other vulnerable individu-
different from that of a psychologist, since it may ignore als. The earliest recorded legal principle about the mentally
the contribution, for example, of cognitive psychology. ill was that of Marcus Aurelius in ad 179 (Spruit, 1998;
And the history written by a lawyer will be different again. Quinsey, 2009) when dealing with a question posed by
Although the history of forensic and criminal psychology a Roman governor. Aurelius suggested that the governor
tends to be brief, the history of certain topics which are now should not be concerned about punishing an offender who
considered aspects of forensic psychology is quite exten- had murdered his own mother. The man was permanently
sive. For example the history of fire-setting/pyromania insane and there was no evidence that he was feigning his
(Umanath, Sarezky and Finger, 2011) and post-traumatic disturbance. According to Aurelius, insanity itself was suf-
stress disorder (Miller, 2012) is substantial. However, ficient punishment. But there was a need for the man to be
many of the important contributions are by psychiatrists kept in custody for his own protection and that of the com-
and medical professionals rather than psychologists. Prob- munity. Had the crime occurred during a period of sanity,
ably most accounts of the history of forensic and criminal then the full punishment would have been appropriate.
psychology dwell more on the experimental/laboratory Madness was not always an issue in law, although it was
tradition in psychology than anything else. Perhaps this a consideration as long ago as Roman times, as we have
reflects a bias towards the academic rather than practice. just seen. Before the thirteenth century, in English law,
With caveats such as these, it is nevertheless worth- the doing of something evil was sufficient to establish the
while to highlight some of the features that a defini- individual liable for that evil. The offender’s mental condi-
tive history of forensic and criminal psychology should tion was simply irrelevant to sentencing (Eigen, 2004). In

History of forensic and criminal psychology
C14th C16th C18th C19th C20th C21th

The acceptance into
law of psychological
aspects of offending,
such as insanity.
The acceptance
into law of expert
witnesses – especially
medical experts.
Development
of systematic
criminology.
Professionalisation of medicine, medical

concepts of mental illness and social problems.
Development out of
Wundt’s laboratory at
Leipzig, i.e. in the origins
of modern psychology.
Great founding ‘father’

theory – Munsterberg in
Germany, then USA.
Development of the
profession of clinical
psychology to vie with
psychiatry.
Massive expansion of
academic psychology
and psychological
practice after World War 2.
Figure 1.2 Different components in the historical origins of forensic and criminal psychology
1230, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a professor of theology in or curable. Legal changes allowing the detention of danger-
France, published De Proprietatibus Rerum. This contained ous lunatics emerged at about the middle of the eighteenth
descriptions of a wide variety of mental conditions such as century. Such persons could be held in workhouses, pris-
melancholie. In England, legal categories classifying the ons or madhouses. By the end of the nineteenth century,
mentally disordered first appeared in the Statutes at Large legal categories such as idiot, insane, lunatic and person of
in 1324. These distinguished between lunatics and idiots. unsound mind were well entrenched (Forrester, Ozdural,
In both cases the property belonging to the individual could Muthukumaraswamy and Carroll, 2008). Other notable
be transferred to the Crown or some entrusted person. The points are:
difference was that the idiot lost his or her property forever
but the lunatic might have their property returned when • The first English trial in which the accused was acquit-
they recovered from their lunacy. Thus the law enshrined ted on the basis of insanity occurred as early as 1505.
the possibility that some mental disorders were temporary However, not until the eighteenth century did courts

begin to develop criteria to assess insanity. The crite- principles in the seventeenth century: Sir George Macken-
rion developed at this time essentially held that insane zie, a Scottish legal scholar, compared a sleepwalker to an
persons are equivalent to wild beasts – which, of course, infant and reserved punishment for sleepwalkers who had
are not capable of committing crime. Such a definition previously shown enmity for their victim. Sleepwalkers,
was a difficult one to meet but nevertheless required somnambulists or nightwalkers, then, were not seen gener-
no degree of psychiatric knowledge to apply – ordinary ally as sinning if they killed or injured in their sleep without
members of the jury could identify such an extreme sign of malice.
case as this. So expert advice from the medical profes- The first known trial of a somnambulistic killer was that
sion, such as it would have been at this time, was not of Colonel Cheyney Culpepper in 1686 at the Old Bailey in
needed. Insanity became an important issue in the nine- London. Fifty witnesses were lined up to testify about the
teenth century when deluded reasoning became part of strange deeds that the colonel had previously done in his
the legal test of insanity. Such a definition required the sleep! Although the jury found him guilty, he was pardoned
advice of experts much more than the wild beast cri- by the crown almost straight away. The Albert Tirrell case
terion had. In the nineteenth century the M’Naughten in 1846 was the first successful defence of a sleepwalking
case (see Chapter 22) and numerous books about the killer in the USA. It used what is known as the automatism
nature of insanity stressed the belief that a person suf- defence – the idea that the sleepwalker is unaware of what
fering from a disease of the mind and reasoning should they are doing.
not be held responsible for their crime. Expert witnesses Quinsey (2009) makes the observation that there has
were required with increasing frequency and, as a con- been little progress in concepts of how to deal with crimes
sequence, lawyers became ever more concerned that committed by the mentally ill over the centuries. This could
evidence of experts might replace the jury in deciding be broadened to make a more general point. Progress in
the verdict. forensic and criminal psychology cannot be described as
• The notion that some individuals were unfit because of being equal on all fronts. Some areas of research have
their limited intellectual ability had entered into legal progressed enormously and have been studied in depth for
considerations quite early historically during the four- many years. Yet there are other topics which have scarcely
teenth century in England. The issue of competence to been contemplated, let alone tackled systematically in any
stand trial (see Chapter 22) was a development origi- detail. Throughout this book you will find examples of
nating in eighteenth-century English common law (i.e. impressive research traditions alongside much briefer dis-
law not laid down by statutes but essentially by tradi- cussions of topics which are only just emerging.
tion). The basic idea was that the defendant must be
competent at certain minimal levels in order to have a
fair trial (Roesch, Ogloff and Golding, 1993). Although Links with the parent discipline
competence is a legal matter and one to be defined by
It is not possible to separate developments in forensic and
the courts and not psychologists or psychiatrists, the
criminal psychology from developments in psychology in
emergence of the expert witness encouraged the even-
general. To fully study the history of forensic and criminal
tual use of medical and other practitioners to comment
psychology, it is necessary to understand the changes that
on the mental state of the defendant.
have occurred in psychology in general as no branch of
All of this boils down to the question of the extent to which psychology has been unaffected. The following examples
mentally impaired people (and also children) can be held illustrate this:
responsible for their criminal acts and punished. Umanath,
• The new emphasis in social psychology on group
Sarezky and Finger (2011) review this especially from the
dynamics in the 1960s was associated with a rise in
viewpoint of somnambulism and crimes committed in such
interest in research on the dynamics of decision making
a state of night walking or sleepwalking. Umanath et al. see
in juries.
formal law dealing with somnambulism beginning at the
latest in 1313. At this time, the Council of Vienne resolved • Many of the psychological assessment techniques, tests
that a sleepwalker, an insane person, or a child ought not to and measurements used especially in the assessment
be found guilty of a crime if he or she attacked or murdered of offenders for forensic purposes have their origins in
someone while in that state. Other examples of such think- other fields of psychology. In particular, their availabil-
ing can be found in the declaration of the Spanish canonist ity to forensic and criminal psychologists is contingent
Diego de Covarrubias, Bishop of Segovia, who claimed in on developments in academic, educational and clinical
the sixteenth century that sleepwalkers who killed commit- psychology.
ted no sin so long as they did not know of the risk that they • The study of memory has been common in psychology
might kill when they were asleep. Others developed similar since the pioneering work of Ebbinghaus. Obviously,

the psychology of memory is very relevant to eye-wit- tend to look for funding where there is political interest
ness testimony. Not until the 1960s and later did psy- and governments fund research into changes they are
chologists properly begin to address the important issue planning.
of memory for real events. This set the scene for expan-
We can now turn from the broad societal and legal
sion of research into eyewitness testimony beginning in
framework in which forensic and criminal psychology
the 1970s.
developed to consider some of the key events in the history
of research and theory in forensic and criminal psychology.
Social change
Both the law and psychology are responsive to changes in
Early work in the disciplines
society in general, as can be seen in the following examples: of criminology, sociology and
• Child sexual abuse: although nowadays concern about
psychiatry
child sexual abuse (and rape and domestic violence The intellectual origins of forensic and criminal psychol-
for that matter) is extensive and ingrained, this has not ogy are to be found in related disciplines, especially crimi-
always been the case. The history of the radical change nology, sociology and psychology in general. Indeed, some
in the way in which professionals regard child sexual of the earliest criminological contributions seem unques-
abuse victims makes fascinating reading (e.g. Myers tionably psychological in nature. There are a number of
et al., 1999). Dominant themes in early writings on sex- aspects to consider:
ual abuse contrast markedly with modern thinking. For
example, a century or so ago, children were regarded as • One of the first examples of forensic and criminal psy-
being the instigators of their own victimisation, moth- chology is in the work of Italian Cesare Beccaria in the
ers were held to blame for the fate of their children and late 1700s. Beccaria regarded humans as possessing free
sexual abuse was perceived as rare. The massive social will, which is subject to the principles of pleasure and
impact of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s focused pain. This is an ‘economic’ model in which we are seen
concern on a number of issues. Among them was child to evaluate the costs and benefits (pleasures and pains)
sexual abuse, which was found to be more common than of our actions prior to engaging in them, such as when
had been previously thought. This interest brought to we decide to commit a crime. He believed that punish-
forensic and criminal psychology a need to understand ment for criminal behaviour is not desirable in itself, but
and deal better with matters such as the effects of child is important in order to deter people from crime. Thus
sexual abuse, the treatment of abusers and the ability of punishment needs to be proportionate or commensurate
children to give evidence in court. This does not mean with the crime – and inflicted as a means of deterrence.
that prosecutions for sexual offences against children It is argued by some that Beccaria’s ideas led directly
were unknown prior to this. In the United States at least, to the abandonment of barbaric torture of prisoners in a
they increased steadily during the twentieth century, number of European countries (McGuire, 2000).
although Myers et al. describe the rates as modest by • The publication of the first official crime statistics in
modern standards. It is worth noting that countries may France in 1827 was a crucial development. Statistical
experience apparently different patterns. For example, data allowed the development of investigations into the
Sjogren (2000) claimed that the rates of child sexual geographical distribution or organisation of crime. This
abuse in Sweden were as high in the 1950s and 1960s, continues in criminology today, and geographical profil-
before concern about sexual abuse rose due to American ing of crime is important in areas of forensic and crimi-
influences, as they were in the 1990s. nal psychology. The Frenchman André-Michel Guerry
• Government policy: the work of forensic and criminal and the Belgian Adolphe Quetelet began the tradition
psychologists is materially shaped by government pol- of crime statistics. Modern computer applications have
icy on any number of matters. For instance, government refined this approach enormously. It is now possible to
policy on the treatment of offenders (say, to increase study databases specifying the geographical locations of
the numbers going to prison and the length of their sen- crime down to the household level, for example.
tences) is critical. Similarly, the issue of the provision • The idea of the biological roots of crime was an impor-
of psychiatric/psychological care (say, increasing the tant late-nineteenth-century idea in the work of the
numbers managed within the community) profoundly Italian doctor Cesare Lombroso. He took groups of
changes the nature of the work of practitioners. Fur- hardened criminals and carried out what might be called
thermore, changes in research priorities may well be an anthropological study of their features. He compared
contingent on such developments as researchers often the criminals’ features with those of soldiers on whom

he practised his medicine. Lombroso believed that cer- popular throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
tain structural anomalies of the skull were more com- Its explanation, though, was difficult since kleptomania
mon among criminals. These abnormalities, he said, was not fuelled by poverty – the things stolen were of lit-
were indications that criminals represented an earlier tle economic worth – and frequently the thief would not
stage of evolution of humanity than the rest of society even unwrap the stolen item or use it. The motive was
had achieved. Lombroso stated that criminal charac- sexual, according to some, and the psychoanalytical psy-
teristics include a lack of skull-space for brain tissue, chiatrist Wilhelm Stekel held it to be suppressed sexual
pronounced structural differences between the two sides desire (Stekel, 1911). Women, it was argued, suffered from
of the skull, ears that stick out, a bent or flat nose, col- penis envy (envy at not possessing a penis) so might seek
our blindness, left-handedness and a lack of muscular to replace their missing penis through symbolic objects
strength! Different characteristics distinguished murder- that they stole (Fenichel, 1933). Kleptomania is not an
ers from sex offenders. Murderers’ eyes are bloodshot, outmoded concept in the sense that it continues to be a
cold and glassy, whereas the eyes of sex offenders glint. diagnostic category in the American Psychiatric Associa-
Lombroso is largely remembered for being wrong and tion’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disor-
few give his ideas any credence. For example, Lom- ders DSM-V (see Box 21.1).
broso’s findings could not be replicated just a few years Early interest in lie detection through hidden emo-
later in Britain by Charles Goring. Harrower (1998) tions (an idea which relates directly to the modern work
argues that the observation that some criminals are discussed in Chapter 19) can be found in the writings of
mentally deficient is indirect support for Lombroso’s Charles Darwin (1872). He suggested that an angry person
point of view. Her idea is that in Lombroso’s time bio- can control their body movements but not the facial mus-
logical defects, including mental deficiency, were seen cles which are not under wilful control. These ideas reflect
as linked, though Goring’s evidence was that criminals very much the approach to the detection of lies through
had low intelligence, not that they showed the cranial facial expression offered by Paul Eckman in his theory (see
characteristics Lombroso claimed. Just to confirm how Chapter 18). Anyone wishing to find further evidence of
wrong the theory was, Lombroso claimed that it could be the British roots of forensic and criminal psychology could
used even to explain the lack of criminality in women. draw on the fact that Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin,
It was not that women are socially more evolved than tried to find a word association test for lie detection. In
men. Quite the reverse. They were so backward in terms this, the truth assessor would say a word such as ‘thief’
of human development that they had not evolved to the and study the response from the ‘suspect’ (Matte, 2002).
stage at which it was possible to be criminal! More important was the development of modern psy-
chology at the University of Leipzig in the late nineteenth
century, which quickly led to an interest in forensic issues.
Generally speaking, it is accepted that the origins of mod-
European psychology’s early ern psychology lie in the establishment of the psychologi-
contribution to forensic and cal laboratory at this university in 1875. This was part of
criminal psychology the legacy of Wilhelm Wundt to psychology. Some refer
to this as a convenient ‘creation myth’ for psychology, but
One of the earliest concepts related to forensic and criminal it was a number of his students, colleagues and co-workers
psychology was that of kleptomania. The term appears in who took the initial steps in developing forensic and crimi-
modern dictionaries and has some popular currency today nal psychology. Other influences include:
among the general public. Mathey, in 1816, coined the
term klopemania, which means ‘stealing insanity’, whereas • Albert Von Schrenck-Notzing (c. 1897): in 1896, Von
Marc, in 1840, used the term kleptomania, to mean exactly Schrenck-Notzing appeared at a Leipzig court in a role
the same thing (Fullerton and Punj, 2004). The main char- that some might describe as the first true forensic psy-
acteristics of kleptomania for these early physicians were chologist. His was early testimony into the effects of
as follows: the media on matters relevant to the courtroom. He
argued that witnesses at a murder trial confused their
• impulses to steal things of negligible value; actual memories of events with the pre-trial publicity
• economic necessity was not a reason; given to the event in the media. They were not able to
• the theft was accompanied by an elated state of exhilara- distinguish between what they had witnessed and what
tion together with relief from feelings of tension; they had read in the newspapers. Von Schrenck-Notzing
described this memory effect as ‘retroactive memory
• kleptomaniacs tend to be women.
falsification’. Similar issues are still being researched by
Given its emergence at a time of great economic growth psychologists, although they do not necessarily concur
from industrialisation and commerce, the concept was with Von Schrenck-Notzing – for example, Roberts and
10

Blades (1995) asked whether children confuse television ‘American’ roots of forensic
and real-life events. Their answer was that children as
young as four years are good at identifying the source of
and criminal psychology
their memories correctly. Significantly, at the lower age The timescale is short between what we may call the
studied, children can be confused into making errors by German origins of forensic and criminal psychology and
the way they are questioned. its appearance in the United States. This is because a sig-
• J.M. Cattell (c. 1895) investigated using the techniques nificant number of early American psychologists actually
of laboratory experiments into human memory on the trained at Wundt’s laboratory and either returned home
quality of eyewitness testimony. He was an American or emigrated to the United States as academic positions
who returned to the United States to research forensic became available. Thus early work in the United States
issues after studying in Wundt’s laboratory. His research involved both American researchers and European émi-
included situational influences on eyewitness accuracy grés. It is interesting that it is not uncommon to find these
as well as the issue of whether some individuals tend to migrants identified as the major figures in the history of
be resistant to error and outside influences. Binet, the forensic and criminal psychology. Hall, Cook, and Berman
originator of intelligence testing, in France, replicated (2010) trace the interdisciplinary study of psychology and
Cattell’s work. He focused particularly on the question law to Hugo Münsterberg – especially his book On the Wit-
of the amenability of testimony to outside suggestion ness Stand (1908). On the other hand, Shaw, Öhman and
in interrogations. In Germany, at about the same time, van Koppen (2013) identify Wilhelm Stern (1871–1938)
William Stern conducted research on similar themes to as the recognised originator of the tradition of witness
those of Cattell in relation to both adults and children. psychology. He had founded the first journal Beiträge zur
• Sigmund Freud did not write about legal matters Psychologie der Aussage (Contributions to the Psychology
although his ideas about human nature so profoundly of Testimony) in 1904. Whichever or whoever can best be
affected the legal system that he was given an honorary described as the founder of eyewitness research, we should
doctorate in law from an American university. Never- not overlook the convenience of naming American-based
theless, a number of the psychoanalytically influenced researchers for an America-centric view. Here are snapshot
followers of the psychodynamic psychology of Sigmund biographies of Stern, Münsterberg and other such pioneers:
Freud made contributions to the field. For example, in • L.W. Stern (c. 1910) continued the tradition of testimony
1929, Theodor Reik wrote about the compulsion to con- research in the United States. Among his achievements
fess; Erich Fromm, in 1931, discussed the psychologi- was the introduction of realism to the study of testimony
cal diagnosis of fact (Jakob, 1992). Also in Germany, in that he introduced staged events into lectures – such
around 1905, C.G. Jung experimented with using word as a student brandishing a revolver, which was wit-
association to test a criminal suspect – that is, the char- nessed by the class of students! In 1903/4, Stern was the
acteristic delay etc. when responding to a word with first to distinguish between two kinds of interview called
another word. Emotional stimulus words tend to pro- Bericht and Verhö (Myklebust and Bjørklund, 2006).
duce greater delay. Bericht allowed the interviewee to give their account
• Udo Undeutsch in 1953 presented arguments to a as a free narrative by the use of open questions. In the
German Psychological Association meeting that moved Verhö approach, the interviewees answered a set of
the issue of testimony to the question of the veracity of preset questions which are known as closed questions.
a statement rather than the credibility of the witness. Generally, modern research suggests that open questions
• Gradually, researchers have been unravelling examples lead to longer responses and greater accuracy.
of fierce debates in the early European history of foren- • Hugo Münsterberg was the first major applied psycholo-
sic and criminal psychology. Especially illuminating is gist – and one of the most resolute. He was another of
Wolffram’s (2015) account of the contentious exchanges Wundt’s students and he developed a lifelong interest
between psychiatrists and psychologists about who had in forensic issues. While still in Europe, he worked in
the expertise to advise courts of law in the early part of support of Flemish weavers who were being sued by a
the twentieth century. Perhaps the details are unimpor- customer. They were accused of supplying material of
tant at this distance in time, but such skirmishes do illus- a different shade of colour from that ordered. They dis-
trate something of the resistance which psychology had puted this. Münsterberg, with the help of the great physi-
to overcome. There is also considerable evidence that ologist of the visual system, Helmholtz, showed that the
psychologists actively sought to contribute to the educa- apparent difference in colour was a function of the dif-
tion of the judiciary in psychology (Műlberger, 2009) So ferent lighting conditions involved. The shades were not
in 1908, Otto Lipmann published in Leipzig a textbook different. After migrating to the United States, he found
which translates as Outline of Psychology for Jurists. that the adversarial Anglo-American system of law was
11

not so sympathetic to hearing psychological opinion as civil rather than criminal trial. Unacceptably to current
the European system had been. Münsterberg’s interests sensibilities, Marbe also argued in court that the alleged
were wide in the field of applied psychology (Howitt, victims of child sexual abuse made unreliable witnesses
1992) and included jury decision making as well as eye- against their teacher. Society has changed a great deal
witness testimony in the domain of forensic psychol- since that time in terms of its attitudes to children.
ogy. He developed what he believed to be a test of lying • Henry H. Goddard was an American pioneer of intel-
using what was basically a timed word-association test. ligence testing. However, he is best known for his
Generally speaking lawyers at the time were interested failed work which linked feeble-mindedness (sic) with
in Munsterberg’s ideas about psychology and the law criminality. His most famous book (Goddard, 1912) The
(Dalby, 2014). According to Dalby, the lack of psy- Kallikak Family, was the study of the offspring of a sol-
chologists with the appropriate skills was responsible dier, Martin Kallikak, who fathered a son by a feeble-
for the extremely slow development of forensic psychol- minded barmaid which led to generations of criminals,
ogy until the 1970s when there was an explosion in the degenerates and deviants. Kallikak also married another
number of psychologists graduating. However, others, woman and this led to a lineage of upstanding people
including Weiss and Xuan (2015) are much more critical such as doctors, lawyers, and educationalists. Goddard
of Münsterberg suggesting, among other things, that he believed that it was low intelligence which led to the
held back the development of forensic psychology by criminality of the other line. He claimed that in excess of
alienating the legal establishment. a quarter of the people in prison were feebleminded. He
• William Marston was one of Münsterberg’s students. was much criticised and later changed his mind about
Under another name, he was the creator and cartoon- his ideas.
ist for the comic strip character Wonder Woman. He • Louis Thurstone (1922) published the findings of a
developed the lie detector test (polygraphy) in 1915. The study of the intelligence of police officers in the United
prototype for this was known as the ‘systolic blood pres- States. It was found that, in general, junior officers
sure deception test’ and employed repeated blood pres- tended to be more intelligent than older ones. Thurs-
sure measurements during questioning. Marston claimed tone suggested that the brighter officers tend to leave the
that changes in systolic blood pressure are indicative force for more rewarding and stimulating work, leav-
of lying (Grubin and Madsen, 2005). Furthermore, ing the less intelligent to be promoted within the police
Marston was the first psychologist to be appointed in an force. This, effectively, was the start of the study of
American university as a professor of legal psychology police psychology.
(Bartol and Bartol, 1999). Importantly, Marston was an
expert witness in the Frye v. The United States case in
1923. In this, the Federal Court of Appeals laid down the
principle that procedures, assessments and techniques The modern development
used in evidence should normally be well regarded in of forensic and criminal
their field. Bunn (2012) points out that the development
of the polygraph could not have occurred without the
psychology
rejection of the dominant European ideas of criminol- Psychologists’ increasing involvement as expert wit-
ogy. The criminal in nineteenth-century criminology nesses in American courts was one stimulus to forensic
influenced by Cesare Lombroso could be described psychology. Although psychologists could serve as expert
as homo criminalis since they were almost regarded witnesses, the general principle prior to this was that they
as a separate criminal species. The polygraph would should not step into areas of medical profession expertise.
be superfluous as the signs of criminality were readily However, eventually it was established that an individual’s
seen. The criminologist Frances Kellor not only refuted knowledge of the topic in question was the determining
the idea of homo criminalis but suggested that psycho- standard for an expert witness (The People v. Hawthorne,
logical and physiological tests might be the means of 1940). The mere possession of a medical qualification was
identifying deceit. That is, the idea that psychologically no longer sufficient to be an expert witness. As empiri-
normal people could be criminal meant that new ways cally based psychology developed, the judicial system
of finding criminality in them became important and the gradually became more prepared to employ the services
potential of instruments like the polygraph was evident. of psychologists in courts of law, especially following the
• Karle Marbe (c. 1911) testified in court that human reac- end of the Second World War in 1945. At this point, the
tion time latencies were such that an engine driver had profession of clinical psychology began to expand substan-
no chance of stopping his train in time to prevent a crash. tially in the USA with an obvious interest in what happens
This was possibly the first psychological testimony at a in courts of law. However, psychologists’ lack of medical
12

qualifications was sometimes a stumbling block as the the case in terms of its institutional basis which varies from
courts were reluctant to accept their evidence equally with country to country. For example, although universities
that of the medical profession (Bartol and Bartol, 1999). may provide the training in the legal area of psychology
Nevertheless, a series of legal decisions allowed psychol- in Western Europe, the training is more likely to be in non-
ogy to expand its interest in legal issues in both research university settings in other countries. To illustrate how
and clinical practice. For example, the important case of the origins of forensic and criminal psychology may dif-
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) relied very fer in different countries, we can consider the example of
much on the admission of psychological findings concern- Spain. The first Spanish textbook on legal psychology was
ing the effects of segregation of children into the court pro- written by a psychiatrist in 1932 (Royo, 1996). Its author
ceedings. Crucially, in Jenkins v. United States (1962), the left Spain along with many other intellectuals because of
ruling of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia the Spanish Civil War. It was not until 1971, when the
was that psychologists could act as expert witnesses on the Barcelona College of Barristers created a Department of
matter of mental illness at the time when the crime was Sociology and Legal Psychology, that the field was re-
committed. The ruling said that expertise on mental disease opened. The first international meeting on legal psychol-
was not the sole province of medics. The consequence was ogy in Spain was held in 1976. While the specific details
the increased acceptance of psychologists as expert wit- differ (see accounts of the development of the discipline
nesses on a wide range of legal matters by American courts. in Hungary in Szegedi, 1998; in Portugal in Goncalves,
So, despite the slow headway that psychology made into 1998), generally speaking, it would be a common experi-
the courtroom, the 1962 judgement changed things forever. ence in different countries that forensic and criminal psy-
Another factor was that key disciplines in the devel- chology, despite early interest, was in the doldrums until
opment of forensic and criminal psychology did not grow the 1970s (cf. Wrightsman, 2001), certainly in the United
significantly until the second half of the twentieth century. States and Western Europe. Important things were happen-
This is especially true of social psychology and clinical ing, as we have seen, but these cannot mask the relative
psychology. Hall (2007) refers to the situation in the United inattention to forensic issues until the 1970s and 1980s. It
Kingdom for psychology as being ‘bleak’ in these early should also be noted that the pattern of the steady expan-
years, owing to the small numbers of psychologists that sion of forensic and criminal psychology since that time is
were working in academic contexts. Given this, it was not characteristic of all nations, especially those in Eastern
probably inevitable that clinical psychology developed Europe (Kury, 1998).
slowly in the United Kingdom. Things were different in In the period since the 1970s and 1980s forensic and
the United States where the returning veterans from the criminal psychology has developed extensively as a disci-
Second World War led to the more rapid development of pline as well as in its institutional base. One might say it has
clinical psychology. Nevertheless, from about the 1970s burgeoned, flourished and prospered. (Heilbrun and Brooks
onwards, psychologists were increasingly, though still in (2010) date the rapid expansion of forensic psychology as
small numbers, turning their attention to matters of rele- from about 1980.) Royo (1996) suggests that there are four
vance to criminal psychology. In the United Kingdom, for basic ways in which a discipline may be consolidated.
example, Lionel Haward of the University of Surrey was These are the formation of associations, the creation of
beginning to speak of forensic psychologists and the work specialised books and journals, the legal institutionalisation
that they were doing to help, especially, defence lawyers. of the discipline as part of the process of criminal justice
As an illustration of this, Haward carried out a study into and the creation of university courses devoted to the sub-
the adequacy of a police officer’s claim in court that he ject. All of these things can be recognised in forensic and
had recorded the licence plate of a motor cycle travelling criminal psychology to varying extents. Some of the key
at speed. A hundred trained observers tried to replicate this institutional happenings include:
but none of them could identify licence numbers in such
circumstances (Smith, 1977). Although, for example, Hans • Formation of Associations: Particularly important in
Eysenck was proposing his general theory of crime in the the development of any sub-discipline are meetings
1960s (see Chapter 5), by the 1970s others were making and associations of like-minded researchers which
important contributions. For example, Ray Bull was begin- help them to form research relationships between uni-
ning to apply social psychological principles to the work of versities and other organisations both nationally and
police officers (e.g. Bull and Reid, 1975) and Philip Sealy internationally.
was applying social psychology to the jury (e.g. Sealy and 1. The American Psychology-Law Association was
Cornish, 1973). established in 1969 (Grisso, 1991) and was influen-
Forensic and criminal psychology has different histori- tial in the creation of the Psychology and Law divi-
cal antecedents in different countries. This is particularly sion (Division 41) of the American Psychological
13

Association (APA), with which it merged in 1981. of the total number of citations. In other words, not
The association began publishing the highly influ- only are there a substantial number of specialist jour-
ential journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law in nals in the field of forensic/legal psychology but there
1977. Often overlooked, however, Division 18 of the are numerous other publication opportunities available
American Psychological Association – Psychologists to researchers in mainstream and general psychology
in Public Service – formed a criminal justice section journals.
in 1975.
The field of forensic and criminal psychology is not now
2. The Division of Criminological and Legal Psychol- fixed with its foci, boundaries and future clearly defined. It
ogy was established by the British Psychological is an evolving field that will inevitably change:
Society in 1977 but renamed the Division of Forensic
Psychology in 1999. The division began publishing • Developments in both the law and psychology will
the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology ensure that new issues become incorporated into the
in 1996. field. For example, the development of the concept of
stalking and its first incorporation into law in California
3. The Australia and New Zealand Association of Psy-
in 1990 (Emerson, Ferris and Gardner, 1998) led to
chiatry, Psychology and Law was founded in 1972
considerable psychological and psychiatric effort to
and began publishing the journal Psychiatry, Psy-
understand stalking behaviour. Now it is a substantial
chology and Law in 1993.
research area in its own right. There are probably similar
4. The European Association of Psychology and the new developments currently which will generate intense
Law grew slowly from initially small meetings, research interest from forensic and criminal psychology,
such as those held at the University of Oxford in but it would take a brave soul to make predictions.
the 1980s. Dominated initially by small fledgling
• Increased employment of psychologists as personnel
research communities in countries such as Germany,
within different branches of the criminal justice system
the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, the first Euro-
will also bring change. So too will increases in private
pean conference on psychology and the law was
practice in the field. For example, a broadening of the
held in Maastricht, Netherlands in 1988. This led to
role of psychology in police organisations – such as the
a second European meeting in Nuremberg, Germany,
recruitment of officers – will bring a shift of interest in
which led to the founding of the European Associa-
that direction.
tion of Psychology and the Law.
• Increasing numbers of students training as forensic and
5. The Nordic Network for research on Psychology and
criminal psychologists will ensure a fuller professionali-
Law began in Sweden in 2004.
sation of work and practice.
• Professional education: According to Shaw, Öhman and
van Koppen (2013), postgraduate psychology and law
programmes are to be found in many countries. There
were over 30 in the US, 20 in the UK, nine in Australia, Conclusion
four in Germany, four in Spain, three in Russia, three in
Canada and one in Sweden, for example. Such a sup- While today forensic and criminal psychology is a major
ply of qualified postgraduates contributes greatly to the sub-discipline of psychology, historically it was fairly
future of any discipline. marginal until the 1970s onwards. It has attracted growing
• Publications: The number of journals which publish numbers of psychologists to work in the field. However,
articles in the field of psychology and the law is large some of the unevenness of the coverage of forensic and
and includes important mainstream journals such as criminal psychology can be attributed to it being some-
Psychological Bulletin. Black (2012) carried out a what of a late-comer into psychology. Its growth-rate has
study of the most frequently cited articles listed in six been marked in recent years and it seems consolidated
forensic psychology journals, including Behavioral Sci- into an important sub-discipline with substantial numbers
ences and the Law and Law and Human Behavior. He of psychologists specialising in the field. Of course, this
found nearly 22,000 citations to publications in a wide leads to sub-specialisms within the broader context but
variety of journals. The top 68 most frequently cited this is no surprise given that forensic and criminal psy-
journals contained only 15 specific to legal psychol- chology recruited its personnel from other sub-disciplines
ogy. The top 68 journals only contained 47 per cent of psychology.
14

Further reading
Further reading Crichton, D.A. and Towel, G. (2021) Forensic Psychology

(3rd edn) Chichester: Wiley.
Kapardis, A. (2014) Psychology and Law: A Critical Intro-
Bartol, C.R. and Bartol, A.M. (2014) ‘History of forensic psy-
duction (4th edn) Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
chology’ in I.B. Weiner and A.K. Hess (eds), Handbook of
Forensic Psychology (4th edn). Chichester: Wiley (pp. 1–27).
15

Chapter 2
The social context of crime
Overview
• Misconceptions about crime and criminals are frequent despite a plethora of sources of information – the
media, social media, government, family, friends and acquaintances. Much timely information about crime
trends appears on the Internet. Personal experience of criminal victimisation also has a role.
• The shortcomings of criminal statistics do not make them entirely useless as they may be fit for some pur-
poses. Knowing what the limitations are is the problem.
• Surveys of personal victimisation form a useful contrast to statistics of crimes recorded by the police and
may be more accurate. However, the two are best seen as complementary.
• Crime statistics do not speak with a single voice and need interpretation. Different researchers may interpret
them differently.
• Extensive research demonstrates that criminal behaviour is quite common – sufficiently so that it might be
described as normal. Of course, relatively trivial incidents of stealing form the bulk of this criminal activ-
ity. Nevertheless, half of men and nearly a third of women admit to committing at least one crime such as
burglary, theft, criminal damage, robbery, assault or selling drugs at some stage in their lives.
• International comparisons indicate considerable variation in crime levels in different nations. Criminal statis-
tics do not invariably show increasing trends over time. At different times, crime rates may escalate, flatten,
or diminish.
• Justice is administered differently and is based on different principles in different parts of the world. Even
where the systems have the same origins (e.g. the United Kingdom and the United States), crucial differ-
ences in the practices of the criminal justice systems may mean that the principles of forensic and criminal
psychology are not universally applicable.
16

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
It certainly was a poser. If, he said, he described a man as having
a very cowardly dog, what should I think he meant? I suggested
various possible solutions: that he was a brutal man who thrashed
his dog unmercifully; that he was a very poor man who could not
afford to buy a good one; or a very mean man who nearly starved
the beast to death. As none of them was correct, I asked him to
explain. But he preferred to keep me on tenterhooks and declined to
do so, chuckling with delight at the way in which he was making me
“work my brain.”
Sheykh Senussi.—Clerk to the Qadi in Haggi Qwaytin.—My guide during my
Mut and the village poet. (p. 44). last year in the desert. (p. 199)
Sheykh Ibn ed Dris.—One of the Left, Haggi Qwaytin. Right, Haggi
Senussi Sheykhs in the Zawia in Qway.—Qway was my guide during my
Farafra. (p. 228). first two years in the desert. (p. 26).
It was not until the train began to move, that he condescended to

solve the problem. When he said that a man had a cowardly dog, he
meant that he was so very hospitable that his dog got tired of barking
at the innumerable guests who came to his house! As a literary
language Arabic must be very hard to beat.
Near Nazali Genub, where I camped while buying my camels, I
found an acquaintance whose job consisted in surveying and
drawing the hieroglyphics on the tombs, where, to relapse into
metaphor, in mere English:
“The long phantasmal line

Of Pharaohs crowned divine
Are dust among the dust that once obeyed them.”
I shared a very comfortable tomb with him during the time I spent
there.
After about a week, during which Qwaytin with Abd er Rahman
visited the surrounding villages and markets in search of the camels
that he required to complete the caravan, we moved over to
Qwaytin’s house, some seven miles away, and on the following
morning, 24th March, started off for our journey into the desert;
Ibrahim at the start, as usual, banging off his gun after the Arab
custom to scare away evil spirits during our journey.
I decided first to make for an uninhabited oasis called Bu Gerara,
which had not previously been reported, that Qwaytin said he knew
of, and that lay some little distance off the Derb et Tawil, and not very
far to the north-east of Dakhla. This oasis he said contained palms,
wells and some old buildings, but had been deserted for many years.
The Derb ed Deri—the monastery road—that we followed starts
from near an old der, or monastery, called the Der Muharug, from
which it takes its name, and is a branch of the great Derb et Tawil
—“the long road”—that, starting from the Nile Valley near Manfalut,
runs right across the desert plateau to Dakhla Oasis.
On getting up on to the plateau, Qwaytin pointed out in the
distance to the west a low hill, which he said was called the Jebel
Jebaïl, where, he stated, there are many tombs.
The plateau was level and as featureless as that between the Nile
Valley and Kharga Oasis, to which it bore a strong general
resemblance. There were the same patches of sand and pebbles,
interspaced with areas of limestone, showing all the same types of
sand erosion—kharashef, kharafish, battikh and rusuf.
In many places the limestone appeared as marble, sometimes
polished by the action of the sand blast. White, black, grey, yellow
and beautiful rose pink, in various combinations, were seen in the
stone. Much of it showed large cracks on the surface, but there were
considerable areas of stone, especially of the grey marble with
darker grey lines, that seemed to be quite solid. The rock in places
was translucent and appeared to be alabaster, but of very inferior
quality. Some of the pink marble looked to be of a fine colour and
texture; but it is doubtful, in such an inaccessible position, if it would
ever repay working.
Early on our second day in the desert we joined the main road—
the Derb et Tawil, or “long road.” Close to the east of the point,
where the two roads met, was one of the low rocky hills with which
the plateau was studded. From the foot of this ran a little used road
leading to ’Ain Amur, via ’Ain Embares, an undiscovered well that I
had tried to reach by way of the small depressions leading out of the
’Ain Amur wady. It was reported to be almost sanded up and to give
very little water.
On the following day we passed the point where a road branches
off to the west from the Derb et Tawil to go direct to Qasr Dakhl. This
road, which does not appear to be much used, is known as the “Derb
el Khashabi,” or “wooded road,” owing to the fact that about two
days’ journey from the point where it leaves the Derb et Tawil, there
is a patch of dead trees about ten feet high. It is said to be an easy
one to traverse.
The next day we reached the Abu Moharik dune belt that took us
three hours and twenty minutes to cross, which at the rate of two and
a half miles an hour, was equivalent to a distance of eight and a half
miles. The dunes of which it was composed were all, so far as we
saw, of the crescentic type, and were probably all considerably under
fifteen feet in height. Where the road crossed the belt, was a sand-
free gap, the dunes in that part being rather thinly distributed, though
farther to the north they appeared to lie much closer together. The
whole of the road, where it ran through the belt, was entirely free
from drift sand. We camped that night in the middle of the dunes.
On leaving the dunes for Bu Gerara, I sent Qwaytin and Abd er
Rahman off to look for another oasis that the former had heard of,
that was said to lie some distance to the west of our road, which,
however, he failed to find. In the evening before his departure, he
came into my tent and announced that “his book said” that on the
following day we should reach the Gara bu Gerara. There, he said,
the road forked, and one branch, leaving the usual road followed by
caravans going to Dakhla, and keeping more to the west, led to Bu
Gerara—the oasis we were in search of.
This was the first mention he had made of any “book,” so I
enquired what the book was to which he referred. Qwaytin seemed
rather surprised that I had not heard of it before, and said that it was
his “book of treasure!”
Cautious questioning elicited the fact that he had never been to
Bu Gerara before, but that he was relying entirely on the directions
given in this precious volume to take me there, and evidently
expected, when we reached the place that we should all fall to
digging in search of the buried riches that the book said were to be
found there, instead of getting on and mapping the desert.
He was clearly under the impression that he was conferring a
great favour on me by taking me into the secret of the vast wealth
that he expected to find. To have thrown any doubt on the reliability
of his wonderful book would have mortally offended him, as natives
are very sensitive on these subjects. But as following out his
instructions did not seem likely to take me far from the part to which I
wanted to go, and would lead me into new ground, I thought it best
to humour him, trusting that, when he failed to find the place, he
would be willing to come down to the more mundane occupation of
mapping the desert. So, much against my inclination, I found myself
at last fairly launched on a treasure-hunting expedition!
PINNACLE ROCK ON DESCENT TO BU GERARA VALLEY.

Soon after our start on the following morning one of the camels
fell ill. What the particular disease was I was unable to discover; but
the remedy that Mohanny applied was to bleed her from the tip of
her tail—an operation that appeared to afford some relief. The
bedawin veterinary methods are simple, but, on the whole, effective.
They may be summed up in three words—“bleed, butter, or burn.”
Eleven miles’ march from our camp brought us to the Gara bu
Gerara—a long, low, flat-topped hill with a small peak at its eastern
extremity, where the road to Bu Gerara branched off from the Derb et
Tawil, according to Qwaytin’s book of treasure.
Qwaytin had given minute instructions to Mohanny as to finding
the place, so, on reaching the hill, he came up to me and announced
that it was now necessary to leave the Derb et Tawil, which turned
off towards the east, and to follow a road that led straight on.
Our departure for Gara bu Gerara though had to be postponed for
a short time owing to the camel developing another attack of
whatever the complaint was that she was suffering from,
necessitating that she should be again bled—this time from the
nose. The operation having been successfully performed, we started
off to look for our treasure.
Much to my surprise, we found a very well marked road branched
off from the Derb et Tawil, though, judging from its appearance, it
had not been used for a very long time. Away to the east of our route
—by the side of the Derb et Tawil—was a small, but very
conspicuous mound of bright yellow earth—probably ochreous—
which I was told was the Garet ed Dahab (golden hillock).
Shortly after we passed through a tract of desert thickly studded
with stones. Through this stony area ran a made road. The stones
had all been cleared off its surface, which had then been smoothed
over with a thoroughness that made it extremely unlikely that the
work had ever been done by the bedawin, whose contempt for all
forms of manual labour always induces them to put up with a bad
part in a road, if they cannot circumvent it by a slight detour.
After traversing this stony part of the desert, we reached the top of
a steep descent, where again it was evident that some more civilised
race than the desert bedawin had been at work, for the road down
on to the lower level had been notched out of the side of the scarp in
a way that would not have done discredit to a modern engineer. After
that I felt prepared for any developments.
After negotiating the Negeb Shushina, as the descent from the
plateau to the level of the depression is called, we came on to a level
sandy plain, where for a time Mohanny, who had been acting as
guide by following the directions Qwaytin had given him from his
wonderful book, succeeded in getting completely lost. After
wandering about for a time, seeking the marble palaces and gilded
domes of Bu Gerara, we at length caught sight of two figures in the
distance, who, when examined through the glass, proved to be
Qwaytin and Abd er Rahman.
CHAPTER XXII
W E found Abd er Rahman and Qwaytin diligently engaged in

grubbing about in the ground. In reply to my question as to
whether they had seen anything of Bu Gerara, I was told that we
were standing on it. Qwaytin pointed out the foundations of several
walls that could just be seen showing above the sandy surface of the
ground and a lot of broken pottery lying about on the desert. He then
led me a few yards away to where a circular patch of unusually
sandy soil, a few feet in diameter, was to be seen, which he said was
the mouth of a well, and produced as the first instalment of the
“treasure” to be found, a piece of broken purple glass, that had
apparently once formed part of a cup or bowl, and a copper coin of
the Ptolemaic period, which he had dug up.
The sight of that coin was too much for my men. It was all I could
do to get them to unload the camels and pitch my tent, before they
were all off digging away into the ground for dear life, expecting
every moment to find the untold wealth that the book had described.
They continued until it was too dark for them to see. They then set to
work to cook their evening meal.
Qwaytin’s men were even more primitive in their culinary
arrangements than Abd er Rahman and Ibrahim. Their food supply
consisted of the usual leathern sack of flour, an earthenware jar,
covered with raw hide, which contained clarified butter, that they
slung on a camel, and several tin canisters containing a very
anæmic-looking cheese. They mixed the flour, water, salt and butter
together into a dough, which they rolled out into thick slabs with a
stick about three-quarters of an inch in diameter on the top of one of
my provision boxes. They then lighted a huge bonfire from the
surrounding scrub, and when the sand was sufficiently heated and
the wood was reduced to glowing embers, scraped the fire away, laid
the slab of dough down on the heated sand and covered it over
again with the cinders. After about a quarter of an hour’s baking the
bread was considered to be ready to eat. My men cooked their
dough on a slightly dished iron plate called a saj.
Qwaytin came into my tent in the evening, highly elated at having
found Bu Gerara. To my disgust I discovered that he was not thinking
of going on into Farafra at all, but was fairly off on a treasure hunt,
and seemed to imagine that he was going to drag me all over the
desert with him searching for buried riches. His book, he explained,
not only described the road as far as Bu Gerara, but said that close
by there was a hill to the west, standing in the same wady—Qwaytin
pointed out a hill standing by itself to the west as a conclusive proof
that his book was correct—and that a road ran past the foot of the
hill that, if followed, led to a big hill, on the top of which was a well in
which the treasures of three Sultans were buried. He said he had
seen the road at the foot of the hill in the morning. He had never
followed it to see where it led to; but he had seen a hill some years
before in the direction of which the road was going, and had noticed
a lot of pigeons alight on the top of it, and thought that perhaps it
was the one the book referred to, and that they had gone there to
drink from the well.
His mind was fairly obsessed with the idea of treasure, and I could
get him to talk of nothing else.
I tried to get some information from him about Farafra and Iddaila
—but it was of no use; he got round again to treasure at once. The
last time he was in Farafra, he said, he was on his way back from
Tibesti, where he said he had found a seam of diamond that stood
up two feet above the ground like a wall, and ran for a long distance.
He had chopped some lumps of diamond off and they cut glass. But
the Senussi sheykhs had apropriated them for the benefit of the
Senussia. He was clearly very sore on the subject.
I tried to switch him off on to the Bedayat country—but it was
almost equally useless. He said he knew of a number of places there
where there were ruins that probably contained treasure and asked
to see my map.
He studied it for some time, asking me to read out the names and
then declared that it was all wrong, and asked for a pencil and piece
of paper, saying that he would draw me a better one. He laid the
paper on the ground, sucked the end of the pencil and began to
draw the roads joining the places he was going to tell about, now
and then consulting a cheap bar compass to make sure that he had
got them running in the right direction. This framework, when
completed, looked more like a broken spider’s web than anything
else.
He next proceeded to place on his “map” a number of enormous
dots, to represent the positions of the places he wished to insert in it,
and began to reel out a lot of names that are not found on any
printed map. The conversation commenced to become interesting,
and a good deal more in my line than fables relating to buried
treasure.
But the names given to places by Arabs, Tibbus and Sudanese
are not easily remembered, or even grasped, the first time they are
heard. I allowed him to run on until he had completed his list, and
then took the pencil from him and began to write opposite his dots
the names of the places they stood for, and their distances and
bearings from each other. Qwaytin at once became impatient, as I
found he always did whenever I questioned him as to his statements,
or he saw me writing them down, and I was not able to get more
than two or three of the names before he took himself off in a huff.
He was a most exasperating man to get information from. If I
questioned him about some part of the world that he had visited, he
would very often give me no information at all. Sometimes a
suggestion on my part that perhaps he did not know anything about
it, would put him on his mettle and cause him to divulge some of his
knowledge; but as often as not it only had the effect of making him
reel out a lot of lying statements that probably appealed to his
yokelish mind as being facetious, but which subsequent questioning
showed to be incorrect—every statement that he made I had to
check in order to guard against this peculiar sense of humour that he
possessed.
I usually verified his information by getting him to repeat what he
had said after an interval of a week or more, by which time I
calculated that, if he had lied, he would have forgotten what he had
said.
The first time I caught him misleading me, I pulled him up. But this
proved to be quite the wrong line to take, and nearly had the effect of
making him withhold his information altogether. He was greatly
incensed, and for many days he would tell me nothing at all. Then
late one night, while I was sitting up, waiting for a star to come on to
the meridian in order to get a latitude, just when it had almost got
there and I was going to take the observation, Qwaytin came quietly
up and said that he would tell me about the country of the Bedayat. I
had to give up the observation and go and sit down in the tent,
where under a coat thrown over my knees, under pretence of feeling
cold, so that he should not see me doing so, I took down all he said
in writing.
The information that he volunteered in this way I found to be
nearly always reliable—but he generally chose some time when I
was going to bed, or in the middle of some other work, to come and
impart his knowledge, and broke off at once if he saw me writing it
down. During the day’s march, too, I would sometimes get him in a
communicative mood, and he would describe to me the route that
joined two places. The difficulty of writing all he said down before I
forgot it was easily solved in this case, by stopping to take a
compass bearing, as he had often seen me do before, and then by
writing in my route book the information he had volunteered under
pretence of keeping up the survey.
Collecting data from natives on which to base a map is not quite
so simple as it sounds. The habit that so many bedawin have of
deliberately misleading one, makes it necessary to check the routes
described most carefully. But even bona-fide information collected in
this way will make a most inaccurate map unless some means for
adjusting it can be found.
The plan I adopted was to get the data whenever possible, in the
form of through routes, joining two places whose positions had been
previously fixed. Roads so described can then be plotted on the
map, their accuracy tested and the route as a whole adjusted, so as
to fit the positions of the places that are already known. In this way
the errors can be minimised as far as possible.
But collecting this information from Qwaytin was anything but
easy. Like nearly all the bedawin he was entirely illiterate, and so
could not give me the spelling of the names of the places that he
gave me in the Libyan Desert, the Sudan, Tibesti and Endi, and
these could not be found on any map. Many of them were almost
unpronounceable, and in some cases introduced sounds that could
not be reproduced by even the Arabic alphabet. They were
presumably those of the Tibbu or Bedayat languages—the latter
being a tongue that Qway had described to me as sounding like “the
chattering of monkeys.”
It will easily be imagined that to take down a long string of new
names such as these, when rapidly reeled off, was a matter of some
difficulty.
But it seemed worth taking some trouble to get them. I had been
asked to get any information I could about the unknown parts of the
desert, for the Senussi question was in the air—the Government
were by no means so fast asleep as people were led to suppose—
and at that time, moreover, a rod was being laid in pickle for ’Ali
Dinar, the Sultan of Darfur, whose goings on did not always meet
with the approval of the authorities; so information on these unknown
parts was likely to be of some practical use, beyond spoiling the
virginal whiteness of this part of the map of Africa.
Qwaytin’s knowledge of the least known parts of North and
Central Africa was profound, and he had the great virtue, from my
point of view, of being so densely stupid that he was unable to
realise the value of all that he let out. Before I had done with him, he
gave me enough data to form a fairly complete map of the unknown
portions of the Libyan Desert, with a great deal of the Bedayat
country and Endi. In addition I learnt from him much information of
the orography of the desert and the distribution of the sand dunes.
The map when completed contained the names of some seventy
places that, I believe, had not previously been recorded; many of
them have been found since, approximately in the position in which
they were shown. Maps of this kind do not, of course, err on the side
of accuracy, but they have their uses—principally in giving future
travellers that definite objective to look for, that I had so greatly
needed when starting work in this desert. If I had been able to collect
during my first year the information I eventually obtained, mainly
from Qwaytin, in my last, I should certainly have tackled the job in an
entirely different way.
The morning after our arrival at Bu Gerara, the men fell seriously
to work to dig about in the site, with the result that by midday a few
pieces of broken pottery and glass and two or three more small
copper coins had been unearthed. As I wished to ascertain whether
any water was to be found in the well, in the afternoon, much to their
disgust, I set the men to clear it out.
Qwaytin’s men, after they had been working for a short time,
downed tools, declaring that that sort of work was a job that was only
fit for the fellahin, and beneath the dignity of the Arabs. It was not
until I pointed out that the well was the most likely place in which to
look for treasure, and reminded them that the three Sultans were
said to have buried theirs in the well on the top of the hill described
in Qwaytin’s book, that they could be induced to resume their work.
Then they fell to with a will and soon had the well cleared out to the
bottom.
It was about nine feet in diameter, and eight feet deep. On the
side towards the site of Bu Gerara, a ramp, cut in its side, led down
to the bottom. The part of the desert in which it had been sunk was
covered with a thin layer of rock, below which lay a bed of clay,
extending down to another layer of rock, which formed the bottom of
the well. Before we commenced to dig, the well was completely filled
with sand that had drifted into it. About half-way down our
expectations were raised by the sand becoming damp; but though
the well was cleared out to the very bottom, and the sand got
considerably damper as we descended, no water was to be seen.
This was a considerable disappointment, as a well at this point on
the long Derb et Tawil would have been of the greatest value to the
travellers using the road.
The nut of a dom palm that I dug up, and the trunks of some palm
trees that had been built into the walls, showed that, at one time,
there must have been a plentiful supply of water in the
neighbourhood. The place was probably a small fortified station built,
or at all events occupied, during Ptolemaic times, to protect the well,
which from its position on “the long road” must once have been of
considerable importance.
The existence of fossilised tree-trunks and old river-beds in the
Libyan Desert shows conclusively that, in the remote past, this
portion of the world must have been a well-watered country. But
whether this desiccation reached its limit before historical times, or
whether it is still going on is one of the most disputed points in
connection with this district. The failure of the well at Bu Gerara may,
of course, have been due to some purely local cause, which was not
apparent. But in the absence of some explanation as to its nature,
this little abandoned settlement affords a very strong argument in
favour of the view that the water supply—apart from that derived
from the artesian wells—has failed appreciably in comparatively
recent times, owing probably to a decrease in the rainfall. From this
point of view, our discovery was of some importance, though the
place itself was of no consequence at all.
But it was found by following instructions in Qwaytin’s book of
treasure. Works of this description, to put it mildly, are regarded in
Egypt with a considerable amount of incredulity. This scepticism, I
own, I fully shared—until my discovery of Bu Gerara.
Since then, however, I have taken a different view of the case,
and believe that the almost universal suspicion with which these
books are regarded, may not, after all, be entirely justified, and that
part of it at least is due to the strong prejudice that so often exists
towards any native beliefs or customs that do not admit of a ready
explanation, or that savour in any way of the occult, or of buried
riches.
These books of treasure, it is true, are mostly written by natives of
the astrologer class, who clearly expect their readers to rely largely
upon charms and various occult means to discover the hidden riches
to which they profess to give the key. Many of them lived in the
Middle Ages, but the race has not died out. There are hundreds of
the same class of men still to be found practising their arts on the
credulous natives of Egypt, and one of the principal subjects upon
which they are even now consulted is the recovery of buried
treasure. There is a sheykh el afrit (ruler of spirits) in almost every
village, to whom the inhabitants resort to induce him by means of the
pool of ink, or some similar method, to foretell the future or to guide
them to where treasure has been buried. Some of them perhaps
believe in their own powers, but the majority are probably little more
than impostors. So far, so bad.
But there appears to be a very fair amount of grain among all the
chaff contained in these books, for in many cases they not only refer
to places, such as Esna, which are perfectly well known, but they
describe the roads that lead to them, when these roads are still in
use.
For this reason I think they are worth careful—or perhaps it would
be better to say cautious—consideration. It is true that in many
cases they mention places and describe roads which perhaps were
perfectly well known at the time when the books were written, but
that cannot now be identified; but this proves nothing. There are
many old sanded-up wells, little deserted oases and small outpost
stations of the Roman and other periods, such, for instance, as Bu
Gerara, scattered about in the desert, and the vestiges of many old
roads are still to be seen, whose ultimate destination is now
unknown, but which, I believe, lead to these abandoned oases,
which very probably, in the fifteenth century, when the book of
Johnson Pasha’s that has already been referred to was written, were
populous villages and oases; but which, owing to failure of the water
supply, the encroachment of the sand, or to some other cause, have
long since become deserted.
On these grounds I believe these books contain—among a great
deal that is useless except as a curiosity—some valuable information
as to old places in the desert that have long since been lost to sight,
and whose very names may now be forgotten, information that is of
a geographical character.
Why not? Is it the age of the book, or the fact that the descriptions
in it are associated with magic and hidden treasure, that presents the
difficulty? If it be the former, ask any archæologist whether he would
hesitate to look for the site of some ancient city, because the only
references to it were to be found in some old papyrus or temple
hieroglyphics; besides, did not the Royal Geographical Society have
a paper read before them on the identity of the Garden of Eden with
Mesopotamia? The description that led to the identification being
taken from the Book of Genesis, which was written long before any
of these books were thought about.
If it be the treasure that presents the difficulty, has there not been
endless discussion among geographers as to the identity of the
Wakwak Islands and other places, mentioned in the “Arabian
Nights,” a large proportion of the stories in which have no
pretensions to be anything more than fairy-tales—and certainly there
is enough buried treasure mentioned in them to satisfy the most
ardent fortune hunter in Egypt.
Are not educated Europeans, even now, continually setting out to
look for the fabulous riches hidden, a hundred or two years ago, by
some old pirate or buccaneer, usually on an island—say, in the West
Indies? Of the identity of the island there is generally no doubt at all
—but the treasure does not seem to be often found!
We stayed for a day or two more at Bu Gerara, during which time
the men found a small earthenware pot, some broken fragments of
glass and pottery and one or two more copper coins—and that was
all! Then as we had drawn a blank, so far as treasure was concerned
at Bu Gerara, the men all wanted to be taken off to the hill where the
riches of the three Sultans was buried with the least possible delay.
Qwaytin was the most insistent of them all, evidently assuming that I
had given up my plan of going to Farafra and had committed myself
to a whole season’s treasure hunting instead.
The hill where the mystical Sultans had buried their riches was not
far off, though it did not lie in the direction in which I had intended to
go; but it was in a part of the desert that had never been mapped, so
I thought it best to humour him once more and let him take me there.
We got off early the next morning. Qwaytin led us straight towards
the hill in the wady, near the foot of which we found the promised
road.
As we increased our distance from the cliff lying to the north of Bu
Gerara, the surroundings of the place could be better seen. The view
to the north was, of course, cut off by the cliff, which as soon as we
had got some distance from it, could be seen stretching away for
many miles to the east, forming the continuation of the escarpment
that bounded the Kharga depression on its northern side.
To the south-east was a considerable expanse of elevated
ground, evidently the plateau in which lay some small depressions I
had found to the north of ’Ain Amur. So far as I could see, there was
no cliff on the northern side of this tableland, the ground only sloping
up to it from the lower level. A well—’Ain Embares—that I had tried
to reach by way of the chain of small depressions, with little doubt
was situated between the foot of the scarp of the main plateau and
this high ground that lay to its south.
On the west, the scarp of the plateau was visible for a long way.
Qwaytin’s old road led us in a southerly direction, roughly parallel to
the cliff of a detached plateau. It was chiefly noticeable for the large
number of small patches of bushes, known as roadhs, that were
scattered along it. These seemed to be a favourite feeding ground
for gazelle, to judge from the number of tracks we saw, most of
which, however, were fairly old ones. In one place, instead of the
usual small bushes, a couple of small acacia (sunt) trees were seen.
We sighted the hill we were in search of in the afternoon, and, an
hour before camping, reached the top of a steep descent on to lower
ground, about two hundred and fifty feet below us, that Qwaytin said
was called in his book the “Negeb er Rumi” (descent of the
European). The road down to the valley below was obviously to
some extent an artificial one, and, though extremely steep, was
negotiated without difficulty. We pitched our camp below.
This lower ground was so covered with sand and pebbles that I
was unable to see whether we were still on the limestone. But the
ground level rose again considerably as we neared the hill, and for
the last part of the way the limestone was showing again on the
surface. Possibly a fault exists in the neighbourhood.
We reached the hill itself at noon, and camped on its southern
side. It was a small limestone-capped hill, chiefly remarkable for the
extent to which the limestone was honeycombed by the wind-driven
sand. At the foot of the hill, near the camp, was a boulder that had
evidently rolled down from the top. It was almost four feet in
diameter, and literally riddled with holes like a sponge.
As soon as the camp was pitched, the men rushed up the hill and
began minutely searching every nook and cranny for the reported
well, while Qwaytin wandered disconsolately along its base, vainly
searching for the broken glass that his book had foretold would be
found there. He thought that perhaps he had mistaken the hill, and
said, if we could not find the well or any glass, that we had better
follow the road farther, to see if there was not another hill upon it that
might be the one referred to in his book; but to waste any more time
in looking for that hill was the last thing I intended to do.
By sunset the well had not been found, though every inch of that
hill must have been most carefully examined several times.
This was a serious blow to Qwaytin’s hopes, and a distinct wet
blanket to the whole caravan with the exception of Ibrahim, who, as
he explained to me, would not have minded a little bakhshish, but
would not in the least know what to do with sacks of gold, or
diamonds, even if he found them.
In the evening Qwaytin, Abd er Rahman, Dahab and I held a
serious consultation. The position of the hill tallied so well with the
description of it in Qwaytin’s book that he felt sure that it was the
right one; but he was terribly worried over the failure to find the well.
Dahab said that he thought that probably it was there all right, but
that it was hidden by enchantment, and that it would be necessary
for us to burn some incense before it would become visible.
Qwaytin cheered up rather at this idea; but said that we had no
incense with us, and added it was awkward stuff to play with, as it
was most important that we should have the right kind, and should
be quite sure that we knew how to use it.
Abd er Rahman agreed with this, and was very emphatic in saying
that we ought to be quite sure that we had enough of it, as he had
heard a story of a Maghrabi Arab, who had joined with two fellahin in
a search for treasure that was buried in some tombs in the side of a
hill that had a spell over them, and so could not be opened without
proper formalities. They found the place where the tombs were
hidden, and then had gone through the necessary incantations and
burnt some incense and the tombs immediately opened. The two
fellahin had then gone in to collect the treasure while the Maghrabi
had remained outside to look after their camels and to keep the
incense burning. Unfortunately the incense ran short, and, as soon
as the last of it had been burnt, the tombs closed again with a bang,
burying the two unfortunate fellahin alive. The Maghrabi had then
gone home with their camels, and Abd er Rahman was clearly of
opinion that that Arab had done something that was quite
exceptionally clever.
He suggested that, to be on the safe side, we had better go and
fetch Sheykh Ibrahim, the Sheykh el Afrit from Dakhla, to come out
and do the necessary incantations. But this did not meet with
Qwaytin’s approval at all. Sheykh Ibrahim, he said, was a member of
the Senussia and he knew all about him. He had the right books and
the proper incense and was very clever at his work. But he was such
a bad man that sometimes the spirits would not obey him; and he
pointed out that if an afrit went on strike in the middle of the
performance, we might find ourselves rather badly in the soup.
After much serious discussion, we came to the conclusion that, in
the circumstances, it was no use for us to waste any more time in
examining the hill, but that at the end of the trip we would go and get

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Introduction to Forensic and Criminal

Psychology 7th Edition Dennis Howitt

F01 Introduction to Forensic and Criminal Psychology 95787.indd 1 09/02/2022 12:44

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F01 Introduction to Forensic and Criminal Psychology 95787.indd 2 09/02/2022 12:45

Dennis Howitt Loughborough University

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First published 2002 (print)

© Pearson Education Limited 2002, 2006, 2009, 2011 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-292-29578-7 (print)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Image on cover and chapter titles: maxkabakov/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images

F01 Introduction to Forensic and Criminal Psychology 95787.indd 4 09/02/2022 13:53

F01 Introduction to Forensic and Criminal Psychology 95787.indd 5 09/02/2022 12:45

List of figures, tables and boxes xix

1 What is forensic and criminal psychology? 1

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21 Mental disorders and crime 450

F01 Introduction to Forensic and Criminal Psychology 95787.indd 8 09/02/2022 12:45

List of figures, tables and boxes xix

1 What is forensic and criminal psychology? 1

2 The social context of crime 16

3 Crime and the public 29

F01 Introduction to Forensic and Criminal Psychology 95787.indd 9 09/02/2022 12:45

What is fear of crime? 33

6 Juvenile offenders and beyond 85

F01 Introduction to Forensic and Criminal Psychology 95787.indd 10 09/02/2022 12:45

Continuity of childhood and adult antisocial behaviour 91

7 Theft and other crimes against property 114

8 Violent offenders 137

9 Sexual offenders 1: rapists 166

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Patterns in rape 178

10 Sexual offenders 2: paedophiles

11 Police psychology 221

12 Terrorism and hostage-taking incidents 255

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The nature of terrorism 258

13 Eyewitness testimony 280

14 Profile analysis 1: FBI-style offender

15 Profile analysis 2: investigative psychology,

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Criminal profiling – the research-based approach 328

16 False allegations 343

17 False and true confessions 365

18 Lies, lie detecting and credibility 1:

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Strategic questioning and the Strategic Use of

19 Lies, lie detecting and credibility 2:

20 Children as witnesses 425

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21 Mental disorders and crime 450

22 Mental, personality and intellectual problems

23 Judges and lawyers 487

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Underlying narrative of legal arguments 493

24 Juries and decision making 509

25 Effective prison 533

26 Psychological treatments for prisoners