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The Diversity of Offenders and Criminal Acts As a means of exploring these propositions, a sample pool in a hypothetical offender homology study will be considered. In this context, what will be examined is whether the analyzed pool of data was more likely reflective of a homogenous group of people that may have feasibly demonstrated […]

The Limitations of Law and the Diversity of Human Beings The classification of crime in criminal justice systems throughout the world is typi- cally conceived of as acts regarded to be breaches of the law. While the laws of a society can prescribe with comparative ease a generic constellation of behaviors that constitute a violation,

Disentangling Homology The review of the aforementioned four tenets associated with homology research calls for a number of considerations. What might explain the conflicting findings between the studies demonstrating accuracy in profilers and those unable to find evidence of offender homology? It is postulated herein that this circumstance may arise as a result of disjunction

Profilers Do Not Evaluate Situational Factors Another point of marked differentiation noted in Dern et al. (2009) are the descriptions suggested by some commentators concerning the procedures for formulating criminal profiles and those actually employed by law enforcement personnel when constructing criminal profiles.4 In this context, another tenet that seems to have emanated from homology

Criminal Profiling Relies Upon Trait-Based Connections As noted in Dern, Dern, Horn, and Horn (2009), there appear to be disparities between the conceptions imputed by some commentators on the topic of criminal profiling with the activities of actual practitioners who produce criminal profiles to assist police investigations.2 In this regard, the scientifically conservative language originally

No Links Between Offender Characteristics and Crime Behaviors A second tenet that intermittently appears to be conveyed in the literature associated with homology research is the proposition that studies have failed to demonstrate pat- terns and/or relationships between behavioral features typically exhibited in crimes and offender characteristics. As previously indicated, part of the intended purpose

International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 59(3) likely offender in both a murder and sexual assault case. As the utilized case materials were from previously resolved crimes, the correct answers, in terms of the actual char- acteristics of the responsible perpetrators, were known. Thus, a mechanism for mea- surement was developed wherein the

Profilers Are Not Accurate The first tenet that sporadically appears to emerge from the literature considering offender homology has been the proposition that profilers have failed to demonstrate accuracy in their predictions. A perplexing aspect has been its exposition which, at times, appears quite truncated in its coverage concerning the full scope of available material

Kocsis and Palermo 315 As a consequence, it is important to bear in mind that this manuscript is not intended to generate criticism but rather to attempt a more holistic appraisal and thus integration of what appears to be disparate bodies of research in the field of criminal profiling. Accordingly, some portions of this manuscript

Disentangling the Tenets It is this apparent contradiction between the implications argued from offender homol- ogy research and the findings of the profiler accuracy research that, in the authors’ opinion, forms the nub of the conundrum and thus disjuncture informing the premise of criminal profiling. Consequently, this manuscript attempts an integration of these seemingly opposing