Assignment:
Analysis of an Offender
As a criminal justice professional, you will likely deal with offenders on a daily basis. Understanding the causes of criminal behavior is essential to learning how to handle offenders, how offenders are most effectively rehabilitated, and how to protect society from criminals. All too often, however, theoretical explanations for criminal behavior are never applied to criminal behavior in real-life situations. The Final Project in this class is designed for you to apply what you have learned about in this class about the causes of criminal behavior to a real-life criminal.
You are responsible for selecting one specific criminal. You must be able to research and track down detailed information about this specific criminal. Be sure that there is enough information surrounding his or her:
- Upbringing
- Behavior over the course of a lifetime
- Social relationships
- Specific details pertaining to criminal offending patterns
Once you locate an offender who you wish to research, you will need to create an analysis of the offender that takes into consideration the following:
Detailed Overview (2 pages)
- Provide a detailed overview of the offender, and his or her life and crimes.
- Discuss the nature of the offender’s crimes.
- Explain how his or her criminal offending is consistent or inconsistent with what is known about the nature of criminal behavior.
Causes of Crime (8 pages)
- This section of the paper is the most important and should contain a sufficient amount of detail pertaining to all of the potential causes of crime based on what is known about the offender.
- Discuss the potential social and environmental causes of the offender’s behavior.
- Discuss the potential psychological causes of the offender’s behavior.
- Discuss the potential biological and genetic causes of the offender’s behavior.
Type of Offender (2 pages)
- Identify the type of offender.
- Based on the type of offender that you are researching, explain some of the unique issues presented by this type of offender.
- Discuss the obstacles to rehabilitation for this specific type of offender.
Apprehension (2 pages)
- Discuss whether criminal profiling could have been used to apprehend this criminal sooner.
- Explain how the details of this specific offender could be used in the apprehension of future criminals.
Policy Implications (1 pages)
- Briefly discuss some of the policy implications that might flow directly from what is now known about this offender.
- Discuss how policy could be revamped in terms of prevention and rehabilitation.