Presentation created from a chapter from Curt R. Bartol's book: "Criminal Behavior: A Psychological Approach"

1. Aleem Ashraf
Department of Psychology
University of Sindh,
Pakistan.

2. 1. Defining mental illness
2. Disorders associated with crime
3. Competency and criminal responsibility
4. Mental disorder and violence
5. Mentally disordered in prisons
6. Risk factors for violence
7. References
Aleem Ashraf

3. • Disorder of mind that interferes substantially
with a person’s ability to cope with life on a daily
basis.
• Deprives the person of freedom of choice with
varying degrees.
• Disorders most relevant to crime are
▫ Schizophrenia
▫ Delusional Disorders
▫ Major Depressive Disorder
▫ Antisocial Personality Disorder
Aleem Ashraf

4. • Symptoms: severe breakdowns in thought
patterns, emotions, and perceptions, social
withdrawal, loses contact with reality etc.
• Schizophrenics don’t often commit crime but
when they do, the level of violence is stronger
than normal violent offender.
• Delusions, particularly persecutory ones, are
particularly common in those schizophrenics
who commit violent offenses.
Aleem Ashraf

5. • Characterized by the presence of one or more
non-bizarre delusions.
• In delusional disorder, the delusions are
reasonably believable and not completely far-
fetched as they are in schizophrenia.
• Anger, resentment, and sometimes violence
accompany these false persecutory beliefs.
Aleem Ashraf

6. • Symptoms include: an extremely depressed
mood accompanied by slowing down of mental
and physical activity, gloom, despair, feelings of
worthlessness, and thoughts of suicide.
• Depression may be strongly associated with
delinquency specially among teenage girls.
• They don’t care what happens to them, which
may increase the likelihood of gravitating toward
delinquency.
Aleem Ashraf

7. • Depression also plays a significant role in mass
murders, school shootings, workplace violence,
and “suicide-by-cop” incidents in which a person
sets up a situation wherein police are essentially
forced to shoot.
Aleem Ashraf

8. • The essential feature: rights of others are
violated.
• The individual must be at least 18 years of age
and must have a history of some symptoms of
conduct disorder before age 15.
• APD is a common diagnosis of criminal
defendants and offenders.
• Henn and colleagues (1976) found that 40% out
of 1,195 criminal defendants referred to their
psychiatric facility had APD.
Aleem Ashraf

9. • In correctional facilities, rates of inmates
considered APD range from 30 percent to 50
percent.
• Some jurisdictions specifically exclude it from
the list of mental disorders that can support an
insanity defense.
Aleem Ashraf

10. • The above psychiatric diagnoses are considered
when decisions are made whether mentally
disordered defendants are competent to stand
trial or, if so, are culpable enough to be held
responsible for their crimes.
Aleem Ashraf

11. • Defendants are competent to stand trial if they
have “sufficient present ability to consult with
their lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational
understanding.
• The law states that a person who is incompetent
must not be tried.
• 1 in 15 defendants are evaluated each year by
state and federal courts for their competency to
stand trial.
Aleem Ashraf

12. • About 4 out of every 5 of these evaluated defendants
are found competent.
• If found incompetent to stand trial, defendant is
typically sent to a mental institution until rendered
competent.
• Cases of those ISTs who have no hope of gaining
competency are dismissed if their charges are
minor.
• The prosecutor still retains the option of charges if
the person regains competency at some later time.
Aleem Ashraf

13. • Pirellie et al. found that defendants with
psychotic disorders were about eight times more
likely to be found incompetent.
• They also found that defendants who were
unemployed or had previous psychiatric
hospitalizations were about twice as likely to be
found incompetent.
Aleem Ashraf

14. • Insanity is a legal term which refers to a person’s
state of mind at the time an offense was
committed.
• If someone is found insane, it means he was so
mentally disordered at the time of an offense to
be held responsible.
• He is sent to a psychiatric facility instead of
prison.
Aleem Ashraf

15. • Cochrane et al. found that federal defendants
with diagnoses of psychotic disorders, affective
disorders, and mental retardation had higher
rates of release than those diagnosed with other
disorders.
• Personality disorders were negatively correlated
with a finding of insanity.
• Today’s jurors prefer neurological evidence,
particularly evidence of traumatic brain injury.
Aleem Ashraf

16. • Successful NGRI defendants tended to be older,
female, better educated, single and had a history
of prior hospitalization.
Aleem Ashraf

17. • When the possible penalty is capital punishment
or life imprisonment without parole.
• Insanity holders are immediately confined to a
mental institution.
• NGRI on average spent at least as much time in
mental institutions or treatment facilities as they
would have spent in prison if convicted.
Aleem Ashraf

18. • Posttraumatic stress Disorder
▫ PTSD has been used to support a defense of NGRI,
in both violent and nonviolent cases.
▫ Using PTSD to support an insanity defense is not
likely to be successful.
▫ It usually results in a finding of diminished
responsibility, rather than the complete
absolution of responsibility.
▫ Previously there have been no objective ways of
assessing PTSD.
Aleem Ashraf

19. • Posttraumatic stress Disorder
▫ Recently Clinician Administered PTSD Scale
(CAPS) has been referred to as the “gold standard”
for assessing the disorder.
• Amnesia
▫ Amnesia refers to complete or partial memory loss
of an event or a series of events.
▫ The courts have not been receptive to amnesia as a
valid condition in both the insanity defense and
incompetence to stand trial.
Aleem Ashraf

20. • Amnesia
▫ The exception is in cases of brain injury, when a
connection can be established between the injury
and the memory loss.
▫ The courts have not been sympathetic to
defendants who rely on excuses based on alcohol
or other drug intoxication to prove their Amnesia.
Aleem Ashraf

21. 1. Past mental disorder alone, even serious
mental disorder, is not a good predictor of
violence.
2. The mental disorder most closely associated
with violent and serious offenses is
schizophrenia.
3. Males who have developed schizophrenia and
who score high on the PCL-R have an
increased risk of being violent.
Aleem Ashraf

22. 4. Males who develop schizophrenia and exhibit
antisocial behavior at an early age often
demonstrate persistent and versatile patterns
of criminal offending.
5. Violence is associated with current serious
mental disorder, particularly when a history of
violent behavior is also present.
6. MacArthur Research Network classification
system is an efficient predictor of future
violence in the community.
Aleem Ashraf

23. 6. Despite the researchers’ attempts to predict
violence, no one factor is found to predict
violent behavior.
Aleem Ashraf

24. • The percentage of mentally disordered inmates
in American prisons is increasing.
• 10–15 percent of persons in jails and federal and
state prisons have severe mental disorders.
Aleem Ashraf

25. • Debate between the respective merits of
statistically based assessment of risk versus the
more subjective, clinically based methods goes
on.
• Statistical measures offer a compilation of risk
or needs factors on which the individual is
evaluated (e.g., past violence, age, criminal
record, early onset of antisocial behavior).
• Actuarial instruments have consistently
outperformed clinical judgments.
Aleem Ashraf

26. • Research on the reliability and validity of these
instruments is ongoing.
• Many mental health practitioners have been
reluctant to yield their professional judgments to
actuarial models.
• A separate category of measures based on
structured clinical judgment (SPI) was
developed.
Aleem Ashraf

27. Bartol, C. (2012). Criminal Behavior: A
Psychological Approach (10th ed.). Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Aleem Ashraf