Taxonomic Discrimination Among Sex Offenders: Forensic Utility?

Abstract

During the decade of the 1980s, development and testing of taxonomic systems for classifying a broad range of criminal offenders, including arsonists, murderers, domestic violence/batterers, and sex offenders, had its heyday. The promise of empirically informed classification systems for enhancing decision-making in multiple arenas–-apprehension, risk assessment, management, and treatment–-lost currency and, at least with sex offenders, went out of favor. Beginning with the advent of the second wave of sex offender civil commitment laws in 1990, the research focus shifted sharply toward the development of methods for assessing risk. Courts were compelled by the third prong of the sexually violent predators statute to inquire about the likelihood of re-offense, not about what 'type' of offender the respondent was. Empirically derived classification systems are likely to be most useful if they cater to the needs of the criminal justice system by focusing on management-related concerns, including assessment of risk. The extant systems have relied typically on prison file data with a paucity of input from nomothetic data. Designing classification systems with a forensic purpose in mind would necessitate revisiting input data that differentiates among offenders with regard to the efficacy of current interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)