ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on schizophrenia, the illness most strongly associated with criminal behavior. Schizophrenia is the most widespread of the psychotic disorders, and affects about 1 percentage of the world's population. Mental illnesses, especially schizophrenia, are associated with an elevated risk of committing criminal acts. Schizophrenics are also much more vulnerable that the average person to be victimized, especially those showing the most severe symptoms, the homeless, and those comorbid for drug and/or alcohol abuse. The neuro developmental model unites genetics, epigenetics, immunology, and the two critical periods of brain development in a comprehensive attempt to show how the many factors combine to produce the symptoms associated with schizophrenia. The World Health Organization defines mental disorders as clinically significant conditions characterized by alterations in thinking, mood, or behaviour associated with personal distress and/or impaired functioning, and adds that they are not variations within the range of normal, but are clearly abnormal or pathological phenomena.
