About the Author

(Photo by Karl Braanaas)

Facing cases of murder or fraud, seeing and hearing an offender of other serious crimes is part of the role of a judge. The author of Exploring the Criminal Mind is Jens-Jacob Sander. He is a judge in the Norwegian Courts of Justice at Asker and Baerum District Court (Norwegian: Asker og Baerum tingrett). This court is situated West of the city of Oslo. By Norwegian standards it is a large court with 12 judges and 3 assistant judges.

The criminal mind is a field of research which relative to its importance is poorly investigated. Having seen this, Jens-Jacob accepted the challenge. Initially he found it necessary to carry out extensive studies in criminal cognitive behavior on subjective procedure levels. That is the study of forms of criminal thinking. The second step was to explore the possibility of identifying and describing corresponding brain procedures. This required studying advances of neuroscience on brain procedure levels. His idea is that only by organizing these areas of knowledge into one coordinated unit of understanding – in a unified brain-mind theory - will the substance of the criminal mind lend itself to reasonable and well grounded insight. These efforts resulted in the book Exploring the Criminal Mind which is published electronically on the World Wide Web.

The insight gained deviates from widespread mythical understandings of criminals that prevent society and individuals from rational and effective measures against development of criminal personalities. Further wrongly based understandings of criminals have lead to irrelevant ways of treating them for the purpose of changing criminal personalities to responsible citizens. And for those who are occupied with criminal investigation a wrong basis of understanding the criminal personality obviously will be detrimental to many vital investigative steps as related to offender profiling and offender interrogation to mention two examples.

The roots of the e-book Exploring the Criminal Mind can be traced back to a major international fraud-hunt in 1989 when Jens-Jacob was engaged as one of the hunters. The hunt was successful but the work with the case evidenced that relevant information and relevant understanding of the criminal mind is a suffering subject. Many fraud hunts and criminal investigations are suffering from lack of such insight. Myths about criminals such as “… delinquents were punks because their fathers were drunks …” are hard dying. Don’t we all tend to believe what we think is right without really knowing?

Search for literature uncovered a much ignored exploratory work of late Dr. Samuel Yochelson and Dr. Stanton E. Samenow, The Criminal Personality, Vol. I-III. The work of the two explorers - unveiled a substantial number of subjective mental procedures of the criminal mind leading to crime. Their work rejected the panoply of myths, misunderstandings and superficial opinions about criminals represented by mainstream social sciences such as criminology, psychology, and sociology. Through studying of The Criminal Personality an incentive to complete the jigsaw-puzzle of the criminal mind was created.

Advances in neuroscience occurred above the horizon. Despite a steady increase in detail and range its findings seemed relatively fragmented and microscopic to contribute to a broader and comprehensive understanding of the criminal mind. But the potential was there. Frustrated attempts over years to find a way or ways to see through the fog were made, until early summer 1998 when Jens-Jacob searched the bookstores of Cambridge and Boston for literature and was in a secondhand bookstore lucky to find help. This visit provided a vital key to solving the puzzle, Dr. J. Allan Hobson’s book, The Chemistry of Conscious States with its model of the brain-mind.

Here was an opening to a new basis for bringing the mental processes of any mind including the criminal mind together with brain processes. This new approach required a lot of research, studying and thinking to achieve the ends of a unified brain-mind understanding of criminals.

In the same year, 1998, Rita Carter published her Mapping the Mind and yet another vital piece of the puzzle was found in Adrian Raine and his team’s murder investigation by use of PET-scanning of the brains of 41 murderers and control.

These advances and many more have been studied, digested and put together forming the documented fundament of Exploring the Criminal Mind for you to see how criminal mental procedures go hand in hand with brain procedures. And it will be shown that these brain-mind procedures are trained by the criminal personality through endless repetitions from early life around 3 – 4 years of age. Unless the criminal personality is trained to change its way of thinking and unless his brain is correspondingly trained to process its data differently with a relative highly activated frontal region, the criminal will most likely retain his destructive personality for the rest of his life.

You can buy ECM and download it now for only $9.90 by clicking here.

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