TBR Pile Review: Bad Psychology, by Robert A. Forde

For decades the psychological assessment and treatment of offenders has run on invalid and untested programmes. Robert A. Forde exposes the current ineffectiveness of forensic psychology that has for too long been maintained by individual and commercial vested interests, resulting in dangerous prisoners being released on parole, and low risk prisoners being denied it, wasting enormous amounts of public money. Challenging entrenched ideas about the field of psychology as a whole, and how it should be practised in the criminal justice system, the author shows how effective changes can be made for more just decisions, and the better rehabilitation of offenders into society, while significantly reducing the cost to the taxpayer.


This is a fearless account calling for a return to scientific evidence in the troubled field of forensic psychology. 

My Review

Aren’t you lucky, three reviews in one day. I actually have a bit of time and am rested, so I decided that my goal today would be to sit and read three books that I’d started but hadn’t finished. And I have. This is the third.

I bought this book in early 2020 after reading a book by a forensic psychologist who had worked in prisons and now works in private practice and as an expert witness. The author of that book, Kerry Daynes, recommended this book. I have been reading it on and off since about March.

I am, by my nature, a lover of the scientific method, and I have developed some understanding of mental health, how it relates to criminality and I am critical of the current criminal justice system. It treats the symptoms, not the cause. You have to treat the cause if you want to stop people going back to the same ways outside of the confines of prison. Most current psychological treatments in prisons, where they even exist, don’t treat the cause, they attempt to treat the behaviours, because they are based on cognitive-behavioural therapy.

CBT is meant to help with responses that can be rationally interrogated; a person responding to a perceived threat because they have been traumatised and have an enlarged amygdala is not going to have time to rationally consider their actions, they just react to threat. They need trauma treatments not imprisonment and CBT. That’s just an example of how current forensic psychology gets things wrong, and this book provides the evidence to confirm my thinking on the subject.

Since I’m human (unfortunately – I’d rather be a dragon), I clearly have confirmation bias, but in this case, multiple studies show just how questionable the treatment programmes are and how unscientific they are. Forde calls for a return to psychology informed by the scientific method, and greater oversight for psychology professionals working in the criminal justice system.

This book is at times specialist in tone, I struggled on occasion because I’m not a psychology professional, and don’t have the vocabulary, so I can’t call it a popular book, but an intelligent reader armed with a dictionary can read it and understand the points the author is making.