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Law is part of what defines society but it is also defined by those who break the law and how we as a society treat them. We'll hear from Dr Mark Freestone about the link between personality disorders and violent crime, and from Dr Landon Kuester about how prisoners may be forced to resort to violence or self destruction as a means to access healthcare.
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Pint of Science goodies to be won during the night!
The Personality Theory of Crime: Backwards to the Future
Dr Mark Freestone
(Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry)
Hans Eysenck thought personality was causally linked to crime: criminals were poorly socialised as children and became aggressive, cold and calculating. The idea has largely been forgotten, yet in forensic psychology personality disorder is a key predictor of criminality - particularly for those with narcissistic, antisocial or borderline traits. I will revisit some ideas about why personality disorder may be linked to crime and draw on forensic psychology and mathematical modelling as evidence. I suggest that we know more about how to address this problem than is currently acknowledged.
Productive and Destructive Violence: the experience of health vulnerable inmates in the American prison system
Dr Landon Kuester
(Research Fellow in Psychiatry)
Taking inmates living with HIV as the case, I will explore the role of ‘violence’ in the delivery of prison healthcare. I will draw on ethnographic data to depict how inmates and prison staff co-produce violence as a form of currency in their daily lives and discuss how delineating ‘benefits’ from ‘harms’ associated to violent acts can be challenging in the prison context, as destructive behaviours become imbued with life sustaining qualities. Taken together, I argue that this experience of imprisonment might be producing of a particular type of ‘degraded citizenship’ for these inmates.
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