Criminal psychology: the main directions of the discipline

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Criminal psychology is an arealegal psychology, studying the system of internal mechanisms of committing offenses by people, the spiritual peace of people, as well as the problem of the structure, education, functioning and disintegration of criminal groups.

Poznyšev S.V. is the founder of this discipline. According to his theory, criminal psychology performs the following tasks:

studies such properties and conditions of a person that are capable of provoking his criminal behavior;
considers not a complex of separate internal processes, but an integral personality in its manifestations, which can be attributed to the field of legal psychology;
Identifies ways to combat offenders.

In domestic studies on criminal psychology, we study:

the inner world of prisoners;
living conditions of the underworld;
principles of interpretation of testimony of witnesses (reasons for the appearance of errors in them);
methodology and theory of forensic psychology;
psychology of deviant behavior (criminal, addictive, suicidal and other types).

Legal psychology offers original methods of detecting traces of crime. For the years of the existence of science, a large number of experiments have been carried out.

Criminal psychology has two directions of research.

First, within the discipline were allocatedpersonal prerequisites and qualities that, when interacting with a specific external situation, can provoke the emergence of an offense situation. Criminal psychology establishes and substantiates the specific and characteristic features of a person, which become the cause and characteristic prerequisites. It's about the defects of sense of justice, culture, morality, emotions and so on. Moreover, within the framework of the discipline, the origin of human immunity to criminogenic situations is investigated in detail and recommendations for the prevention of offenses are developed.

Secondly, the methods of legal psychology are also aimed at studying the psychology of the victim. Careful attention is paid to the factors shaping his personality and analysis of behavior.

Within the framework of the discipline, problems of criminal intent formation, as well as careless crime (domestic and professional) are studied.

This science contains one of the most importantsections - criminal psychology of minors. She explores not only their antisocial behavior, but also reveals the environmental factors and personality characteristics of the adolescent who are pushing them towards crime. It is from them will depend on his individual response to any life failures. This section also develops recommendations that are aimed at preventing juvenile and juvenile delinquency.

A special offshoot of criminal psychologyis a forensic psychological examination, which is not lawful to solve problems of legal content. We are talking about the reliability of the testimony, the purposes and motives of the crime, identifying the form of guilt, etc. The subject of EIT is the diagnosis of mental non-pathological features on individual participants in the criminal case, which are significant in order to establish the truth.

Criminal psychology is engaged in researchsocio-psychological mechanisms of group crime. It is about the reasons for the unification of offenders, the conditions that contribute to this, the social positions of specific members, the hierarchy of interpersonal roles and group dynamics.

All areas of discipline are associated with the search for effective means and ways to prevent the growth of crime.