Understanding the Criminal Mind



Adults typically stereotype American fourteen year olds as being angsty teenagers obsessively playing video games and using social media. Fourteen year old Evan Miller, committed aggravated murder and a judge sentenced him to server a life imprisonment without parole. In recent decisions, such as Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs, scientific research shows that it should play a more significant part during the judicial decision making process than “common sense”. Behavioral research as well as neurobiological inspection methods offer a deeper and more accurate look into the minds of criminals, and hopefully could prevent crime before it happens.

To understand the argument’s basis, we must grasp how the human brain functions. Different brain parts have unique functions. The occipital lobes control visual processing; the temporal lobes memory and hearing; the parietal lobes sensation. The frontal lobes control problem solving and judgment (1). An area behind the forehead, the prefrontal cortex, analyzes and moderates behavior. It works to inhibit behaviors as well as to form strategy and thus plays a very clear-cut rule in potential crime decisions and orchestration.

Young adults and teens’ decisions are considered questionable because their brain chemistry is different from that of fully grown adults. Human brains develop from the back to front, so the prefrontal cortex develops near the last stages of development, around the time an individual reaches the age of 25. (1)This helps to explain why teens knowingly engage in risky or dangerous behaviors. The judgment control part of their brains is not fully developed. Myelin is also an important factor in connecting brain tissues; researchers determined that myelin content increases in the human brain as individuals grow older; thus increasing the effectiveness of information transfer between brain regions as an individual grows. (1) A teenager’s occipital lobe may process a visual sensation but since the teenager may not have an adequate amount of myelin for the prefrontal cortex to interpret that visual as a potentially dangerous situation.

This information provides context when inspecting court cases. In Jackson v. Hobbs, a fourteen year old was sentenced to life-imprisonment without parole for aiding his cousin commit armed robbery and murder. He, his cousin, and an acquaintance premeditated a convenient store robbery. Jackson was initially waiting outside the store but chose to enter. He was not the triggerman nor of legal age. (2) His prefrontal cortex was not developed at the time and it may or may not occur to him that being an accomplice to an armed robbery was a poor decision, but based on whatever was going on in his prefrontal cortex at the time, he decided to follow through with it. The judicial system is well aware of the fact that teenagers and adolescents are not as mature as adults, and this is so widely accepted that it is pretty much common sense. Thus, a provision in foreign and international law prohibits the use of capital punishment on juveniles, but as Charles Stimson and Jonathan Levy write in “The Mysterious Disappearance of International Law Arguments from Juvenile Sentencing in Miller v. Alabama” this law was conspicuously absent in the case of Miller v. Alabama, and Evan Miller was given a life sentence without parole. Had the jury taken into consideration the developmental implications of Miller’s or Jackson’s mind, perhaps the verdicts would be different.

There is an interesting question that reveals itself when looking through all of these criminal cases. Is the criminal mind different from that of a non-criminal? If the decisions we make are controlled by our prefrontal cortex and criminals choose to make bad decisions couldn’t one logically conclude that the criminal prefrontal cortex is different from the non-criminal prefrontal cortex? A study comparing people with antisocial personality disorder to people without antisocial personality disorder indicated that sufferers have a significantly smaller frontal lobe. (4) Clara Moskowitz for LiveScience writes “Those with the disorder "typically have no regard for right and wrong. They may often violate the law and the rights of others, according to the Mayo Clinic.”

Another study conducted comparing psychopaths (people with severe cases of antisocial personality disorder) to non-psychopaths and results show that psychopaths have relatively deformed amygdalas and thinner cortexes. The amygdala is responsible for human emotion (4). Their jaded sense of decision making can be attributed to a thinner cortex while their lack of empathy and guilt can be attributed to the deformed amygdalas. Moskowitz also describes a pavlovian shock test administered to children where a stimulus signaled a punishment. After long-term observational studies, it showed that criminals displayed an abnormal absence of fear to the test as children (4). This study brings up an exciting possibility- would it be possible to determine beforehand which children would end up as criminals based on childhood tests? The most ideal situation would be that every child is put through psychological testing and those that pose a potential threat are then monitored and/or prevented from engaging in detrimental behaviors. This would bring about the need for a moral or ethical ruling to determine how far we can take this “monitoring children” but if it reduced the crime rate many would agree that it would be worth it. If Kuntrell Jackson and Evan Miller had been studied earlier in their childhood, scientists could have found potential flags that would suggest that these individuals would be predisposed to committing the crimes they did.

There has already been a movement to give courtroom judges a more in-depth understanding behind the science that is used to incriminate or exonerate convicted criminals- DNA analysis. The idea behind this is relatively straightforward- that judges will be able to make fair decisions if they have some background knowledge of the process used to gather evidence. Cornelia Dean writes “The justices may also consider that when scientists confront a problem, they collect all the information they can about it and then draw conclusions.

Lawyers work in reverse. They know their desired outcome at the outset, so they gather arguments to support it. While it would be unethical for scientists reporting on their work to omit findings that don’t fit their hypotheses, lawyers are under no compunction to introduce evidence that hurts their cases; that’s the other side’s job.” (5) This offers reason to trust science over logical arguments. Lawyers are paid to win, rather than find the truth, because lawyers are hired by either the defendant or plaintiff while scientists are usually working at crime scenes and have no vested interest in the outcome of a case one way or another.


A defendant’s story can be phrased to paint a particular picture in the jury’s minds while the evidence presented by science cannot; hard data and facts are not up for interpretation. With a universally accepted set of guidelines that dictate the statistical significance of scientific findings, science would present evidence that would be guaranteed to offer the most comprehensive insight into a criminal case or a criminal’s mind. The use of science as a tool in forensics is not new. The use of science to explain motives and behaviors of criminals is a new application of an existing technology; and one which has credibility seeing as it has provided conclusive results on the matter of criminal psychology. Through the use of this science, we will be able to better understand the criminal mind, and hopefully, prevent crime to some extent.

 

Works Cited:

 



(5) Dean, Cornelia. "COMMENTARY; When Questions of Science Come to a Courtroom, Truth Has Many Faces." The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 Dec. 2006. Web. 17 Feb. 2013.

(4) Moskowitz, Clara. "Criminal Minds Are Different From Yours, Brain Scans Reveal." LiveScience.com. N.p., 4 Mar. 2011. Web. 16 Feb. 2013.

(2) Change, Angela, and Tian Wang. "Jackson v. Hobbs (10-9647)." LII. Cornell, 20 Mar. 2012. Web. 04 Feb. 2013.

(1) "Maturation of the Prefrontal Cortex." Maturation of the Prefrontal Cortex. US Department of Health and Human Affairs, n.d. Web. 16 Feb. 2013.

(3) Stimson, Charles, and Johnathan Levy. "The Mysterious Disappearance of International Law Arguments from Juvenile Sentencing in Miller v. Alabama" The Heritage Foundation. N.p., 22 Aug. 2012. Web. 04 Feb. 2013.