Severity and Frequency of Reactive and Instrumental Violent Offending: Divergent Validity of Subtypes of Violence in an Adult Forensic Sample

• NCJ Number: 238113
• Journal: Criminal Justice and Behavior Volume: 39 Issue: 2 Dated: February 2012 Pages: 202-219
• Author(s): Jennifer L. Tapscott; Megan Hancock; Peter N. S. Hoaken
• Date Published: February 2012
• Length: 18 pages
• Grant Number(s): 410-2008-2461
• Sponsoring Agency: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study tested the validity of distinguishing between reactive and instrumental violence by reviewing the characteristics of adult male offenders' prior conventions.

Abstract

A common practice in forensic research is to distinguish between reactive and instrumental violence, but recent critics have asserted that these subtypes of violence are not orthogonal and that this distinction has outlived its usefulness. To test the validity of the reactive-instrumental distinction, the authors reviewed the official files of 71 violent male offenders to determine the frequency and severity of reactive and instrumental violent offending. Overall, 79 percent of violent offenses could be categorized as purely instrumental or purely reactive, and as hypothesized, reactive violent offenses were more severe than instrumental violent offenses. Both parametric and nonparametric correlation analyses indicated that the frequency of instrumental violent offending was negatively related to the frequency of reactive violent offending. These findings support the reactive-instrumental distinction. Implications pertaining to offender specialization, the general theory of crime, and specialized rehabilitation programs are discussed. (Published Abstract)