CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS

Criminal psychology historically is the basic theoretical section of legal psychology. The subject of criminal psychology is mental laws arising and existing in the system "person - crime". The given section of legal psychology investigates problems of the nature of criminal behaviour, criminal motivation, group criminality, formation of criminal installations and, maybe, criminal mentality as a whole. The traditional problems of legal psychology are studying the personality of the criminal; researching the role of the personal and situational factor in the criminal event; research of criminal consequences for the person who committed a crime, the victim, the society; studying the possibility of correcting criminal intentions, its expediency and efficiency; integration of psychological knowledge of the personality of the criminal into other legal sciences; compromise searching between the ethical, socio-political and scientific bases of studying of the criminal's personality. There is specificity in the use of separate psychological methods at solving problems of criminal psychology. Thus, legal psychology borrows research methods of general psychology due to sufficient similarity of the object of research. The situation with criminal psychology is different. The opposition of the researcher and the researched makes application of the majority of the known methods ineffective. Criminalistics and legal psychology have long studied the criminal's personality. However, if to analyse dynamics of researches with a high degree of reliability it is possible to draw a conclusion on the decrease of efficiency of the given research. The techniques used in modern criminalistic and psychological sciences based on the data about the criminal's personality are basically borrowed (the technique of construction of a psychological profile of an unknown criminal, the technique of geographical profiling, the technique of statements analysing). The idea of unity, interconnection and complementarity of the biological, social and individually psychological factors of human behaviour helps in solving the problem at the theoretical level. But how true is the given position? Does it contradict the thesis about the necessity of evolutionary specialization? Is this thesis a vivid example of the simplified sesquicentennial approach? It seems the answer is affirmative to all these questions.