Citation

Byrne JM, Roberts AR. Aggress. Violent Behav. 2007; 12(5): 483-492.

Affiliation

Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, United States; Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Livingston College Campus, Lucy

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.avb.2007.02.009

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

It should come as no surprise that there is no "one-stop shopping" offender typology available that can identify the risk level, targeted treatment protocols, and control levels of the offender groups examined in this special issue: murderers, sex offenders, batterers, violent prisoners, and violent mentally ill offenders. We are in desperate need of further research establishing the links between offender risk level, offender treatment needs, and offender control requirements for each of these offender groups. This article provides a "state of the art" discussion of the key issues that must be addressed by policymakers, practitioners, and ultimately, the public, vis-a-vis the design, development, and implementation of typologies for each of these targeted groups of offenders. This is followed by our assessment of the lessons learned from the great prison classification experiment. We conclude by providing an assessment of new directions in the development of typologies of offenders and the communities in which offenders reside, based on the simple notion that offender change-not offender control-needs to be the primary focus of the next generation of correctional classification systems.