Criminogenic Personalities

Childhood abuse and trauma can develop a person into criminogenic personality. Following personality disorders are strongly linked with the violence and legal issues:
• Personality Disorders
• Antisocial Personality
• Narcissistic Personality
• Paranoid Personality
• Borderline Personality
Anti social personality disorder is considered to be directly linked with the exertion of aggression and violence. Although Borderline personality directly does not practice any violence but becomes an easy prey
and legal issues like prostitution, suicides rise on the surface.

Risk Assessment
Another area that requires psychologist’s service is future risk assessment, prior release risk assessment is done with the help of two types of instruments:
a)Static Instruments:
PCL-R, Static 99
b)Dynamic Instruments:
VRS, HCR-20
Static factors refer towards the unchangeable things that like the child hood trauma and abuse of criminal. Dynamic factors refer towards the changeable factors like if a person is taking heroine as a drug or keeping
weapons, once he decided to quit and quitted the addiction so risk factor is eliminated.

Problems with Risk Assessment
We also touched the controversial issue of unpredictable nature of human beings and implication of statistical tools for predicting future risk
• Subjective
• Statistical
•Forensic treatment
In the realm of treatment we learned about the therapies like narrative therapy

Narrative Therapy
• Proved useful with prisoners
• People live out stories
• Prisoners have negative stories
• Therapist collects positive events
• Weaves them into a positive story
• Questions are the most important technique
Along with NT we also dwell into details of Solution focused Therapy, Art Therapy, Drama Therapy, Role Play, Empty Chair, Role Reversal and many other techniques.

Expert Witness
Another duty of a Forensic psychologist is to write reports for courts as an expert witness. We learned the method of report writing and few elemental things like:
• You work for the courts and not for lawyers
• Use as much objective evidence as possible
• Opinion should be based on factual evidence
We also splurge two lectures understanding the problem and treatment of substance misuse. Point to ponder! In Pakistan Forensic Psychology is a new emerging field, there is a crucial need to hire psychologist in police department and other civil and criminal courts and settings.

References:
Wrightsman, L. S. (2001). Forensic psychology. Belmont, CA:
Bartol, C. & Bartol, A. (2004). Introduction to Forensic Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Handbook of Psychology, Volume 11. Forensic psychology / edited by Alan M. Goldstein and published by
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.