Applying Psychology to Criminal Justice

There are many books that describe the interface between criminal justice and psychology from various vantage points. Applying Psychology to Criminal Justice is noteworthy for its extensive exploration of how the two fields have positively influenced each other. The comprehensive text, which is edited by five scholars with backgrounds in law, psychology, and criminal justice, includes contributions from experienced professionals from the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, the United States, and Australia.

As an avid reader of forensic mental health literature, I found this book to be a roller-coaster ride through 18 chapters of interesting forensic topics. The introductory chapter set the stage by exploring the various domains where psychology can be applied to law and criminal justice. The editors made a case for the compatibility among these fields and contend that the disciplines are necessarily interwoven. The editors describe the impact that the interdisciplinary field of forensic mental health has had on legislation; the formulation and adoption of legal criteria and clinical and forensic practice protocols; various psychologically based alternative models of justice, including therapeutic jurisprudence, which supports therapeutic outcomes for individuals who are subjected to mental health laws, provided that their basic civil rights are not impugned; restorative justice, which illuminates the impact of the offense on victims and their families rather than solely focusing on the offender; and preventive law, which supports, when possible, problem-solving in lieu of incarceration, especially when domestic violence, substance abuse, and mental illness are major concerns.

Authors Becky Milne, Gary Shaw, and Ray Bull explore the interface of psychology research in police investigation techniques. Many police officers use a traditional closed-question, rapid-fire interview technique which, according to the authors, is thought to reduce fabrication of responses. They describe how Fisher and Geiselman used behavioral science research about memory to inform their development of the Cognitive and Enhanced Cognitive Interviews, which encourage interviewers to establish rapport with interviewees and to obtain brief narratives of events.

A discussion about police interrogation and evidence management practices, including how bias and prejudice may influence evidence procurement, is presented by retired U.K. police officer and academic John G. D. Grieve. He describes how psychology underlies these practices and cites research findings about police prejudging and stereotypes that have informed the development of more objective policies and practices.

Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom, contemplates whether the accuracy of credibility assessment tools meets the evidentiary requirements promulgated by Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (509 U.S. 579 (1993)). His research showed that, while lay persons have a 67 percent accuracy rate in detecting those who are telling the truth, police officers have a 55 percent accuracy rate when distinguishing truth from lies. When physiological lie detection tools are used, the error rate in detecting truthfulness reportedly ranges from unknown to between 12 and 47 percent. These tools do not meet the Daubert criteria, because the scientific hypothesis underlying the tools may not be testable.

In Chapter 7, David Carson describes psychology's contributions to the science of fact finding and substantive rule analysis. He explains that before applied science was commonly used in criminal justice investigations and legal proceedings, proof of culpability was generally accepted if it was provided by an authoritative source, even if the evidence was obtained by coercive interrogation. %There is an interesting discussion about the degree of divergence of the legal and scientific definitions of intention and causation in criminal responsibility cases. Susan Dennison posits that although cognitive neuroscience research suggests that the initiation of volitional processes may be unconscious, intention and causation in legal settings are broadly determined by whether the accused should have reasonably foreseen the consequences of his actions.

Jane Winstone and Francis Pake write about mentally disordered offenders and introduce the term disenabler: an obstacle that hinders delivery of justice to mentally disordered offenders. For example, when the U.K. government created a legal category of dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD), psychiatrists saw it as an attempt to permit involuntary commitment of dangerous criminals who have no treatable serious mental illness. Sexually violent predator statutes in some U.S. jurisdictions may also be disenablers.

The ability of legal decision-makers to render fair-minded judgments is explored by Eddie Greene and Leslie Ellis. They contend that when decision-makers are faced with vast quantities of information, heuristic reasoning is naturally triggered in the cognitive processing system.

Even though Francis Pakes says that Chapter 15 is sketchy, I actually found it to be the most informative part of the book. He discusses inquisitorial and adversarial systems as well as international criminal courts and the Islamic system in the Middle East. Definitions of Islamic legal terms, like qadi (a judge) and fatwa (a legal ruling or verdict) are listed in this chapter. Pakes conjectures that in an inquisitorial legal system, a court-appointed expert appears to take on a partisan pro-prosecution attitude. In the latter part of the chapter, Pakes notes that although Sharia law may be religion based, its organization can differ from one Islamic country to another. Sharia law has been criticized by Amnesty International and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) for its focus on corporal and capital punishment and denial of basic rights to defendants. %Finally, having discussed the positive role psychology can play in criminal justice in earlier chapters, Peter J. van Koppen used Chapter 16 to explore the scientific accuracy of the phrase reasonable psychological certainty, including error rates associated with transferring findings from one scientific field to another. Overall, I found the book thorough and compelling and recommend it to professionals in the field of forensic psychiatry, forensic psychology, and criminal justice.

• © 2011 American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law