Personality Disorders and Offending Behavior - Essay Example

The real world is much more complicated than vague sound bites, as are offending behaviors and antisocial behaviors, and solutions demand a more careful reading of the literature and a broader discussion that recognizes causes rather than symptoms or tangential causes.To accomplish the tasks, it will first be necessary to define a working definition of personality disorder and a basic typology before further exploring the risk factors that influence personality disorders over the course of an individual's life.

It is the basic thesis of this paper that these risk factors and subsequent personality disorders explain offending behaviors far more satisfactorily than vague references to criminal subcultures, dangerous prisoners incapable of reform, or the dreaded substance abuse allegation.As an initial matter, any rational discussion of the connections between personality disorders and offending behaviors demands precise definitions. This, however, has proven somewhat problematic in the instant case because different professional and social interests have approached the conceptual framework differently.

There are psychiatrists, for instance, who define personality disorders largely within the context of a public health paradigm whereas many criminal justice professionals and policy-makers emphasize a criminal justice paradigm. The psychological research, therefore, must account for and attempt to reconcile these often competing approaches to and definitions of personality disorders into a larger contextual framework. This larger contextual framework, in turn, must attempt to harmonize definitions to the extent possible to serve both public health and criminal justice objectives and needs.

This is no easy task; indeed, as pointed out by Eastman concerning fairly recent proposals linking medical treatment of certain types of personality disorder to public protection rather than patient treatment, "The fragility of the distinction between public health psychiatry and crime prevention has never before been so starkly represented as it is now in this proposal. However, all doctors should note the subtle but growing social requirement that medical practice should be applied towards public protection" (1991: 551).