NCJ Number
125629
Editor(s)
K Howells,
C R Hollin
Date Published
1989
Length
355 pages
Annotation
This volume details clinical approaches to criminal behavior that focus on the individual and on psychological methods of producing change rather than on a medical model in which criminal behavior is viewed as pathological.
Abstract
The book is about aggression and violence, forms of behavior that can endanger and take life and produce adverse long-term effects on surviving victims. Several psychological theories of aggression and violence are examined, including instinct, drive, social learning, and social accounts theories. Research on contexts in which serious assault, robbery, and murder occur is reviewed, and characteristics of violent offenders are analyzed. Clinical approaches to violence prevention are characterized by primary attention to psychological characteristics of the individual violent person, both for establishing the etiology of violence and for producing change. Clinical approaches are contrasted with social, economic, and political levels of analysis and intervention. Specific consideration is paid to anger disturbances and cognitive mediation, family violence, child abuse, sexual violence, violence in institutions for young offenders and disturbed adolescents, and violence in prisons and psychiatric hospitals. 1,018 references, 9 tables, 14 figures.