>>13645429Criminals are those who break social conventions and are counterproductive to society/the currently dominant power structure.
That's also a reason why historically poor people were regularly conflated with the class of criminal people.
Evolutionary psychology tells us that all human interaction is at least partially grounded in evolutionary biology and thus subjected to evolutionary processes. The green-beard effect gives rise to a we-vs-them distinction which you regularly encounter in humans whereby members of a tribe can torture, kill and hurt other people as long as they are not part of your ingroup. You can observe this kind of behavior very well in chimpanzees. As already introduced above, criminals are ingroup members that break against social norms and thus are counterproductive to the survival of the group. Thus, there must be a way to discard criminal elements from your own ingroup without having to discard all the other members. This is done by othering the criminal. The criminal is ejected from the ingroup and becomes a member of the outgroup. Subsequently, there's a shift in the association between the criminal and the ingroup. One of these shifts consists in associating the criminal with another othered group for example the mentally ill.
This is how humans instinctively behave. That's why you get comments such as:
He's a psycho!
What a schizo!
He has done that? He must be mentally ill.
There is no mental illness that is not instantly associated with unpredictable, violent people. It happened to schizophrenia, bipolar, borderline, adhd etc.
