The psychology of criminals

Murderers, rapists, thieves. The criminal mide is a complex and fascinating phenomina that reaches as far back in human history as the laws in which these criminals break them. Whether or not a shop lifter or a prestidious serial killer they all share one common trait, there disregard for the laws and the consiquences of breaking them.

To understand the minds of criminals you must first look how there brain functions differ from that of the average human being, there are many factors that lead to someone breaking the law, often circumstance plays a large role in the goings on in a criminal mind. Personality to effects the capability of somebody to commit heinous acts, criminals often have a similar set of personality traits, such as:

-Impulsiveness

-Lack of guilt

-Pleasure seeking

-Over optamistic

-High self importance

If you take all of these ingredients, add in some poor life choices and some unlucky circustances and you essentially have the recipie to breed your own criminal. But this is not completely true, thousands of people come from this same back ground but grow up into up standing members of society, so why are there so many exceptions?

Keith E Rice discovered that there may be a genetic connection to criminals. he took 4000 prisoners and performed a brain scan on each of them, his results showed that the way a criminals brain works is different to the way the average citizen. This has lead him and other scientists in the field to conclude that criminals are born and not made and that (lets call it the crime gene) the crime gene is inherited from his/her parents.

The study also showed how and why there brains function differently. In criminals there prefrontal cortex, which connects antisocial behaviour and fear has either late firing or early firing neurons which in turn may not allow them to feel fear towards the consequences of there actions. The limbic system controls agression, sexual behaviour and empathy, over reactive nerve cells here causes criminals not to feel empathy for there victims. The corpus collosum links rational and irrational parts of the brain, in murderers the connection between hemesperes is week. The temporal lobe is used to understand language and reactions to emotions and is less active in psychopaths.