"The Importance of a Criminal Record for Individuals Involved in Criminal Acts Produced by Violence"

Abstract

Aggression is the manifestation of some type of intentional behaviour, aimed at harming another person or obtaining a tangible reward for the aggressor. Aggressive behaviour is often attributed to people with mental disorders or those with a criminal history. It is attempting to assign a substrate on which to graft such behaviour, although its aetiology is multifactorial and widely debated at the international level. Thus, to define the aetiology of aggression and to highlight the risk factors involved, we conducted a study on patients involved in violent criminal acts. <br />Material and method. We conducted a comparative study between two groups of people involved in criminal events using violence or an aggressive behaviour. One of the batches consists of 100 inmates who committed a criminal act through aggression, and the second batch consists of 100 people with psychiatric pathology who also committed a criminal act through aggression. The two groups included those with criminal records and those with no prior history of this nature. Both groups of people were examined with psychiatric forensic expertise. As a way of assessing aggressive behaviour and possible risk factors, we used the STAXI-2 (State Trait Anger Expression) and EPQ (Eysenck Personality Questionnaire) tools. The data obtained was analyzed using the SPSS platform, where we conducted comparative studies to highlight the differences between the frequencies of the samples. <br />Results. There are no major differences between the patients of the two groups in terms of gender distribution. The chi-square test (0.509; p=0.476) indicates that there are no statistically significant differences regarding the environment of origin of the two groups. The results obtained at those two evaluation instruments used to evaluate pathologic traits did not show an increased influence of the psychiatric pathology on presence of the aggressive behavior. Instead, both tests showed a correlation between the criminal record and the development of an aggressive behaviour. In this situation STAXI-2 showed a significative result related by p =0.011 for AX-I, p=0.012 for AC-O, p=0.007 for AC-I and p=0.008 for AX-I. <br />Conclusions. The impact of the criminal record on aggressive behaviour is more significant compared to the psychiatric pathology.