The Role of Memory in Penal Sciences

The ancient Greeks believed that memory was a gift from the beautiful goddess Mnemosine, daughter of Uranus and Gaia, belonging to the first generation of titans and a titanide. Nowadays memory is understood and defined in many different ways, sucha as multi-stage process consisting of the ability to register and recall data information. Memory processes are undoubtedly very closely related to emotions. They differ depending on the duration of the memory trace, as well as the type of information and the degree to which we are consciously involved in the process of remembering and recreating information. The aim of this paper is to show the importance of human’s memory in penal science. Memory allows to recreate a so- -called memory portrait with the help of a qualified police cartoonist or a computer program, the perpetrator of which the witness or the aggrieved person saw only for seconds. Such portraits are published through various means of communication, such as the press, the Internet, and television. They often cause the quick identification and apprehension of the perpetrator.