Module 01 Central Eight Big Four and Conclusion PDF

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Module 01 Central Eight Big Four and Conclusion...

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Module 01: Central Eight, Big Four and Conclusion Shelley Brown: Welcome back, everyone. Psychology 3402, criminal behavior. Module 1, Crime in Canada, section 6. This is our last section in this module. It's relatively short. I have two slides, but very important slides. All I want to do with this slide is introduce you to something everybody in the corrections world affectionately knows as the central eight. This term was coined by Dr. Andrews and Dr. Bonta, probably two of the most well-known internationally respected scholars in the world of correctional psychology, both Canadians in fact. And based on a slew of research, lots of evidence, they have identified eight risk factors that collectively they call the central eight, criminal history, criminal personality, criminal associates, criminal attitudes, substance use, marital/family deficits, education/employment, and unstructured leisure activity. Now, these are the central eight. According to Anderson and Bonta, these are the top risk factors, these are the big factors that predict crime, are causally related to crime. These are the things we need to target in our intervention strategies if we really want to make an impact on preventing future crime from occurring amongst known offenders. They say that these eight factors are relevant regardless of your age, your sex, your gender, or your racial or ethnic background. Now, another important distinction within this category of central eight is this notion of the big four. Within the central eight, there are four big factors, the top four if you will, within the central eight. And I have bolded those factors for you. Criminal history, the earlier you started doing crime, the more crime you do, the more extensive it is, the more variety you have to your criminal offending patterns, the greater risk you are of doing it in the future. Do you have something called a criminal personality? We're going to explore this concept in more detail throughout the course. But are you the kind of person who's cold, callous, impulsive, manipulative, risk-taking, adventuresome, but you really have no remorse, no empathy for people? Some people might call you a psychopath. That's one of those big risk factors associated with criminal conduct, it's part of the big four. The third one is who you hang around with.

If you hang out with a lot of people who do a lot of crime, who are skilled at doing crime, your risk goes up quite a bit that you, too, are also going to engage in crime. Criminal attitudes, what's in your brain, how do you think about crime? When a crime occurs, the corner store gets robbed, you were involved, what's your attitude? Do you think, well, they've got insurance, nobody was really hurt, my gun wasn't real, I have to do this kind of stuff to survive, I deserve it? Violence is an OK way, yeah. If you bump into me, of course I'm going to show you who's boss. Is that the way you think? We know that those are the big four risk factors associated with crime, according to Andrews and Bonta, based on copious amounts of research. The other four factors, substance abuse, marital/family, education/employment, and unstructured leisure activities, are also known risk factors associated with crime. They're part of the central eight, albeit not part of the top four. Two other points I want to make from this slide. First is that these central eight risk factors are divided into two categories, static risk factors or dynamic risk factors. Generally, most scholars agree that all of the factors, with the exception of criminal history, they are construed as dynamic risk factors, meaning we can change them through intervention. We know these things are related to crime, so if somebody is up here on criminal associates and attitudes, we can through intervention lower how they think and give them strategies to avoid hanging out with criminal others. They're dynamic, in theory, they can change with intervention. All right? So, criminal personality a little harder to change, but in general it's viewed as a dynamic factor. All these variables are dynamic risk factors, we can change them. And when we change them using effective intervention strategies, we should see reductions in crime. One factor, the very first one, criminal history, is known as a static risk factor. It's a very powerful predictor or risk factor associated with future criminal conduct. However, we can't change it through intervention. If you were age eight the first time the police brought you home, if you were in custody 10 times between age 12 to age 16, we can't change that. That definitely elevates your risk that you're going to do more crime in the future. It's a static risk factor, it's predictive of your future involvement in the criminal justice system, but we can't change it through intervention. OK? So very key concept I'm introducing you to, static versus dynamic risk factors. The dynamic stuff we want to target. There's one more important distinction to make, and that's criminogenic versus non-criminogenic needs. Dynamic risk factors and

criminogenic need factors are terms that are often used interchangeably between researchers. When you think criminogenic, you can kind of think crime causing, like carcinogenic. When we say something is carcinogenic, we typically mean it causes cancer, it's linked to cancer. In the same way, the term criminogenic need is also linked to criminal behavior. It's synonymous with the dynamic risk factor. There are there things we want to target in treatment, and if we target them we should see reductions in crime. There's a whole other category of needs called non-criminogenic needs. These are things that are not reflected in the central eight, OK? Non-criminogenic needs are not reflected in the central eight. These are things that change over time. They're needs, they could be depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, a sense of hopelessness, personal distress type variables. These are variables, their needs they can change. Offenders definitely possess these things. But according to the central eight model, these non-criminogenic factors or needs are not part of the essential eight. They're not crime, they're not linked to crime in any way, hence we shouldn't be prioritizing them in treatment. OK. So, I've introduced you to the central eight. You're going to hear about the central eight more as we move throughout the course. And you'll hear about some of the criticisms of the central eight and how people think it can be improved. And we'll also start to unpack each of these major risk factors in more detail. OK. Our final slide for module 1 is here. And I'm just going to briefly present some of the key issues we reviewed through each of the six sections in Module 1. So crime, crime is a social construct. We as a society define what is considered a crime and what's not considered a crime. It's abstract, it's socially constructed. There is no absolute objective definition of what a crime is, it varies from societies to society and from time period to time period. In this course, our focus is on Canadian crime and the legal definition. Whether or not we're studying criminal behavior in this course is based on whether or not it's codified in the criminal code, predominantly. The other big message was there's multiple ways to measure crime. There's no one method that's the best. The best picture emerges when we use multiple methods to measure crime. We need to ask people, have you ever done this? We need to ask victims, potential victims, has this ever occurred to you? And then we also need to gather and collate all the data that officially comes into the police forces and analyze that data. Only through

triangulating all three sources of those information will we get the best image of what's truly happening. And of course, measuring crime has important aspects. It will influence our behaviors, the development of social policies. It helps us evaluate criminal justice system, whether it's working or not. And it also has important implications for theory development and validation. Second last point, really, really, really important to distinguish between correlates, risk factors, and causal risk factors associated with crime. We really need to understand how those three factors are different and are similar. Correlates are great, but we need to elevate up to risk factors and then if we can determine whether or not something's a causal risk factor, wow. Lastly, research shows that there are at least eight central risk factors associated with crime and they're categorized into two main areas, static versus dynamic. Thank you. Looking forward to seeing you in Module 2....