NCJ Number
232021
Journal
International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology Volume: 54 Issue: 5 Dated: October 2010 Pages: 829-849
Date Published
October 2010
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This article examines the theoretical nature and aims of criminal profiling.
Abstract
In this article the authors analyze the nature and aims of criminal profiling from a theoretical point of view. The need to become increasingly "scientific" has given rise to the modern approaches of profiling, which have been particularly successful in cases of serial homicides and sex crimes, given that compulsive (perverse) acts, because of their ritual nature, have been described as being more easily foreseeable and presumably linkable to the psychological and even personal characteristics of a given criminal. On this basis, the authors analyze profiling from an epistemological point of view and show how, in the concrete activity of profiling, profilers depart from the "certainty" of the scientific models (those that are based on deductiveinductive processes); the epistemological basis of reasoning changes as there is no longer an inductiondeduction model but rather an abductive model (as conceived and explained by Peirce) in which the importance of plotting (the weaving of a narrative) becomes greater. References (Published Abstract)