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This paper has tried to make as explicit as possible the many problems involved in creating typologies in criminology. Initially the paper presented some logical and methodological requirements for typologies in general and some illustrations of how existing typologies in criminology fail to meet particular requirements. Following this, five typologies of criminality were assessed in detail. The minimal scheme of the criminal, the victim, and the act, presented at the end of the paper, is an effort to find a universal framework for analyzing criminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion related to Jack P. Gibbs' work on analytical typologies in criminology. Gibbs treated as problematic an issue that has been closed for students in the field for sometime. The research was competent, its limitations clearly spelled out for the reader, and the results carefully tied to theory. Certainly, none of the others have attracted as much attention. Expectedly, the best scholarship was to be found among the papers on social theory. Unfortunately, most of these were agonizing efforts over where sociology has been and ineffectual attempts to redirect activity in a more promising direction. One has to constantly remind oneself that sociology began with three interests in mind, a distinctive subject matter, social reform, and the application of the scientific method to social behavior; that one is perilously close to forsaking the first two in mindless deference to the last in that important questions go unasked because one cannot attack them scientifically; that the questions one asks are becoming more and more scientific but more and more trivial, and, in so doing, one is, if not becoming psychologists, following psychology down the path to intellectual oblivion.