Forensic neuropsychology: Social, cultural, and political implications

This chapter examines sociological and geographical theories relating to the causes of crime, criminal behavior, and the contextual factors in which these are enacted. It explains the differences between criminal responsibility, understood as individual culpability for a particular crime, and criminal justice, as a set of social, cultural, and political issues surrounding the fairness or otherwise of the practices of policing, law, and punishment. The chapter highlights the potential unintended consequences of forensic neuropsychology in terms of focusing public and expert debate on crime at the scale of the brain, gene-environment interactions, and "situational" factors, at the expense of more structural, socio-spatial explanations of crime and criminal behavior. It shows how criminality has shifted to a certain extent from an immoral form of behavior in need of punishment, through a mental health problem in need of treatment, toward a set of genetic-neural predispositions in need of prevention, pre-emption, and intervention.