Criminal Behaviour Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Criminal Behaviour - Essay ExampleThe Mental Health Act 1983, 2000For example, most jurisdictions consider psychopathy to be an aggravating rather than a mitigating factor in determining criminal responsibility. In some states an offender convicted of first-degree murder and diagnosed as a psychopath is seeming to receive the death penalty on the grounds that psychopaths are cold-blooded, remorseless, untreatable and almost certain to re-offend. But many of the killers on death row were, and continue to be, mistakenly referred to as psychopaths on the basis of DSM-III, DSM-III-R or DSM-IV criteria for ASPD. ASPD and psychopathy might now be much or less synonymous constructs. Hare, 1999Psychopaths generally are more violent than non-psychopaths, and are more likely to engage in a variety of different types of aggressive acts, but tend to engage in preponderantly instrumental (calculated) violence, threaten strangers with weapons and to be motivated by vengeance, retribution, or mon ey. Hart S.D., Forth A.E., Hare R.D. 1994The psychopaths profile includes such individual characteristics as sense of entitlement, disparate grounds of behaviour and socially acceptable behaviour they are unremorseful, apathetic to others, unconscionable, blameful to others, manipulative and conning, affectively cold, disregardful of social obligations, non-conforming to social norms, irresponsible. Traditionally, affective and interpersonal traits such as egocentricity, shallow effect, deceit, manipulativeness, lack of empathy, selfishness, guilt or remorse are central individual characteristics in the conceptualization and diagnosis of psychopathy. Cleckley,1976 Hare, 1993 Widiger & Corbitt, 1995In 1980 psychopathy was renamed antisocial personal incommode and is now defined by stern violations of social norms, including lying, stealing, truancy, traffic arrests and inconsistent work behaviour. These features appear to be visible through failure to make interior relationships , impulsiveness, lack of guilt, not learning from adverse experience. Harris G.T., Rice M.E., Quinsey V.L., 1993Hare in his Without Conscience (1999) defines that psychopaths charm and exploit others for their own gain, they lack empathy, sense of responsibility, they manipulate, lie and con others with no regard for anyones feelings. Psychopathy is characterized by such traits as lack of remorse or empathy, shallow emotions, egocentricity, glibness, manipulativeness, parasitic lifestyle, episodic relationships, low frustration tolerance and persistent violation of social norms. Hare, 1999Dr.Hervey Cleckley in The Mask of Sanity came up with 16 traits that formed a specific pattern of perspective and behaviour, and to see the symptoms of psychopathy one should combine him with the circuit of a full social life. Psychopaths miss the qualities that people depend on for living in social harmony. Cleckley, 1976The psychopathic personality disorder items hail into two clusters One clus ter - Factor 1, reflects core interpersonal and affective characteristics the other cluster - Factor 2, consists of items that reflect a socially deviant and meandering(a)