Book Review: The criminal mind

Abstract

People’s mental processes, particularly how they see and understand other people, change as they grow, and the criminal law should take this into account. Vastly oversimplified, this is the fundamental premise of The Mind of the Criminal: The Role of Developmental Social Cognition in Criminal Defense Law, Reid Griffith Fontaine’s elegant tour of seven areas of the American criminal justice system’s recognition—or failure to recognize—the new “social-cognitive jurisprudence.” What can psychological research concerning how people develop their understanding of, views about and feelings toward, others, offer the criminal justice system?We all attach meaning, undertake behaviors and have emotions in response to the words and actions of others (social information), and how we do that depends upon our social cognition. Theories of social cognition, most significantly social information processing (SIP) theory, seek to explain why individuals respond differently (sometimes violently) to these social stimuli, which could have great significance for the criminal law. Individual differences in social cognition that could impair a person’s ability to make sense of social information could make such a person act in a way that was less controlled or less rational, which might suggest reduced criminal responsibility. Impaired social cognition, or social cognition that has developed through initial responses and feedback to these, could lead to misinterpreting social information, for example by misperceiving as threats social information that most people would perceive as nonthreatening, which could affect the reasonableness of a person’s response. This book collects developmental psychological research (much done by Fontaine himself) into a coherent theory that Fontaine applies to the basic situations in which the criminal law makes allowances for reduced, impaired, insufficiently developed or absent rationality. The particular processes by which persons who engage in antisocial behavior understand their social environment is undeniably an important inquiry for the criminal law, as the views of perpetrators towards other persons might help us Crime Law Soc Change (2012) 58:563–565 DOI 10.1007/s10611-012-9400-3