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Book Review: Offending Behaviour: Moral Reasoning, Criminal Conduct and the Rehabilitation of Offenders

This is an extremely useful introduction to the important field of moral reasoning within the criminal justice system. This book presents complex material in a very readable and concise form. Chapter 1 sets the context by reviewing the main psychological theories of offending behaviour: Psychobiological theories, Psychodynamic theories, Learning theories, Cognitive-Behavioural theories and Control Theories. The author briefly but succinctly outlines the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches in the light of the research evidence, and neatly shows in a chronological fashion how sets of theories build upon each other. Each approach has a partial and therefore limited contribution to make to our understanding of criminal behaviour. The chronology of these approaches indicates the need to take full account of the internal biological and psychological, and the external structural and environmental factors for a fuller understanding of criminal behaviour. This issue of the balance between internal and external factors is a major theme of the book and is further developed in the ensuing chapters. In Chapter 2, having set the context, the author discusses the work of Piaget and Kohlberg and the origins of moral reasoning in developmental psychology. Thus Piaget’s four stages of logical reasoning are outlined, alongside which moral reasoning is developed based upon individual social experience. It is upon the basis of this experience that the child develops notions of fairness and justice, which is a marked contrast to the Durkheimian view of the internalisation of society’s norms and values. The author shows how an understanding of justice comes to have a psychological context, by children developing from purely reciprocal exchanges with others (based upon a fixed idea of rules imposed by people in authority) to mature notions of treating others as one would wish to be treated oneself (rules are a result of consensus and cooperation). To achieve this latter autonomous moral reasoning Piaget is arguing that individuals have to have moved through the four stages of logical reasoning to be able to use complex cognitive skills to solve problems and apply general rules to specific situations. It is possible for people to have a higher logical reasoning stage than a moral reasoning stage but not vice versa. This is because of the increasing intellectual complexity of the moral reasoning stages. Having outlined the work of Piaget the author considers the work of Kohlberg in some detail as a development of the work of International Journal of Police Science & Management Volume 6 Number 4