an act committed in violation of the law where the consequence of conviction by a court is punishment, such as imprisonment
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Official statistics
the total number of crimes reported to police and recorded in the official figures.
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Victim surveys
recording people's experience of crime over a specific period
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Offender surveys
individuals volunteering details of the number and types of crimes they have committed
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Offender profiling
a behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown criminals
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The top-down approach
profilers start with a pre-established typology and work down in order to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts and evidence from the crime scene
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Organised offenders
an offender who shows evidence of planning, targets the victim and tends to be socially and sexually competent with higher than average intelligence
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Disorganised offenders
an offender who shows little evidence of planning, leaves clues and tends to be socially and exually incompetent with lower than average intelligence
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The bottom-up approach
profiles work up from evidence collected from the crime scene to develop hypotheses about the likely characteristics of the offender
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Investigative psychology
a form of bottom-up profiling that matches details from the crime scene with statistical analysis of typical behaviour patterns based on psychological theory
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Geographical profiling
a form of bottom-up profiling based on the principle of spatial consistency: that an offender's operational base and possible future offences are revealed by the geographical location of their previous crimes
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Atavistic form
a biological approach to offending that attributes criminal activity to the fact that offenders are genetic throwbacks or a primitive subspecies ill-suited to conforming to the rules of modern society
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The Criminal Personality
an individual who scores highly on measures of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism and can't easily be conditioned, is cold and unfeeling and is likely to engage in offending behaviour
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Cognitive distortions
faulty, biased and irrational ways of thinking that mean we perceive ourselves, other people and the world inaccurately and usually negative
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Hostile attribution bias
the tendency, to judge ambiguous situations, or the actions of others, as aggressive and/or threatening when in reality they may not be
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Minimalisation
a type of deception that involves downplaying the significance of an event or emotion. A common strategy when dealing with feelings of guilt
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Moral Reasoning
the process by which an individual draws upon their own value system to determine whether an action is right or wrong
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Custodial Sentencing
a judicial sentence determined by a court, where the offender is punished by serving time in prison or some other institution (e.g. psychiatric hospital)
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Recidivism
reoffending, a tendency to relapse into previous criminal behaviour, usually repeatedly
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Other cards in this set
Card 2
Front
Official statistics
Back
the total number of crimes reported to police and recorded in the official figures.
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