The concept of the identity of the offender

In any illegal act reflects the psychological characteristics of a person, his attitude to society and law. Famous Russian psychophysiologist V.M. Bekhterev wrote that "... in such a case as a crime, the whole personality of the subject, and even more, his entire psychophysical organization, is reflected."

Illegal (including criminal) activity has a significant impact on the identity of the offender, although the implementation of such activities contribute to some of the psychological properties of the individual. Moreover, there is a known tendency connected with the fact that the richer the illegal experience, the deeper the changes that have occurred in the personality of the offender. Along with this, the relatively constant psychological properties of one or another personality of the offender manifest themselves in the very antisocial activity.

A number of investigative and investigative actions are based on this circumstance: drawing up a psychological portrait of a criminal, searching by the method of committing an offense, by criminal “handwriting” revealing the specifics of criminal qualifications, etc.
In legal psychology, an experiment with a modeled prison, conducted under the guidance of an American psychologist, Professor F.D. Zimbardo In this experiment, the dynamics of behavior and the development of interpersonal relations were studied under conditions of modeling a prison situation in which subjects for quite a long time acted as prisoners and guards. The students were male college students.

The main conclusion was that such a simulated, essentially artificial, situation developed into an almost real psychologically tense situation of imprisonment. Subjects - prisoners felt the loss of personal identity and self-control over their own behavior, which entailed the emergence of a syndrome of passivity, dependence, depression and helplessness.

All subject guards (with rare exceptions), on the contrary, felt an increase in the social power of social status and increased corporate identification, which in itself stimulated their stay in such a professional role. The most dramatic moment in the behavior of prisoners who sought to adapt in such a stressful situation was the emergence of extreme emotional anxiety, which often caused the need to terminate the experiment ahead of time. The behavior of at least one-third of the guards was regarded as much more aggressive and anti-human to prisoners than was assumed for this type of simulated situation.