Criminological Diagnosis - A Legal Perspective (From Criminological Diagnosis - An International Perspective, P 187-201, 1983, Franco Ferracuti and Marvin E Wolfgang, ed. - See NCJ-90506)

• NCJ Number: 90514
• Author(s): G DiGennaro
• Date Published: 1983
• Length: 15 pages
• Sale Source: Lexington Books
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Criminological diagnosis is required in various procedural and substantive aspects of criminal processing, as well as in judicial disposition, the execution of applied measures, and treatment.

Abstract

An assessment of the personal qualities of a person being criminally processed is used in the following procedural aspect: arrest, whether to grant provisional liberty while awaiting trial or execution of sentence, assessing whether the necessary mental capacity exists for trial, and suspending punishment because of a psychic illness. Substantive aspects of criminological assessments of processed persons include determining the subject's mental state when the crime was committed; determining the effects of chronic alcoholism, narcotic stupefaction, or deaf-mutism on the moral development of mental capacity; evaluating mens rea; and determining criminal propensities. Criminological diagnosis is used also in selecting the sentence and individualizing treatment. A single diagnostic model to fulfill all the demands of diagnoses in criminal processing is unrealistic, so a variety of evaluation formats are inevitably required. Some other problems involved in evaluations are the difficulty of communication between experts and the courts and determining the use of diagnostic evaluations made during previous states of the criminal process.