Psychiatry of Criminal Behaviour

Certain acts which are regarded as undesirable are defined by the particular society as crimes. Criminal behaviour, thus is a violation of the criminal laws of that particular society. Apart from the fact that it is a criminal act, it invariably is also a psychiatric problem in the sense that it may be (a) a symptom of an underlying psychopathological state, (b) a manifestation of a character disorder, or (c) an expression of a transient emotional state. In addition to the individual acts of criminal violence, there are a much larger number of white collar crimes committed by respectable members of the society such as fraudulent returns of income or property tax, bribery of public officials, or receiving kickbacks on business deals or sale of substandard goods. In fact such activities have lately become so common as to have become a statistically normal behaviour in certain countries. In India, moneys derived from such activities are commonly referred to as "Income from Above' or the more colourful term of 'Black Money.' The extent of such white collar crimes was revealed by a survey of 1698 adults by Wallerstein and Wyle (1947)—91 percent admitted to have committed one or more of the 49 offences listed in their questionnaire, men had an average of 18 and women an average of 11 adult offences. Some recent Scandinavian studies by Christie et al. (1965), Anttila (1966) showed similar results.