Psychology’s role in addressing the causes and treatment of criminal behavior.

(By Lindsay Beller)

Sometimes it is easy to deduce what led someone to commit a crime. Take the woman who, traumatized by prior sexual assault, severely reacts to an unwanted advance and finds herself charged with attempted murder. Or the man who was raised in an abusive home and is later arrested for beating his own children. In other cases, the reasons are much less clear. Why does a successful executive, who makes a good paycheck and leads a happy life, risk it all by committing a white-collar crime? How does a person from a lawabiding family grow up to shock his neighbors and loved ones when it is discovered that he is the serial killer who has been terrorizing his community? Did something happen earlier in these people’s lives that we simply don’t know about, or are their brains hardwired for criminal activity?

The causes of criminal behavior have long been up for debate, and today there are still more questions than answers. Are criminals born prone to a life of aggression and anti-social behavior? Are they products of their environment? Is it a combination of both nature and nurture? Research indicates that genetics is responsible for about 50 percent of criminal behavior and that environment accounts for the rest. Many experts argue that inheriting a particular gene doesn’t necessarily predispose someone to a life of crime—but add in an abusive or violent childhood or another negative environmental factor and that risk greatly increases.

What Role Does Environment Play?

Complicating the equation is the notion that while many of those charged with criminal acts share a common set of personality and behavioral traits— such as impulsivity and the need for immediate gratification—the wide range of offenders and offenses makes generalization difficult. Ask Dr. Michael Fogel what causes criminal behavior and his answer is, “It depends.”

“There is no 100 percent certainty that an individual who possesses certain characteristics will engage in a crime. Life gets in the way,” said Dr. Fogel, associate professor of forensic psychology at The Chicago School’s Chicago Campus. “When you understand where the individual came from, what they were exposed to, and the environment in which they grew up, you can understand why they engaged in the behavior that they did.”

Many experts argue that inheriting a particular gene doesn’t necessarily predispose someone to a life of crime—but add in an abusive or violent childhood or another negative environmental factor and that risk greatly increases.

Researchers have long studied the idea that the nurturing an individual does or doesn’t receive influences behavioral development, and found environmental factors such as coercive parenting styles, physical and sexual abuse, neglect, and family conflict are related to antisocial behavior. For example, research has shown that trauma during childhood can lead to aggressive or even criminal behavior. Dr. Kendell Coker, assistant professor of forensic psychology at The Chicago School, has conducted research on the relationship between trauma and delinquent behavior among inner-city minority youth. In one study that explored the association between these two concepts, he found youth who are exposed to more trauma have poorer social problem-solving skills, which in turn is related to higher delinquency.

“Trauma has been shown to have a large impact on youth, and it can also lead to criminal behavior, but not because the kid all of a sudden sees something bad and they go bad,” Dr. Coker said. “It’s because they start to see the world as a hostile place and their source of protection wasn’t there when they needed it, so they feel like they need to protect themselves. A lot of juvenile misconduct happens in social situations. Juveniles are more susceptible to peer pressure and they don’t think about the consequences of their actions.”

In an effort to understand the extent to which both environment and genetics impact antisocial behavior, numerous twin and adoption studies have looked at the traits and personalities of identical and fraternal twins raised in the same and separate environments (identical twins share all of their genes while fraternal twins share 50 percent of them).

Studies also looked at adoptees, and whether they exhibited similar traits to their adopted parents. Results have varied. Some research found evidence that genetics determined antisocial behavior while other studies concluded environmental factors played a stronger role. Still other research has found that an interaction between genes and environment predicts criminal behavior.

British psychologist Francis Galton initiated the first twin studies in the late 19th century. Considered a pioneer of behavioral genetics, Galton’s research led to the exploration of the nature vs. nurture debate. His interest in heredity was inspired by his cousin Charles Darwin’s book about evolution, The Origin of Species, as well as his belief that intelligence and other “human mental abilities and personality traits” were passed down through heredity. His ideas represented the beginnings of the eugenics movement, which aimed to remove “undesirable” people from the gene pool—a movement that gained popularity in the United States in the early 20th century, but ultimately hindered research into the links between biology and criminal behavior.

Are Genetics to Blame?

Spurred in part by racist attitudes toward large waves of immigrants arriving from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe, eugenics researchers believed if they could control which human genes were passed on, they could eradicate conditions and traits including mental retardation and learning disabilities (or “feeblemindedness,” as it was called), physical disabilities, criminality, epilepsy, and alcoholism, which were considered a drain on public resources. At the time, a limited scientific understanding of heredity was based on research of dominant and recessive genes in plants, and the notion that if animal breeders could select desirable traits for their livestock, the same idea could apply to humans. The Eugenics Record Office was founded to compile genetic information from families, but the data was ambiguous and collected by many individuals who had their own prejudices about what made someone fit to reproduce. While no scientific data confirmed the heritability of most traits, there was widespread support for the movement that led to institutionalization policies and forced sterilization laws. In 1907, Indiana became the first of 30 states to legalize involuntary sterilization. Although the eugenics movement was scientifically discredited after revelations of Nazi experiments on Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other groups during World War II, the last state law was not repealed until 1981. In that time, estimates of up to 70,000 men and women underwent forced sterilizations and thousands were institutionalized against their will.

Despite the declining credibility of eugenics, researchers continued efforts to link biology and criminality, and some unethical research practices persisted in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the “Supermale” syndrome posited that men with an XYY chromosome pattern were thought to exhibit aggressive and antisocial behavior. Although subsequent research invalidated this idea, many newborns, juvenile delinquents, and prisoners were screened for the extra chromosome without consent, leading to further stigmatization for a condition that ultimately had no scientific basis.

But since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, which identified thousands of new genes, there has been a renewed, yet cautious, interest in the link between biology and criminal behavior, and the research has only recently begun to gain a fragile credibility. Certain genes, like one that regulates the production of the MAOA enzyme, for example, have been linked to aggressive and impulsive behavior. But while about 100 studies have shown a link between genes and crime, many researchers reject the theory of biological determinism—that our genes determine our personalities and who we become—and say that environment plays an important role in whether and how a gene is expressed.

The brain has become the latest frontier in the quest to understand criminal behavior, particularly of psychopaths and violent offenders. In the growing field of neurocriminology, which is the application of neuroscience to criminology, researchers have documented differences between the criminal brain and the “normal” brain.

Dr. Adrian Raine, a psychologist at University of Pennsylvania, has conducted studies that show a correlation between criminal behavior and the amygdala—“ the guardian angel of behavior” as he described it to an audience at the University of Missouri. The amygdala is located in the prefrontal cortex and is associated with emotion and fear—the idea being the less fear someone has, the less likely he is to have a conscience guide his behavior. In one study, he found an 18 percent volume reduction in the amygdala of psychopaths compared to non-psychopaths.

Dr. Raine was also part of a longitudinal study that examined the fear-conditioning response of 3-year-olds in the island nation of Mauritius. Based on the theory that a dysfunctional amygdala leads to poor fear conditioning and increases the risk of criminal behavior, his team examined children early in life and, 20 years later, gathered information on whether they committed crimes as adults. To measure their level of anticipatory fear, the children wore headphones and listened to a neutral sound followed a few seconds later by a harsh noise. This was repeated several times, so the children knew that the unpleasant sound would always follow the first one. If the child’s “sweat rate” increased while anticipating the second noise, this suggested a normally functioning amygdala. The follow-up study revealed that many of the children who had not shown anticipatory fear during that test had become convicted criminals. Despite his observation that “bad brains lead to bad behavior,” Dr. Raine shares the belief with many other researchers that one’s environment can still impact whether someone becomes a criminal. “It’s not biology versus environment. It’s biology plus environment,” he told The Times of London in a 2010 interview.

At least one psychologist rejects the notions that biology or environment leads to criminal behavior. In his book, Inside the Criminal Mind, Dr. Stanton E. Samenow argued that regardless of their background, criminals think differently than non-criminals—that they make a choice to commit a crime, and should be held fully responsible for their actions.

Blaming one’s environment or even a mental illness paints the offender as a victim, he writes, and research on genetic links to criminality has been inconclusive. Instead criminal patterns such as lying and breaking rules begin during early childhood and culminate into a life of crime. “The person who makes crime a way of life has a radically different way of thinking from the individual who behaves responsibly,” he wrote in the book. “The two mentalities are so different, it’s as though the criminals were a different breed.”

Based on this theory, Dr. Samenow—who collaborated with and built on work started by his mentor, Dr. Samuel Yochelson, in the 1960s—proposed that the only way to rehabilitate a criminal was for him to change the way he thinks, which would lead to better behavior. In their 1977 book The Criminal Personality, the authors identified 52 “thinking errors,” such as poor decision making, failure to consider injury to others, and lack of trust. The notion that criminals demonstrate errors in their thinking has become a critical element in cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), which is considered the most effective treatment to keep offenders from committing further crimes.

What Treatments Work?

Advances in treating offenders have come a long way since 1974 when sociologist Robert Martinson reviewed 231 studies that evaluated the impact of rehabilitation programs and found they had little impact on recidivism. The media seized on the message that “nothing works,” repudiating the criminal justice system’s focus on the rehabilitation of criminals. The findings, splashed on magazine covers and in newspaper articles, contributed to the rise to the “get tough on crime” approach in the United States.

Cognitive behavioral therapy emerged as the treatment with the greatest impact in reducing the recurrence of criminal behavior in juveniles and adults.

But in the decades that followed, even as the criminal justice system became more punitive, cognitive behavioral therapy emerged as the treatment with the greatest impact in reducing the recurrence of criminal behavior in juveniles and adults, and in decreasing the incidence of depression and substance abuse. One 2005 study found that CBT reduced recidivism by an average of 25 percent, with some programs finding reductions of more than 50 percent. Even high-risk offenders were responsive to the treatment.

CBT—a blend of cognitive theory and its focus on internal thought processes with behavioral theory and its emphasis on external behaviors—teaches offenders to identify distortions in their thinking and understand that altering the way they think will lead to positive changes in behavior. Offenders might be taught coping or problem-solving skills. Dr. Nancy Zarse, associate professor of forensic psychology at The Chicago School, explained how the treatment worked for an inmate she treated during a 16-week cognitive behavioral therapy program. When asked to describe the crime that he had committed—from start to finish—the offender told of a midnight visit from an acquaintance inviting him to help steal $800 tires from a car that had broken down.

“We walked through, from that moment on, how many thinking errors he had and how many rationalizations there were between him leaving that house and getting to the actual car,” she said. “Part of what I wanted to help him see was at how many different points he could have made a different choice and not gone to the crime scene. Because once you’re there, what’s the likelihood that you’re going to turn away?”

When the program concluded, the inmate told her that the exercise was the most valuable part of his treatment. “For him, that’s when he realized, wow, that’s what I’ve been doing,” Dr. Zarse said. “Part of what you want to teach in cognitive behavioral treatment is those earlier decisions, those earlier thinking errors and cognitive distortions, that have a pro-criminal influence as opposed to a pro-social influence.”

Other treatments such as behavioral therapy and psychotherapy show little evidence of being as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy in treating criminals. One study that found that CBT programs were 30 percent more effective than behavioral ones, while a

2007 report from the National Institute of Corrections stated, “Traditional psychotherapy is egocentric; it helps individuals solve their personal problems, feel better about themselves, and fulfill their inner goals and expectations. This egocentric psychotherapy, in and of itself, has failed to have significant impact on changing the thinking, attitudes, and behaviors of offenders.”

As CBT became the widely accepted treatment for offenders, an evolution in risk assessments has resulted in more accurate evaluations and treatment plans. At first professional judgment was used to predict criminal behavior until the 1970s, when psychologists recognized that risk assessments needed to more evidence behind them. They began to consider such factors as the history of criminality, substance abuse, past employment, violent behavior, social networks, and age, which improved accuracy and credibility. Assessments further evolved to consider factors like the offender’s current situation resulting in more targeted interventions. In the last few years, a supervision component has helped ensure that offenders are compliant with their treatment, which reduces their risk of further criminal behavior.

As risk assessments improved, psychologists D.A. Andrews and James Bonta developed the risk-need-responsivity (RNR) model of offender rehabilitation. First used in Canada, the model is considered the most effective way to assess and treat criminals, especially higher-risk offenders who traditionally weren’t as likely to receive rehabilitation services as low-risk offenders. The RNR model is based on three principles that guide interventions: the offender’s level of risk, the services that address criminogenic needs, and the types of treatment programs to provide.

Providing interventions that target the offender’s criminogenic needs is considered critical to overall success. As opposed to static risk factors linked to criminal behavior, such as one’s history of violence, criminogenic needs are dynamic risk factors that can be altered to bring about more positive outcomes. For example, if all of an offender’s friends are criminals, a treatment program would encourage him to avoid bad influences. Or if the offender has too much time on his hands—time that typically gets him into trouble—a treatment program might introduce a new activity and support participation.

Although research is producing evidence-based treatments that have a positive impact on recidivism, such advances alone often aren’t enough to magically turn prior offenders into law-abiding citizens. Such programs cost money to implement, and lack of funding is an ever-present impediment. In 2009, there were more than 1.6 million incarcerated in state or federal prisons, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, but the recession has led to budget cuts in rehabilitation programs. Last year, California cut 36 percent in funding for such initiatives, and numerous other states have made or are considering cuts, including Texas, Kansas, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. “Psychological factors play significant roles in criminal behavior, but it takes time to treat them, and oftentimes there aren’t resources to do so,” Dr. Fogel said. “How much rehabilitation can occur when there isn’t money provided for programs?”