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15 Brit. J. Criminology 157 (1975)
Pathologies among Homicide Offenders: Some Cultural Profiles

handle is hein.journals/bjcrim15 and id is 163 raw text is: BRIT. J. CRIMINOL. Vol. 15 No. 2 APRIL 1975 PATHOLOGIES AMONG HOMICIDE OFFENDERS: SOME CULTURAL PROFILES* SIMHA F. LANDAU (Jerusalem) t SiNCE the early days of criminology, homicide has been, and still is, one of the most attractive topics for social scientists interested in criminal and deviant behaviour. A great contribution to the scientific study of this phe- nomenon was made by Wolfgang (1958) in his work on criminal homicide in Philadelphia, the influence of which is seen in a number of studies pub- lished since then (among them Jayewardene and Ranasinghe, 1963; Pokorny, 1965; Voss and Hepburn, 1968, etc.).' In a previous article on this topic (Landau, Drapkin and Arad, 1974) we investigated several factors related to homicide victims and offenders in Israel, namely, sex and ethnic origin of victim and offender, the victim- offender relationship and motives involved in the criminal homicide. In that study we analysed all the known and solved cases of criminal homicide per- petuated in Israel between January I, 195o and December 3 1, 1964 (except for cases caused by infiltrators from neighbouring Arab countries). 279 offenders and 311 victims were involved. The source of information was data from police files and files of the prison service. Comparisons were made between Oriental Jewish, Western Jewish and non-Jewish (mainly Arab) offenders. The reason for these comparisons stemmed from our basic hypo- thesis that the influence of cultural norms and traditions on behaviour will be reflected in a clear way in the crime of homicide in Israel. This hypothesis was strongly supported by our findings. Along all the variables, very striking differences were found between offenders and victims of the three ethnic groups. The Study The present study was conducted on the same population of offenders, using the same sources of information as the previous one. The topics investigated in this study include the type of homicide as well as the pathologies of the offenders prior to their capital crime: type of first known disturbed or deviant behaviour, previous physical illness or handicap, and hospitalisa- tion for physical and mental disorders. *This article presents some findings from a larger study on criminal homicide in Israel. The project was supported in part by a grant from the Ford Foundation and is being conducted by the Institute of Criminology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in co-operation with Professor I. Drapkin. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, New York, November !973. tPh.D., Lecturer and Assistant Director, Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Previously Research Associate, The Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law, University of Pennsylvania. The author is indebted to Commander A. Shur, Head of the Investigation Branch of the Israeli Police and Mr. A. Nir, Prison Commissioner and his staff for their willing co-operation and assistance, without which this study would not have been possible. Special thanks are due to S. Arad for his assistance in all stages of the research. Thanks are also due to Mrs. Z. Peled for her assistance with the statistics and to B. Beth-Hallahmi, I. Elan and Miss I. Fishman, who took part in the various stages of the study. 1 For an extensive bibliography see Wolfgang (1958) and Wolfgang and Ferracuti (r967).

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