CRIM 1650 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Psychopathy, Developmental Disorder

• School: York University
• Department: Criminology
• Course: CRIM 1650
• Professor: James Williams

Document Summary

Limitations of biological & psychological theories: acceptance of correlations as causes, vague & ambiguous diagnostic categories, lack of conclusive empirical support, inability to account for the social distribution of crime, troubling policy implications. Psychopaths are hard to find because they look normal (they get to know you first) They have a lack of remorse, lack of empathy, lack of regard for the feelings of others. Psychopathy is a form of personality disorder (a developmental disorder, they were never really normal . The psychopath processes emotion in the part of the brain that we process language. (the reality is, scientists don"t have a very good understanding of the brain. ) There"s not really a connection between biology, what goes on in the brain and psychopathy. At least 1% of the population (300,000 in canada, and 3 million in the usa) are psychopaths. 20% of inmates are psychopaths and they commit at least 50% of the crimes.