Mining the criminal mind

The search for a better way of assessing the risk of a violent criminal reoffending is one of 78 new projects to receive grant money from the Marsden Fund.

High-risk violent criminals are to be involved in Dr Devon Polaschek's research into the connection between conscious and hidden thoughts.

Dr Polaschek, from Victoria University's school of psychology, has been given a $140,000 Fast Start grant to run two studies that will help better understand the link between attitudes, violence and rehabilitation.

She plans to turn a conventional paper-based violence questionnaire into a computer-based task to examine the effect rehabilitation programmes have on explicit and hidden thoughts.

"People who are violent are much more positive about violence ... they think about it a lot more.

"We know that, and that means that we know that's something we should be trying to change. And if we change it we could change the risk of those men [reoffending].

"But the main way we measure it is by asking them what they think ... what we do with this is we actually say to the men, 'Do you still think like this?', usually by giving them questionnaires," said Dr Polaschek, a former Justice Department psychologist with 20 years of experience in violent-offender rehabilitation.

"There are two big problems with that: The obvious one is that men lie, or want to present themselves in a positive way, particularly when they're coming up for parole.

"The other is that it turns out that we, as human beings, don't really know what we think about lots of things.

"A lot of our thinking goes on in an automatic way."