Criminal psychology: the main directions of the discipline

Criminal psychology is an area of legal psychology that studies the system of internal mechanisms of committing offenses by people, the inner peace of people, as well as the problem of the structure, education, functioning and breakdown 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 individual 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, personal prerequisites and qualities were singled out, which, when interacting with a specific external situation, could provoke the emergence of a crime situation. Criminal psychology establishes and substantiates the specific and characteristic features of a person, which become the cause and characteristic prerequisites. We are talking about defects in sense of justice, culture, morality, emotions and so on. Moreover, within the discipline, the emergence 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 discipline, problems of criminal intent formation, as well as careless crime (domestic and professional) are studied.

This science contains one of the most important sections - the 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 branch of criminal psychology is a forensic psychological examination, which is not lawful to solve the tasks of legal content. It is about the reliability of the testimony, the purposes and motives of the crime, the identification of 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 research of social and psychological mechanisms of group crime. It is about the reasons for uniting 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 related to the search for effective means and ways to prevent the growth of crime.