AMIDST the instant, appalled reaction and rush to judgment over the shooting of 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week, the assessments of Professor David Wilson on Brenton Tarrant, the Australian-born suspected gunman, were worth reading.

“Live streaming for 17 minutes – action by social media platforms is key ...” read one of his tweets. Clearly, he added, Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011, had become what he always wanted to become – a lightning rod for others.

A second tweet pointed out that Tarrant’s 17-minute live-streaming of his murderous assault was about narcissism, pride, and instilling fear.

If anyone is qualified to pass such verdicts, it is Wilson. As Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University, and a former prison governor, he is our foremost criminologist, and is the author, or co-author, of 13 books drawing on his expertise. His latest book, a memoir of his professional career entitled My Life with Murderers, includes a chapter on two of Britain’s most notorious mass or spree killings – Dunblane, where Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 children and their teacher in March 1996, and West Cumbria, where Derrick Bird shot dead 12 people in June 2010. Spree and mass murderers, he writes, all share a “perverted narcissism” and make desperate attempts “to seduce you to their own way of thinking”. And much of this is reflected in the actions of Brenton Tarrant.

“I went to Dunblane and Whitehaven to look at Hamilton and Bird,” Wilson, 60, says. “Obviously, I never worked with either [both men turned their guns on themselves] but I did try to make sense of their mass and spree shootings. It seemed to me that they fitted a pattern that would eventually emerge ... well, Hamilton’s would eventually emerge through Breivik and all the spree shootings that we’re very aware of now, especially in the United States.

“When you looked at what was driving a lot of their behaviour, it was a desire to re-order the world in a way that better fitted their needs, and why it better fitted their needs was that they were at the heart of that world, as opposed to feeling on the periphery of it.

“What I felt that I saw a lot was narcissism, a desire for power, a desire to be in control. I describe them as ‘beta males’ – they were people who somehow saw themselves as super-predators but in fact they were so often just regarded as slightly odd in the world they inhabited.

“If you think about live-streaming ... if Thomas Hamilton had been able to live-stream, he would have done so. But the technology wasn’t there at that time. With Hamilton, you had an analogue troll, as opposed to this digital reality that we have today. Hamilton would, at night, hand-deliver hand-written letters. He was trying to create and manipulate a sense of who he was and the world as he saw it.”

He notes that Tarrant, who himself has made direct reference to Anders Breivik, wishes to defend himself in court. “If you think about some of the infamous people who defended themselves in court, you go back to Peter Manuel [in 1958], don’t you? And again you have this sense of the ego, of narcissism, the desire to dominate, the desire to be part of the theatre of what you’ve done.”

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In his book, which he will discuss at both Carluke Library and at Glasgow’s Aye Write festival next Saturday, Wilson, who was born in Sauchie, Clackmannanshire, and raised in Carluke, traces his career, from prison governor to criminologist and professor. It touches on many people and issues; he has worked with, or interviewed, many people who have committed murder – not for nothing is the book subtitled Behind Bars with the World’s Most Violent Men – among them Dennis Nilsen, who died in prison last May, who in 1983 was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders, and was long believed to have killed at least 15 young men.

The book also touches on our fascination with serial killers, on hitmen, on the reasons that many men commit murder, and on the profiling of men of violence. It is an enlightening, thought-provoking read.

One of its chapters takes us through his repeated encounters with Bert Spencer, an ambulance driver who was one of the initial suspects in the killing, in September 1978, of paperboy Carl Bridgewater, at Yew Tree Farm, Staffordshire. Spencer had a cast-iron alibi and his name, writes Wilson, faded from the police investigations. Four other men – dubbed the Bridgewater Four – were subsequently convicted of murder, but their convictions were overturned in 1997 amid concerns about the police evidence. The Bridgewater case remains open.

Read more: Police to examine claims made by Scots criminologist in Bridgewater murder documentary

A few months after the jailing of the four in 1979, Spencer, armed with a shotgun, killed his friend, Hubert Wilkes, at a farmhouse, for which he was jailed of 15 years.

For his Channel 4 documentary, Interview With a Murderer (available on YouTube), Wilson spent many hours interviewing Spencer, and subjecting him to forensically researched questions based on careful reading of papers in the Bridgewater case.

In the end, Wilson, having picked holes in the alibi, says Spencer had come out in the "high" range of a psychopath analysis known as the P-SCAN, had lied to him on many occasions and that, in the absence of an alibi, “I think that there’s enough evidence for this case to be reopened”.

Spencer looks dumbfounded as Wilson leaves to present his evidence to the police. “This psychopath needs a cuddle,” Spencer tells his wife, on camera. It is a chilling moment. “That was extraordinary,” Wilson says of that moment. “I obviously didn’t see it live, because I had left the room.”

I mention that Wilson was fearless in the documentary when he confronts Spencer. “You’re being very kind,” he says, “but the simple reality is that, in the world I work in, in an applied setting, you have to tell people what it is you’re making of what they’re saying to you.

“As I say in the book, you should always tell the psychopath that he’s a psychopath. I’m not giving a clinical diagnosis on Bert Spencer, but in the book I quote Kent Kiehl [American neuroscientist and author of a book, The Psychopath Whisperer] as saying that when you’re talking to a psychopath, you should sit in the chair nearest the exit, in case you piss them off.” He laughs.

Staffordshire police did not, however, reopen the Bridgewater case after the documentary. “I remain surprised, but hopeful that the evidence provided by Bert Spencer’s first wife, Janet, would be enough, even now, to persuade them to reopen the case.” The woman, speaking on camera for the first time, provided damning evidence about Spencer’s conduct on the day Bridgewater died.

In the book Wilson expresses alarm and despondency at the latest figures for incarceration across the UK. In England and Wales, some 83,000 people are behind bars; in Scotland, it is around 8,000. Jails are, to use a phrase much in vogue, bulging at the seams.

The Scottish Liberal Democrat justice spokesman Liam McArthur was recently quoted as saying: “Scotland’s prisons are bursting at the seams. Taking incarceration rates back up towards the highest levels seen by the Scottish Parliament is not a sign of a progressive justice system. Two-thirds of Scotland’s prisons are officially overcrowded. This bumper prison population just isn’t sustainable. It’s putting prison staff and inmates at risk.”

Wilson says he despairs at the figures and especially at the Scottish ones.

“These suggest that Scotland has a higher per-capita rate of imprisonment than anywhere in western Europe.

“You’ve got to start saying to yourself, when will we learn? When will we learn that prison is corrosive. We’ve got to find better ways of managing them.

“If you put it in these terms, which I try to do all the time because it’s about communicating with the public, the Scots are no more criminogenic than the Finns, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Spanish, the Germans, the French, the Belgians, the Italians … So why is it we chose to imprison more than our European neighbours?

“And ultimately those are about political decisions, about decisions in relation to culture. I keep saying, Scotland has a wonderful opportunity to look eastwards, to Scandinavia, rather than west, to the United States, or south, to England and Wales.”

He is a firm advocate of the need for prisons to rehabilitate offenders, citing the continuing success of such projects as HMP Grendon, in Buckinghamshire, which, he says, is the only prison in England and Wales that operates as a "psychodynamic therapeutic community", and with markedly successful results. Wilson himself used to work there, saying it felt like a "natural home" for him.

He took some encouragement from a speech last month by David Gauke, UK Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, calling for a "smart" justice system that would cut reoffending, protect the public and make sure that serious criminals received fitting punishment.

"I ultimately don't care if the penal reformer is left-wing, right-wing or centrist. What I want people to say is, 'I don't want tough justice, I don't want soft justice, I want smart justice'. The fact that [Gaulk] was saying that seems to me to be accurate.

"When you think about what the public say, they are far less punitive than politicians might imagine. If you give members of the public cases, and say, 'what sort of sentence would you impose on someone who's done this?', they will often choose a punishment option which is less severe than the one chosen by the magistrate or by the judge.

"The only great thing that you've got going in Scotland at the minute is that there are moves to look at ending short sentences. Obviously we have got to have some way of managing these people, who would have been given a short prison sentence, in the community, but those kind of approaches exist, and the thing that I say down in England until I'm blue in the face, is, 'Have you ever looked at the Scottish violence reduction strategy?'

"It's an amazing approach," he continues. "[Psychologist] Karyn McCluskey [a previous director of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit] is an inspiring woman, and I say, 'This is what you could be doing', and that whole approach, that kind of sense in which you have to have a holistic approach to these problems, is ultimately the way of tackling the kind of problems that we have been describing."

The book closes with what Wilson concedes could be seen as "utopian" measures to reduce the incidence of serial murder by working with groups who so often are killed by serial murderers; he believes we should give a voice to the elderly, challenge homophobia, help young people who are runaways or have been ejected from the family home, and debate how we monitor and police the young – women, generally – who sell their sexual services. He also touches on toxic, aggressive masculinity. And, on the issue of crimes of violence, he addresses the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, which damages the social fabric. "It really is," he writes, "about the economy and jobs and security and feeling fulfilled."

"People," he says now, "seem to deny there is a link between this gap and [crimes of violence and gang violence] because at a commonsense level, there are many people who are worse off but will never commit crime. Look, my grandparents were brought up in poverty. My best friend was brought up in poverty. And they did not go on to commit crime. So there's not a causative link, but there are, quite clearly, correlations.

"Boys in my generation would get employed; they'd join British Steel, they'd work in the railways, they'd be in coal-mining. They'd be in some kind of industry that gave them an opportunity to really get a start in the community. But these kinds of jobs don't exist [now]. You therefore have to say, you can't divorce that micro-reality from what's happening at a macro level. I say that I'm not utopian about that.

“I also acknowledge that there's a lot of misogyny, that we have to talk about masculinity, we have to talk about all of those factors too, and there are ways of doing it with people.

"You have got to give young men good role models. We have got to find ways of helping them perform masculinity, and there are multiple ways of performing masculinity. There's not [just] one way of being a man, and that's the other message that I hope comes out in the book. So often, the young men who have been violent, and whom I've had to deal with, seem to imagine that somehow they were behaving in a hypermasculine way. But I for one would certainly never behave in a hypermasculine way."

He has just finished filming David Wilson's Crime Files, a series of 10 hour-long episodes for the new BBC Scotland channel. It includes a historic case, a current case, and interviews with everyone from the director of the State Hospital at Carstairs to Sue Black, the renowned forensic anthropologist.

In the meantime, he is looking forward to returning to Carluke Library next weekend. He quips that his sisters "pimped me out" to the library for the event. "Three hundred and fifty people have bought tickets, and I was really touched by that," he says fondly. "After all, the first-ever library books I got were from that very library."

My Life With Murderers, Sphere Books, hardback, £20. www.ayewrite.com. Twitter: @ProfDavidWilson