For a long time many people were interested in one question. And it's not about the meaning of life, no. Hundreds of thinkers have been thinking about what are the characteristics of the personality of the criminal. Is this a temporary form of deviant behavior, or is there an initial desire for illegal actions in the nature of certain people? After all, the vast majority of people in everyday life behaves completely normal, without showing a desire to commit crimes ...
So where do those who stand on the “crooked path” come from in our society? In this article we will try to talk about the identity of the offender. This may help someone in teaching or analyzing the behavior of familiar people. It should be noted here that today there are a lot of approaches to solving this problem, and sometimes even large scientists cannot agree on a common “denominator”. Well, this is normal: our world is constantly changing, and therefore approaches to the study of crime are changing.
First you need to decide what types of personality of the offender exist. Everything is simple here: selfish and forcibly oriented. With the first type, everything is clear, since a person commits a crime only for profit. The identities of those who commit crimes are much more complicated ... for the sake of the crime itself. Their mental characteristics are distinguished by a special "brightness" and versatility.
Psychological features
Mental characteristics are a combination of personal and behavioral characteristics that form a specific personality. For several decades, during which the psychology of criminals was studied in all countries of the world, it became completely clear that their personalities initially had some negative features.
But here there were some excesses. Thus, a number of experts believe that the criminal is different from the ordinary person in that the ordinary citizen is in agreement with the criminal code, but the offender is not. But if you talk like that, then you can go very far. It is known that many legislative acts, including regulations in the field of criminal law, are highly controversial. So, should law professors be considered criminals?
So, the characteristics of the personality of the offender - this is the attitude to legislative acts. If a law-abiding citizen, even if he doesn’t have any special enthusiasm for any law, abides by it anyway (at the expense of education), then the offender will always violate it. Of course, with the exception of only those cases when it will be profitable for him to comply with the law.
But here everything is not so simple. Many citizens comply with regulations only for fear of punishment. Are they also considered criminals? Until now, legal science has found it difficult to give answers to such sensitive and controversial questions, since the personality types of the criminal in this case can be replenished with a variety of “potentially criminal layman”.
However, the answer to them can be quite simple: it should be considered that the degree of assimilation of legal norms among criminals is much lower than if they were compared with ordinary people. A citizen may not agree with the provisions of the law, but recognizes that they must be respected. The criminal thinks completely differently. But at the same time, one still has to admit that the line between the law-abiding philistine and the offender is sometimes very thin, and only the activity of the justice system and other state power institutions keeps some citizens from undesirable actions.
How does the criminal relate to the state?
In America, about 20 years ago, a study was conducted, the purpose of which was to check the relationship of deviant citizens with state institutions. Several control groups were tested at once, on the basis of the studies of which the criminological personality of the criminal was revealed. It turned out that normal citizens tend to treat court decisions as "harsh but fair." Criminals tend to consider them "inhumane and cruel." Moreover, the closer the discussed article of the law to the one by which they were convicted, the more stringent the assessment becomes.
It is noted that offenders detained for petty crimes sometimes quite adequately relate to the judicial system, while murderers and bandits do not make contact at all. So the personality structure of the criminal is the more adequate, the easier the offense committed by him.
Scientific approach
But nevertheless, these works finally proved that the attempt to “tie” the crime to ethics and the material base is in any case doomed to failure. For this reason, the research of Yu. M. Antonyan is of great value. The scientist studied criminals and their motives for several years, researching and checking several groups at once. He checked both ordinary thieves and those who committed grave and especially grave intentional crimes, including by prior conspiracy.
In the control group were completely law-abiding people. All citizens, regardless of their group affiliation, were studied using all available methods of personality testing. This allowed us to identify specific features of the psyche that are characteristic only for criminals or persons predisposed to illegal actions. What did further study of the identity of the criminal show?
Identified features of criminals
It turned out that the offender is a person who does not want to adapt to the social system, or one who is not satisfied with his own social position in the existing social model. In addition, many of these individuals are overly impulsive, or are almost childishly infantile. Because of this, they have virtually no self-control, there is completely no critical assessment of their own actions.
Therefore, moral, moral and legal norms do not exert any visible influence on such people. In some cases, they simply do not understand what society requires of them, and in others they understand, but under no circumstances do they wish to comply with these requirements. They evaluate all social obligations only from the point of view of their benefit. The offender does not want to and cannot adapt normally to the social environment, because otherwise the personality structure of the criminal experiences severe dissonance.
Repeatedly, cases were described where offenders who were completely freed up for the experiment from their problems with the law, who received all the opportunities to conduct an honest business or a good job ... after some time took up the old. They simply did not want to perform even basic social functions. Simply put, many criminals can be compared with parasites: they enjoy all the benefits of society, but at the same time they do nothing useful for others. Moreover, this is completely contrary to their morality and certain ethics.
Communication and socialization issues
Numerous communication problems turned out to be characteristic of deviantly oriented people: they are generally not able to look at themselves from the side, they do not know how to empathize and empathize. Because of this, they lose their objective connection with reality, cannot take the side of another person, even if it is really necessary. For an inveterate criminal, the concept of “friend” does not exist in principle; the whole environment is hostile to him by definition.
It is for this reason that they become withdrawn, suspicious, aggressive, they are always selfish. Is there anything social about them? The criminal personality does not need emotional intimacy, and therefore they are cruel, embittered loners by nature.
In many cases, the behavior of criminals is controlled by thoughtless, impulsive actions, they consider all the actions of others from the point of view that they are potentially dangerous. But all the considered features are not inherent in all groups of offenders. More precisely, not fully ...
Features of criminals who have committed serious and especially serious crimes
The most characteristic group are criminals, initially oriented to committing selfishly motivated offenses. They are impulsive, aggressive, completely neglecting even those social norms of behavior that are social (that is, they are not directly spelled out in the Criminal Code or the Civil Code of the Russian Federation). This group of people has practically no volitional or intellectual control.
Any moral and legal norm is perceived by them "with hostility", constant aggression and hostility to the environment - their "normal" behavior. So the identity of the criminal during robberies is very “twitchy”, unbalanced, with some craving for manic behavior.
Oddly enough, but a person belonging to this variety of the criminal world, in spite of his outward "severity", is completely infantile and extremely weak-willed, he practically cannot control his base desires. A simple example is maniacs. Many of them were “burnt out” only because they continued to choose victims, doing this almost in full view of police agents. They simply could not resist their aspirations, well aware of the dangers and futility of this kind of behavior.
Thus, the subject of the crime and the identity of the criminal in practice are loosely coupled. Many still naively assume that the potential victim somehow “provoked” the killer or maniac, but this is not so: such persons themselves will find any excuse for committing an unlawful act.
Abusers Features
This is especially pronounced among rapists, who, it should be noted, show incredible adaptability and ingenuity when it comes to achieving their goals. They are practically not capable of empathy, and in everyday life are characterized by incredible callousness. Behavior control is also low.
Of course, they differ in a pronounced dominant component of behavior, which, in fact, is precisely expressed in rape (that is, the subject of the crime and the identity of the offender are correlated as a slave master). Moreover, obtaining sexual satisfaction in this case is generally in last place, since it is important for a rapist to gain confidence in his dominance and power. In addition, such criminals have very poor social adaptation, and often cannot get a well-paid job, even if their intellectual data do not interfere.
It turns out a vicious circle: a person cannot assert himself in a normal way, and therefore he is trying to “dominate” by regularly committing rape. The worse a rapist is in everyday life, the more he feels himself a little insignificant, the more cruel his crimes become. In criminology, these personality traits are considered classics.
Distinctive features of killers
In general, all of the above traits are quite typical for killers, but they also have some peculiarities that are clearly expressed in this particular group of criminals. We’ll warn you right away that we don’t consider some features of people who have committed forced killings (with a direct threat to their life or the lives of loved ones), as well as crimes committed in the state of passion. These people are completely normal, but, having found themselves in particularly difficult and tragic conditions, were forced to resort to extreme measures. All of the following applies only to “professionals.”
Immediate attention is drawn to the highest impulsiveness and striving exclusively for one’s own interests. Even robbers are sometimes able to empathize and are aware that the life of a certain person without unnecessary necessity is not worth taking. Killers are the exact opposite. For them, the life of others is inconsequential ... but they cherish their own (most often). Many killers are prone to conflict and provocative actions, they are always aggressive and estranged from society. These signs of the identity of the criminal prove how far from reality those who consider them to be “noble robbers”. What-what, and nobility in repeat offenders is not.
Such people are emotionally very unstable, their mood per day changes no less than that of an inveterate drug addict. They are very subjective and biased when evaluating the world around them, and therefore they can easily kill for an “aggressive” look. From this, paranoid caution, suspiciousness, and vengeance flow smoothly. There are cases when such a criminal brutally killed a man who stepped on his foot several years ago.
Under any circumstances, which can even be remotely interpreted as a threat, such an individual is easily excited and takes all possible measures to “protect himself”, that is, he resorts to murder. So the psychological identity of the offender is like a train with failed brakes rushing downhill. No matter what a person who gets in his way does, he is doomed.
Just killings
A special feature of killers is rigidity, that is, inertia of thinking. Any trouble or difficulty in life is considered by them as the intrigues of certain enemies. They tend to do so in order to remove the subconscious feeling of their own infantilism and inability to cope with problems. It is not surprising that such an individual can easily kill a person who really “guilty”, even if this “fault” is a poorly pumped wheel in a car service. These are the key features of the identity of the offender.
It is fair to assume that the killers have a painfully
high self-esteem, they are extremely self-centered. It should be noted that it is the murderers who easily adapt in all kinds of movements “for the rights of the infringed,” since they, insisting on a “physical solution” of all issues, easily satisfy their needs of “revenge on those who have earned more undeservedly.” That is why serial maniacs kill easily and naturally - after all, they “do justice” in this way, and therefore their conscience is clear. Under the “justice” can fall as the elimination of the person who puts his car in “their” parking space, and the removal of the entire family of the ex-wife / husband.
As a rule, all killers experience certain difficulties in social adaptation and even everyday communication. All problems that could be solved with a couple of phrases or a friendly joke, they can be solved only by violence. These people adopt moral and legal norms very poorly.
Averaged psychological portrait of a man convicted of especially serious crimes
According to statistics, people who have reached the age of 35-37, who have been previously convicted (especially often for hooliganism), and have been repeatedly noticed in excessive use of alcohol or more “strong” psychotropic drugs, are most often convicted of intentional especially serious crimes. As a rule, such individuals have always been characterized by increased cruelty even at an early age (this implies the thesis that the identity of the offender = criminal identity).
So, many serial killers beat their peers at school for friendly, kindly jokes. With their own open enemies, such people acted much tougher: many of these criminals ended up in special colonies for minors when they were not even 15 years old. Thus, the typology of the personality of the criminal largely confirms the old opinion that many offenders are initially predisposed to commit unlawful acts.
A “professional” offender is more often closed, has an increased tendency to fall into depressive states, he is overly sensitive, suspicious, maniacs may experience an increased sense of guilt. The mood of a "chronic" criminal is rarely really really good, as he is constantly tense (even subconsciously), looking for a dirty trick in the surrounding reality.
Contrary to the “cinematic” ideas, many people guilty of grave and especially grave crimes are not at all sophisticated intellectuals, but people with a significantly reduced coefficient of mental development. What else characterizes the identity of the criminal? Crimes, even the most terrible ones, represent the offender's subconscious as “retaliation”. How is this done?
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By the way, the high adaptability of inveterate criminals to places of deprivation of liberty can be explained by the fact that their internal level of self-control is extremely low, so it is really more comfortable for such people to be in places where there is a strict internal routine. On the other hand, the need for restraint further aggravates neurotic, anxious behavior. This is the standard typology of the identity of the criminal.
Some conclusions
It should be noted that many criminals have severe mental injuries received either in childhood or in early adolescence. Often they are most pronounced when the convict waits his turn on death row and begins to engage in introspection. Note that in these cases a person can indeed repent, rethinking his misconceptions.
In conclusion, it is worth noting that the situation with organized crime in our country is becoming more and more alarming from year to year. It is generally accepted that after the "dashing 90s" all this remained in the past ... but statistics show that more and more there are contract killings. In connection with the crisis, they kill (most often) competitors and those people who voluntarily or involuntarily impede the "business" of shadow (and not only) dealers. Law enforcement agencies testify that against the backdrop of what is happening, relations within the groups of criminals have become much tougher: today a person can be killed at the slightest suspicion of his cooperation with the police.
Here are the personality traits of the
perpetrator. This is a rather complicated area, but it is necessary to study it to understand the processes that take place in criminal communities.