All About Dangerousness.

The prediction of dangerousness is a fraught field of study. As I have touched on in previous articles I often take exception with some of the psychological models used to categorize violent offenders.
But I do agree that it would be very useful for society as a whole if some accurate form of 'dangerousness' could be predicted.

Psychological models place a lot of emphasis on studying individuals whereas the study of Sociology studies how people act within the context of broader setting within society. In other words the emphasis in Sociology is to study how an individual interacts with other members of society, or within any relevant cultural subgroup.

In assessing suitability for parole the written reports of psychologists and psychiatrists are part of what are considered extremely relevant in assessing whether or not the offender is to be released.

I've spent years working in prisons and I came to studying Criminology and Criminal Profiling later in life. Previous training and education was in the fields of Sociology, Anthropology and Education (and Medicine). My previous training often put me at odds with the 'psychs'.
Though I think there are a couple of other factors that are important in considering how my views might be formed;
When working in prison I am primarily engaged as an educator and sessional academic. This gives me great latitude I believe; I get to see offenders in more of a social context a lot of the time. I get to see how they interact with each other. Also to be borne in mind is that I work almost exclusively with Indigenous prisoners. Materials I use for curriculum development utilize topics and 'the stuff' of which other prison rehabilitation programs are made and I believe that by being a teacher the prisoners tend to trust me more as I am not going to record everything they write or discuss.
Because I both live and work within the local Indigenous society I tend to know many of the offenders on a far more personal level than a psychologist or psychiatrist would. I often know their parents, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, children etc and the kinds of conditions and cultural context in which they live. This fact also places me, most often into a position of great interpersonal trust that I believe most of the psych's would not be privy to.
I would say that this puts me in a pretty good situation for both knowing and judging the effects of conventional rehabilitation programs they may have attended, often in order to get their parole orders stamped. I often joked with them that they should be glad I am not their parole officer - being that I am pretty 'street-wise'.

How does this all relate to current theories about 'dangerousness'?
Hare, author of "Without Conscience" (read further) was the first psychiatrist to categorize what has come to be defined as the psychopath. He believes that, in the case of psychopaths we should just 'throw away the keys'.
His earlier studies involved sitting offenders "at a computer terminal viewing single words, some real and some nonsensical, as they popped onto the screen.
Consider the following, pasted from (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n18_v10/ai_15206787/pg_5 ) May 27th 2008;
"For each word, they had to choose "yes" or "no" to indicate whether it was a real word. Some of the real words were neutral, such as pencil or table. Others were emotionally loaded - rape, death or love.
The results, he says, were "absolutely stunning." Normal people, Hare says, respond much more quickly to emotional words. "Their EEG [electroencephalogram] shot up and they made the decision far more quickly. There was a lot of mental processing with those emotionally loaded words." even "regular," or nonpsychopathic, criminals showed the same dramatic difference in brain functioning as did noncriminals.
But with the psychopaths, Hare discovered, there was no difference at all in the mental processes. The words rape or murder conjured up the same emotional response as words such as table or chair.

"That's the key," Hare says. "In a psychopath, the parts of the brain that should be activated by emotion just don't work." Hare concedes that there might just be a difference in "hardwiring" - that these criminals might just be processing emotions in a different way. But he adds that based on what we know about them, that explanation seems unlikely". End of quote.

An interesting study though I find that I am at odds with his analysis. Had Hare conducted the same study on each offender somehow in a variety of different social contexts I think that vastly different results may have been found hence rendering the analysis questionable.
In other words if the offender were sitting in his family home sharing a meal with his family and that same test were conducted at the family dining table then the responses would have been entirely different. And not only because of the change of setting.

I know at least a couple of diagnosed psychopaths who, upon hearing stories of dastardly crimes appear to have reactions that would be considered as normal as normal can be. I've also witnessed in settings within the general community psychopaths reacting and punishing others for endangering or hurting their families or loved ones. Hence to simplistically say that psychopaths are without conscience, with no sense of morals and no empathy is completely untrue.
What is true though is that, under certain conditions they act in such a way so as to appear that they have no morals, conscience or empathy. In other words, for whatever reason/s they use none of those human qualities in relation to their victims.
Such human gifts are rendered redundant for reasons that I believe those psychs, unfortunately have not yet plumbed. Nonetheless studies that arise out of the discipline of Psychology certainly have worth and are worthy of further research.

Hare goes on to say that "Part of our fascination with them lies in the fact that deep down, they do a lot of things we would like to do. We don't because we're held back by laws, social censure, our feelings for others. We don't want to hurt others or let people down or act immorally. The psychopath has no such controls. He does what is most gratifying to himself without any other concerns. He's totally free." End of quote.
I think such comments are completely outrageous!!! And I don't think he has seen many of his subjects beyond the setting of his practice rooms.
Kind of a 'psychocentric view' of things if you will.

So I guess what I am saying is that a 'Dangerousness Index' might be possible but in order to develop anything truly effective there may need to be a much broader and interdisciplinary based approach.