Reviewing: Forensic Psychology: A Very Short Introduction by David Canter

The Motive:

What lurks inside the mind of a criminal? How does criminal profiling work? When did psychologists become badass? But of course, these questions are pretty mundane. The question I really had in mind was…

Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?

The Evidence:

I first watched The Silence Of The Lambs in a local arthouse cinema back in the early 1990’s. For some reason the foyer of that same cinema recently contained a rack of Very Short Introductions books on a wide range of topics, from architecture to witchcraft. Perhaps they thought their movies sometimes required a bit of homework – in my experience that suspicion would not be entirely unfounded.

Anyway, on finding the words Forensic Psychology on a cover my head immediately filled with profilers: Will Graham from Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon; Tony Hill from Val McDermid’s Hill and Jordan novels; Fitz from Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker. Profiling is a heady magic: some scattered salt suggests a perpetrator blinding the devil to his crimes and bingo, a judge’s gavel descends on another life sentence. The topic is so endlessly fascinating we’ve even enjoyed to stories where the criminal seems to profile the investigator. So, imagine my thrill at holding a book that would explain the sorcery behind the most exciting facet of modern criminal investigation.

Spoiler alert: that sorcery remained unexplained. Principally, this disappointment arises because the author, David Canter, doesn’t believe any such sorcery exists. Despite being the person usually credited with bringing offender profiling to the UK, he feels popular conceptions of the topic have wrapped myth around a mundane truth: psychologists help investigators catch criminals not through uncanny insights into a specific criminal mind but instead by improving police decision-making processes in areas such as interviewing witnesses or organising information. The author calls this more grounded and realistic concept Investigative Psychology.

I did get the feeling that for David Canter, crime fiction sometimes impedes public understanding of the investigative process, with the profiler trope allowing storytellers to skip the workaday record trawling and evidence sifting that underpins most major inquiries. Since paper trails and form filling will neither set bestseller charts alight nor draw viewers to the edge of their seat, I have sympathy for the storytellers here. The unvarnished recitation of facts is certainly honest, but Mary Poppins could have been teaching creative writing when she first praised that spoonful of sugar… Still, a professional psychologist who has assisted over a hundred police investigations certainly knows his onions, and if they cause me some tears, well, them’s the breaks. The author has acknowledged elsewhere his divergence on this matter with the US Federal Bureau of Investigations, so I may follow up this whole profiler controversy in a later blog.

That one disappointment aside, there is much to learn here. Psychologists study normal and abnormal mental processes, and provide insights into how such states can be identified, classified and (potentially) mitigated. This makes suitably experienced individuals valuable at all stages in the criminal lifecycle: during investigation, as expert witnesses in the courts and most commonly of all, in working with convicted offenders both towards rehabilitation, and also to conduct the risk assessment necessary to determine how an offender is most safely managed. The PCL-R questionnaire we mentioned in an earlier blog is an example of just such a risk assessment tool, albeit a controversial one. But  such professional controversy is entirely healthy. In any scientific endeavour attempts at standardisation should be challenged and improved until they are accepted, rejected or replaced. Since crimes are committed by humans, psychologists, as scientists of the human condition, are increasingly relevant to the investigation, prosecution and management of criminal behaviour.

The Verdict:

This book is entirely non-sensationalist, and it might even puncture some of your favourite bubbles (I’m sure I’ll get over it). However, it achieves a worthwhile goal in a pleasingly short form-factor: to teach what forensic psychology is and is not, whilst pointing towards what it might become in the future. Well worth a read.