Book Description
This is an introduction to the techniques of predicting criminal behaviour, and the ethical and practical issues surrounding them. It discusses the use of prediction in bail, sentencing, and parole decisions, as well as in the allocation of treatments to offenders and presents a typology of predictive approaches. This typology serves as the framework for a discussion of the various predictive factors, including sex, race and ethnicity, age, personality and intelligence, socio-economic status, criminal history, institutional adjustment, drug and alcohol use, etc. Issues of variable measurement and sampling are reviewed, as are some of the statistical methods used to predict criminality, including the Burgess Method, predictive attributive analysis, multiple regression, multidiscriminant analysis, and log-linear techniques. The book concludes with an evaluation of the potential value of statistical predictions.
