Findings from study of criminal personalities

Press, 22 June 1978, Page 12

Findings from study of criminal personalities

The first section was inadvertently missed out from the article on criminals which appeared on this page yesterday. The article, “Study finds some criminals ‘born ” bad’,” was by Nigel Hawkes of the “Observer,” London. The missing introductory section follows: Criminals are not like you and me. They lie, they cheat, they swindle their friends; they are devious, manipulating, bullying, and self-ob-sessed. They are, in a word, bent.

Or so claims a survey of the criminal personality recently published in the United States to a reception divided between horror and joy. The two authors of the survey, a psychiatrist, Sam-

uel Yochelson and a psychologist, Stanton Samenow, have dared to challenge the conventional view that criminals are made by poverty and poor social conditions. On the contrary, say Yochelson and Samenow, criminals choose their way of life and are not driven to it by circumstances. It is a claim which has split the criminology world like a cleaver. On one side are the hard men, policemen and prison warders, who applaud the rediscovery of truths they have long known; on the other, academics and social workers who mutter about a betrayal of scientific method and liberal values. Even the search for a “criminal personality” is a mistake, according to the conventional view of things. No such object exists, and to search for it is simply to retrace the errors of the nineteenth century, when scientist such as the Italian

Cesare Lombroso spent ' years measuring the skulls of criminals, to no useful result. The irony is that Yocheli son and Samenow would almost certainly have agreed I with this view when they i started their survey. That they finally came to quite different conclusions is | either a tribute to their I open-mindedness, or, if you ’ prefer, the perversion of j mind which comes from 1 chatting to criminals for 16 years. The method they used was that of extended interviews with men who had committed crimes, but had been found not guilty by reason of insanity. Over the years more than 250 such people were intensively interviewed, some for thousands of hours, and their responses recorded The first thing they dis- , covered was that these sup-

posedly insane criminals were by no means mad in a clinical sense. Most of them had long ago learned how to respond to prison psychiatrists with pat answers which quickly confirmed them as deranged.

In fact, almost all were contemptuous of psychiatry and regarded psychiatrists as the easiest people in the world to con. “Doctor, if I didn’t have enough excuses for crime before psychiatry, I sure do now,” one of them said. But the method Yochelson and Samenow used, though typical of psychiatry, did leave them open to scientific criticism. There were no controls, no interviews with normal people with which to compare the criminals, and the descriptions of what the criminals said were too subjective. There were no women in the sample.