Typologies of Criminal Behavior

Criminologists have developed both crime-centered and person-centered typologies. The former sort out criminal activities into homogeneous groupings, such as residential burglary, car clouting, white-collar crime, and forcible rape. Criminologists base such types on offender-victim relations, techniques employed in the crime, and spatial or temporal features of the lawbreaking activity. By contrast, person-centered typologies assign individuals to role careers, syndromes, criminal roles, and other social and behavioral categories on the basis of similarities on their part in criminal involvement, attitudes, personality patterns, and other presumably relevant characteristics. In short, crime-centered classifications seek to identify distinct forms of crime, while criminal-centered endeavors search for relatively distinct patterns or types into which real-life offenders can be sorted.

Perhaps criminologists will ultimately identity a number of distinct crime forms and a collection of offender types as well. Or it may turn out that distinct patterns of lawbreaking can be identified, but persons who specialize in them may rarely be encountered. For example, while residential burglaries may follow a common pattern (occurring most often during daylight hours, etc.), few if any "burglars" who specialize in that form of crime may exist. Finally, it is possible that there are no distinct forms of crime or types of offenders.