Informing the Understudied R: Exploring and Advancing Typological Research.

Creating offender typologies has become a growing interest and a potential method of improving understanding of programming needs and potential placements. Most typological research has only explored and described potential offender types. Relatively few studies have attempted to confirm the existence of created typologies or examine how offenders in each type predict important outcomes. Utilizing a large sample (N = 37,111) of reentering male offenders from Washington State Department of Corrections, we computed both an exploratory and confirmatory latent class analysis. After the confirmation of six offender types, we examined each type's likelihood of several recidivistic outcomes. We anticipate that the described typology will assist case management, prioritizing offender needs, optimizing treatment services, and determining sequencing of multiple treatment types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]