A history of the assessment of sex offenders : 1830-2020 / by D. Richard Laws.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Laws, D. Richard, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex offenders--History.

Sex offenders.

Criminal anthropology.

Sex offenders--Psychology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (224 pages)

Place of Publication:

Bingley, England : Emerald Publishing, [2020]

Summary:

Most forensic psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers involved in the assessment of sex offenders today have a good grasp of where the field stands. Many of their colleagues do not have an appreciation of why we are where we are. This book is an attempt to bridge that gap, to provide some historical background of sex offender assessment from 1830 to the present. Topics covered in this book include early efforts to identify and describe criminal populations statistically; the introduction of phrenology as a description of brain function; the efforts of criminal anthropologists to develop criminal taxonomies; the technology of anthropometry to identify individuals by measurement of bodily structure; and the introduction of fingerprinting which replaced anthropometry and remains largely unchanged to the present day. The guiding principle of the book is to help the reader understand that all of this represents a continuous thread of development and, disparate as they might seem, all of them are connected. This book is essential reading for undergraduates in psychology and sociology, as well as professionals in training and early stages of practice.

Contents:

Part I: Introduction

Chapter 1: Contemporary psychological assessment: two approaches

Part II: Assessment of criminal and sex offenders: 19th and 20th centuries

Chapter 2: Criminal statistics and the identification of populations

Chapter 3: Offender classification and registration

Chapter 4: Phrenology: pseudoscience of the mind or precursor science?

Chapter 5: Criminal anthropology: Lombroso's search for criminal man

Chapter 6: Anthropometry: Bertillon's measurement of criminal man

Chapter 7: Fingerprinting: a document complete in itself

Part III: Assessment of sex offenders: 20th and 21st centuries

Chapter 8: Penile plethysmography: the search for the gold standard

Chapter 9: Viewing time: an alternative to PPG

Chapter 10: Attention-based measures: supplementary procedures

Chapter 11: Polygraphy: the bogus pipeline to the soul

Part IV: Assessment of sex offenders: possible futures

Chapter 12: Virtual reality assessment: being there

Part V: Conclusions

Chapter 13: What we learned in 190 years: 12 takeaways

Index.

Notes:

Includes index.

Print version record.

ISBN:

9781787693593

1787693597

9781787693616

1787693619