EVALUATION POINTS FOR AFTER A GUILTY VERDICT

As requested, here is a list of issues and evaluation points you can use for after a guilty verdict. It isn't comprehensive, so feel free to comment and add your own or just use a couple of these. It's completely up to you; use the most relevant evaluation points you can think of.

• Ethics: obviously,  the death penalty and imprisonment are unethical. But, restorative justice is also pretty traumatic. 
• Freewill and determinism: consequences of committing a crime tend to follow the ideology that criminals choose to commit crimes, despite upbringing, cognition, and biology all being deterministic explanations of crime. Thus, you can evaluate the appropriateness of punishing someone for what they didn't choose to do - if it's relevant. 
• Situational versus dispositional: this is one most relevant to imprisonment and treatments. Both seem to adopt the ideology that criminals themselves are to blame for their behaviour, whilst research has suggested situation and environment can play a role in determining criminality. Here you can refer to reductionism. Thus, are treatments likely to be effective if they're ignoring one aspect of why people commit crime?
• Methodology of research: a lot of research is content analysis, which is inexpensive and replicable, but is of course limited by the validity and methodology of the individual studies. You can, as with all research, evaluate population validity, ecological validity (most research is done in the field, which is great), usefulness, etc.
• Effectiveness of treatments: look at reduction in aggressive/anti-social behaviour, time/cost effectiveness, as well as recidivism.
• You can also look at how well research has been applied. Haney and Zimbardo suggested that individual differences should be taken into account, prisons should be used sparingly, and that psychological knowledge should be applied to prison policy. But the actual implementation of this seems slow, and prison is still more widely spread than most of the alternatives. There is still racial bias in US prisons, too. However, research raises the issues surrounding punishment and rehabilitation of offenders, and thus you could say any discussion is beneficial. 

Evaluation points for Turning to Crime

I may be posting more of these, so keep checking back. If you have any other suggestions for the blog, leave a comment! 

S = strength, W =weakness

? = potentially

UPBRINGING

-          Situational perspective (S=useful for government, W=reductionist)

-          Nurture perspective (S=easier to change than biology, W=ignores biology)

-          Determinist explanation (S=follows scientific laws as in physics, may encourage rehabilitation rather than punishment, W=ignores freewill, how can we punish people for something they didn’t choose)

-          Reductionist (S=easier to understand, helps us to determine causality and importance of individual factors, W=ignores dynamic of relationship between factors, may not be valid)

-          Runs in families; not necessarily upbringing (S=easier to change environment than biology, W=may not have face validity)

-          For maximum validity, studies testing this explanation need to be longitudinal (S=more in-depth, track development, W=attrition, observer bias, ethics)

COGNITION

-          Dispositional perspective (S=suggests therapy may be useful, W=reductionist)

-          Doesn’t specify nature or nurture; could be both (S=holistic, W=unknown cause?)

-          Soft deterministic as it suggests that cognitions determine behaviour but we have some freewill over our cognitions (S=more holistic, W=to what extent can we blame the individual?)

-          Cognitions aren’t observable (S=more complex than behaviourist approach, accepts that people have individual differences, W=subjective, non-scientific, may be invalid)

-          Somewhat more holistic as cognition can be influenced by situation as well as nature and nurture (S=likely to be valid as it looks at a variety of factors, W=still reductionist in that biology and upbringing tend to be overlooked, may not enable causality so may be less useful)

-          Relies on self-report (S=allows for attitudes and cognitions to be accessed, qualitative and quantitative data, W=validity may be poor due to demand characteristics, lying, and misinterpretation etc.)

BIOLOGY

-          Deterministic (S= follows scientific laws as in physics, may encourage treatment rather than punishment, W=ignores freewill, how can we punish people for something they didn’t choose)

-          Reliance on correlation (S=more ethical than manipulating biology, W=causality; how do we know whether brain dysfunction/genes/serotonin is a cause or result of criminal behaviour?)

-          Reductionist (S=easier to understand, helps us to determine causality and importance of individual factors, W=ignores dynamic of relationship between factors, may not be valid)

-          Nature approach (S=more scientific, observable, objective, W=harder to rehabilitate, reductionist)

Reductionism

Reductionism is a really key issue in psychology because to some extent it can be applied to every theory, and every approach or paradigm. 

Reductionism refers to the breaking down of complex phenomenon into smaller components. It's the opposite of holism, where complex phenomena are looked at in their entirety.

Reductionism/holism is a continuum rather than an either/or description of a theory or approach. Some of the more reductionist approaches are behaviourism and the biological approach, whilst the more holistic approaches are humanistic psychology, the individual differences approach and social psychology.

Essentially, the more simplistically a behaviour is explained, the more reductionist the theory.