Improving Negative Emotion Recognition in Young Offenders Reduces Subsequent Crime

Background

Children with antisocial behaviour show deficits in the perception of emotional expressions in others that may contribute to the development and persistence of antisocial and aggressive behaviour. Current treatments for antisocial youngsters are limited in effectiveness. It has been argued that more attention should be devoted to interventions that target neuropsychological correlates of antisocial behaviour. This study examined the effect of emotion recognition training on criminal behaviour.

Methods

Emotion recognition and crime levels were studied in 50 juvenile offenders. Whilst all young offenders received their statutory interventions as the study was conducted, a subgroup of twenty-four offenders also took part in a facial affect training aimed at improving emotion recognition. Offenders in the training and control groups were matched for age, SES, IQ and lifetime crime level. All offenders were tested twice for emotion recognition performance, and recent crime data were collected after the testing had been completed.

Results

Before the training there were no differences between the groups in emotion recognition, with both groups displaying poor fear, sadness and anger recognition. After the training fear, sadness and anger recognition improved significantly in juvenile offenders in the training group. Although crime rates dropped in all offenders in the 6 months following emotion testing, only the group of offenders who had received the emotion training showed a significant reduction in the severity of the crimes they committed.

Conclusions

The study indicates that emotion recognition can be relatively easily improved in youths who engage in serious antisocial and criminal behavior. The results suggest that improved emotion recognition has the potential to reduce the severity of reoffending.     

Relative Mortality among Criminals in Norway and the Relation to Drug and Alcohol Related Offenses

Background

Registered offenders are known to have a higher mortality rate, but given the high proportion of offenders with drug-addiction, particularly among offenders with a custodial sentence, higher mortality is expected. While the level of overall mortality compared to the non-criminal population is of interest in itself, we also estimate the risk of death by criminal records related to substance abuse and other types of criminal acts, and separate between those who receive a prison sentence or not.

Methods

Age-adjusted relative risks of death for 2000–2008 were studied in a population based dataset. Our dataset comprise the total Norwegian population of 2.9 million individuals aged 15–69 years old in 1999, of whom 10% had a criminal record in the 1992–1999 period.

Results

Individuals with a criminal record have twice the relative risk (RR) of death of the control group (non-offenders). Males with a record of use/possession of drugs and a prison record have an 11.9 RR (females, 15.6); males with a drug record but no prison record have a 6.9 RR (females 10.5). Males imprisoned for driving under the influence of substances have a 4.4 RR (females 5.6); males with a record of driving under the influence but no prison sentence have a 3.2 RR (females 6.5). Other male offenders with a prison record have a 2.8 RR (females 3.7); other male offenders with no prison record have a 1.7 RR (females 2.3).

Conclusion

Significantly higher mortality was found for people with a criminal record, also for those without any record of drug use. Mortality is much higher for those convicted of substance-related crimes: more so for drug- than for alcohol-related crimes and for women.     

Drug-Related Disorders and the Criminal and Clinical Background of the Prison Population of S?o Paulo State,Brazil

Objective

To analyze the association between drug (DAD) and alcohol (AAD) abuse and dependency and criminal and clinical background by gender of prisoners in São Paulo, Brazil.

Method

Cross-sectional study, random sample stratified by administrative district, from which prisons and prisoners were selected via random, multistage sampling. Psychiatric diagnoses were made with the CIDI 2.1. Lifetime prevalence and 95% CI were calculated and adjusted via analysis of complex samples. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was carried out with four categories of dependent variables: presence AAD; presence DAD; presence of another mental disorder; no mental disorders. For female alcohol and drug abuse and dependency (ADAD) were combined into a single category.

Results

The sample was composed by 1809 interviewed prisoners (1192 men and 617 women). Prevalence of DAD and AAD was 25.2% and 15.6%, respectively, among female prisoners, and 26.5% and 18.5% among males. Male prisoners with DAD were more likely to have a criminal record as an adolescent (OR 2.17), to be a repeat offender (OR 2.85), and to have committed a property crime (OR 2.18). Prisoners with AAD were repeat offenders (OR 2.18). Among female prisoners, ADAD was associated with repeat offenses (OR 3.39), a criminal record as an adolescent (OR 9.24), a clinical or infectious condition (OR 5.09), another health problem (OR 3.04), and violent crime (OR 2.5).

Conclusion

The study confirmed an association between drug-use disorders and the criminal and clinical background in the study population. Prisoners with such disorders were more likely to be repeat offenders and to have a criminal record as adolescents. Among female prisoners disorders were also associated with violent crime and health problems, while among males they were associated with property crime. These patterns in clinical and criminal backgrounds illustrate the need for social rehabilitation programs and specific medical treatment for prison populations.     

A funny thing happened on the way to mass subjugation: propensity,opportunity, and irony in two accounts of the crime decline

This article first uses the analytical lenses of crime opportunity, criminal propensity, and routine activity theory to evaluate Wendel et al.’s (2016) plausible and compelling “more drugs, less crime” hypothesis, the latest attempt to explain the crime decline that began in the 1990s. The authors’ present exposition of the hypothesis is beleaguered by methodological problems that jeopardize the validity of its central claims. An alternative media-consumption hypothesis is then briefly outlined, which suggests that changes in media-consumption patterns beginning in the 1980s were a powerful catalyst for reductions in street crime. Because both hypotheses identify mechanisms that reduce both the opportunities and the propensities to commit crime, they stand out from the majority of crime-decline accounts which are presently oriented toward opportunity almost exclusively. Both hypotheses also happen to subvert conventional wisdom in ironic ways.     

Visibilities,invisibilities and twilight zones at the crime scene in Portugal

The Police are the first element of a chain of custody culminating in the court. The documents they produce mediate the understandings between the crime scene and the court. Based on the formal rules, the police give visibility to the narrative and assign legitimacy and credibility to their performance. However, the decision to turn certain aspects of the narrative visible, leaving others in a twilight zone may have repercussions in the production of a verdict. Based in a qualitative analysis of three Portuguese judicial proceedings in this paper I explore how the narrative constructed by the police, based on what they see and what is unseen, travels between subepistemic cultures. Looking at the visibilities, invisibilities and twilight zones, I will try to understand how police forces at the crime scene in Portugal construct their narratives through the use of biological traces and how these narratives are part of the construction of the evidence. I argue that in criminal investigations in Portugal, the production of a narrative with legal meaning in court can be conditioned by the co-existence of the epistemic subcultures of police work (different police forces at the crime scene) that have different knowledge, practices, understandings and ways of “seeing” the forensic evidence. The degree of technological enthusiasm that guides the performance of different police forces at the crime scene is reflected in the way they “see” the scene and in the sociocultural understandings that they produce. This technological enthusiasm and what I call here “selective professional vision” are mobilized at the crime scene and can impact the robustness and efficiency of the evidence presented in court.     

DNA methylation: the future of crime scene investigation?

Proper detection and subsequent analysis of biological evidence is crucial for crime scene reconstruction. The number of different criminal acts is increasing rapidly. Therefore, forensic geneticists are constantly on the battlefield, trying hard to find solutions how to solve them. One of the essential defensive lines in the fight against the invasion of crime is relying on DNA methylation. In this review, the role of DNA methylation in body fluid identification and other DNA methylation applications are discussed. Among other applications of DNA methylation, age determination of the donor of biological evidence, analysis of the parent-of-origin specific DNA methylation markers at imprinted loci for parentage testing and personal identification, differentiation between monozygotic twins due to their different DNA methylation patterns, artificial DNA detection and analyses of DNA methylation patterns in the promoter regions of circadian clock genes are the most important ones. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of open chapters in DNA methylation research that need to be closed before its final implementation in routine forensic casework.     

Forensic psychiatric evaluation of persons with posttraumatic stress disorder undergoing criminal trial

The aim of our study was to determine if there is a difference between the type of crime committed by persons diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that committed by other offenders. The study included 389 male patients at the Department of Forensic Psychiatry in Popovaca who underwent forensic psychiatric evaluation to establish a psychiatric diagnosis, evaluate the mental capacity, and provide advice on further treatment. The data on the number of individuals with PTSD vs. other psychiatric disorders and the data on family violence vs. other criminal acts were analyzed with chi2 test. Of a total of 389 forensically evaluated male patients, 45 (11.6%) suffered from PTSD. Study subjects with PTSD only or PTSD comorbid with the other psychiatric disorders committed family violence significantly more often than subjects diagnosed with the other psychiatric disorders chi2(1) = 40.092, P < 0.001. Subjects with PTSD, whether or not comorbid with the other psychiatric disorders, committed family violence significantly more often than subjects with other psychiatric diagnoses.     

Kombinowanie: agency,informality, and the poetics of self in Highland Poland

This article asks what role local models of agency and subjectivity play in the structure and interpretation of informal economic practices, and how this influences the ways in which people narrate their behaviour to others. Exploring the use of a common Polish idiom for informal activities – kombinowanie – amongst villagers in the Carpathian Highlands, it argues that the term acts as a ‘master‐trope’ for local identity, providing villagers with a narrative model for asserting and broadcasting their social agency to peers. Furthermore, it shows how in this particular ethnographic context, the retelling of instances of informal or illegal activity as kombinowanie can be seen as part of a Highlander ‘poetics of self’, in that each manifestation of the term carries with it a series of implicit sociohistorical and normative meanings that relate to notions of ‘typical’ Górale (Highland) behaviour. By characterizing kombinowanie as a type of tactics, I open up the term for comparative analysis with other local conceptions of agency which value insubordination.     

To punish or repair? Evolutionary psychology and lay intuitions about modern criminal justice

We propose that intuitions about modern mass-level criminal justice emerge from evolved mechanisms designed to operate in ancestral small-scale societies. By hypothesis, individuals confronted with a crime compute two distinct psychological magnitudes: one that reflects the crime's seriousness and another that reflects the criminal's long-term value as an associate. These magnitudes are computed based on different sets of cues and are fed into motivational mechanisms regulating different aspects of sanctioning. The seriousness variable regulates how much to react (e.g., how severely we want to punish); the variable indexing the criminal's association value regulates the more fundamental decision of how to react (i.e., whether we want to punish or repair). Using experimental designs embedded in surveys, we validate this theory across several types of crime and two countries. The evidence augments past research and suggests that the human mind contains dedicated psychological mechanisms for restoring social relationships following acts of exploitation.     

Memory Interventions in the Criminal Justice System: Some Practical Ethical Considerations

In recent years, discussion around memory modification interventions has gained attention. However, discussion around the use of memory interventions in the criminal justice system has been mostly absent. In this paper we start by highlighting the importance memory has for human well-being and personal identity, as well as its role within the criminal forensic setting; in particular, for claiming and accepting legal responsibility, for moral learning, and for retribution. We provide examples of memory interventions that are currently available for medical purposes, but that in the future could be used in the forensic setting to modify criminal offenders’ memories. In this section we contrast the cases of (1) dampening and (2) enhancing memories of criminal offenders. We then present from a pragmatic approach some pressing ethical issues associated with these types of memory interventions. The paper ends up highlighting how these pragmatic considerations can help establish ethically justified criteria regarding the possibility of interventions aimed at modifying criminal offenders’ memories.