Psychological and criminological characteristics of economic crime perpetrators

Abstract

Profiling perpetrators of economic crime, persons which committed abuse of official position, crimes against property and businesses, destroying the economy of their country, damaging the state budget, compromising citizens standard is multidisciplinary research which for is used knowledge from economics, psychology and law. Psychological analysis of perpetrators is implemented by Cybernetic battery of conative tests - KON 6 (Momirović at al., 1992) and AMRL 23 (Knežević, Radović, 1994). Research was conducted at prisons Sremska Mitrovica and Zabela on fraud convicted male persons sentenced to more than one year in jail. Based on a representative sample, there is no significant deviation from normal population, but division into two groups by age, resulted in specific psychological characteristics of the perpetrators: elevated levels of passive amorality (AMRL 23), extraversion, activity (EPSILON), above-average functioning of defending regulators (ALFA), dominance and reduced levels of violent aggression (SIGMA), insensitivity, psychopathy (DELTA) and high level of socialization (ETA). There was a regularity in behavior depending of the age of respondents, specialization for certain criminal offenses, intelligence and education. Pairing socio-demographic characteristics, personality traits and preferred offenses resulted in construction of criminalistic profile of perpetrators who committed instrumental crime motivated exclusively by profit gain.