The main tasks of a criminal psychologist are to help police solve crimes and to evaluate suspects who have been arrested. Obviously working in this kind of job can sometimes be very stressful and even horrifying at times. This means it’s not a job that just anyone can do – it takes a special kind of person with the right attributes to succeed. Reading through this article should help you identify whether you are one of those special people who is up to the task, and whether it’s the kind of work that you’d like to be involved in.
You need the right mindset
The ideal criminal psychologist will have a strong desire to see criminals brought to justice and a fascination with the workings of the criminal mind. It’s not always, or even often, as glamorous as it is made to look in television entertainment shows. It’s a job that can sometimes be frustrating and boring, sometimes unpleasant, and can even be dangerous in certain circumstances.
This must be offset against the positive attributes of the work, which are that you will be helping to solve crimes, potentially saving lives, and also preventing people who are not mentally fit to stand trial from being required to do so. The latter part is not often given much thought or attention, but it is important. Justice must be fair in order for it to be relevant.
You need a strong stomach
While not every criminal psychologist will be exposed to brutal crime scenes and graphic descriptions of horrific crimes, most of them are, and sometimes repeatedly. This can depend a lot upon where you work. Repeated exposure to traumatic scenes can in fact be detrimental to mental health in people who are not emotionally strong enough to handle the images and descriptions they may be exposed to. If you are able to absorb such information without feeling traumatised or reacting emotionally, you’ll probably be more suited to the task than others.
You may be required to work at unusual times
Most of the time you would be working during normal business hours, but of course, crime never sleeps, and many crimes are committed at night. Sometimes, police cannot afford to wait until morning before calling in an expert, because it would delay the apprehension of a dangerous criminal. As such, while it’s unlikely that this would happen very often, you would need to be prepared to drop whatever you are doing (including sleep) and rush to a crime scene to assist the police.
You’ll need to be qualified
Obviously you can’t just turn up at a police station and expect to be given a job as a criminal psychologist. Most people employed in this profession will have a doctorate in a relevant field (usually psychology), which is a lengthy qualification process. If you already have a degree in a relevant field, topping it up with an additional qualification in psychology, criminology, or forensic science may be sufficient to help you get the job.
The job pays better than the average job
In all honesty, you can normally expect to earn much more working as a clinical psychologist, so it’s a job you should choose because it’s something you’re passionate about, not because of the potential earnings. But, having said that, compared to ordinary work the pay is still normally well above average.
It’s less expensive than being a clinical psychologist
Working as a clinical psychologist, you’d normally have to pay for your office, signage, insurance, and all kinds of other things. As a criminal psychologist, however, you may find that an office is supplied to you, and you don’t need any insurance at all because you’re not treating paying patients. You could potentially be sued if you play a role in sending an innocent person to prison, so insurance against that possibility is probably sensible. Or you could just be competent at your job and ensure innocent people are not sent to prison as a result of anything that can directly be attributed to you.
You’ll be making a positive difference in the world
As with any job, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. As an example of the wrong way, consider that police are often under political pressure to apprehend criminals as quickly as possible, and because of this, some of them may be tempted to take shortcuts.
If you’re competent at your job, it will be clear that they may have the wrong person in custody. Unethical police will not normally appreciate it if you bring this to the attention of the courts, and may attempt to offload some of their political pressure onto you. If you succumb to this, that is definitely an example of ineptitude. The probability of being faced with a scenario like this depends on where you work.
On the other hand, when you do your job correctly, you have the opportunity to play a role in helping to make the world a safer place. You also have the opportunity to help prevent incorrect application of the justice system to individuals who are not mentally or psychologically competent to be tried as ordinary criminals.
In the best and most rare scenarios, you could even help save the life of a crime victim by assisting police in identifying the perpetrator or using psychological clues to identify the perpetrator’s probable movements. Such work strays close to the territory of profiling, however, and in real life, profiling is rarely requested or relied upon.
Considering criminal psychology as a career?
If you’re fascinated with the criminal mind to the point where you’d want to make a career of it, criminal psychology make be a path you’d want to pursue. The International Career Institute offers criminal psychology courses at the Certificate, Diploma and Advanced Diploma levels.
