Profiles in Crime: Typologies of Criminal Behavior provides students with a comprehensive understanding of behavior patterns within the context of justice, law, and society. The text teaches students how to identify the perpetrator of a crime, the nature of the offense, the manner in which the crime was committed, and the motivation and aftermath of the crime. The book places special focus on the social, political, and economic context of criminal acts and how these factors can influence an offender's behavior.

The book begins with an overview of criminal offending, criminal typologies, and criminal investigation. In later chapters, students are introduced to various criminal profiles, including those for violent crime, property crime, white collar crime, organized crime, political crime, and more. In the final chapter, students learn the correlates of criminal offending, including psychological, biological, and psychiatric theories of crime, how individuals learn to be delinquent, and psychiatric and psychological explanations for crime.

The second edition features new readings on psychosocial criminology, the study of homicide to better understand violence, and state and war crime.

Profiles in Crime is ideal for undergraduate courses in sociology, criminal justice, and criminology, especially those that address the sociology of deviance, criminal psychology, and criminal typology.