Organized and Disorganized Offenders

EmilyBarnet
3 min readJul 14, 2021

The versatility of crimes as well as their nature push the sphere of criminology to develop and create newer approaches towards the investigation of crime scenes in a more precise way in order to catch a criminal. This paper explores the difference between two kinds of offenders, organized and disorganized, which serves as a helpful tool in catching criminal.

Organized offenders are people who generally commit organized perpetrations when being in clear consciousness and giving account to the illegal actions they are committing. Meanwhile, the opposite term is disorganized offenders. These criminals demonstrate illogical thinking when committing a crime. Additionally, the category of disorganized criminals is frequently connected with obsessions, madness, and violence. This type of criminals is generally referred to people whose aim is not to commit an ideal crime but to murder somebody without special reasons or plans.

Plans and reasons have a tendency to play an important role when investigating a particular crime scene. For example, organized offenders plan a crime in the most precise way, and their aim consists in confusing the police in investigating a misdemeanor. In other words, these murderers frequently replace the body of the victim, create false evidences of the crime, and make additional obstacles for crime investigation. Unlike the organized offenders, the disorganized ones generally behave in an illogical way and do not care much about the evidence left at the crime scene. They do not plan to confuse the police workers by false evidence.

The personality of offenders varies depending on whether they are classified as organized or disorganized. For instance, disorganized offenders in most cases do not have clear mind when committing a crime. Organized criminals, on the other hand, are reasonable in their actions and have their own reasons and motives. However, both types of offenders create a certain kind of an obstacle for the investigators. Bruinsma et al. (2013) have a conviction that this happens due to the reason that organized offenders mean to make the police workers confused when searching for a criminal, and they create all possible obstacles. Disorganized offenders act in an illogical way, and it can also confuse the police.

Behavior samples of both organized and disorganized offenders have a tendency to differ. While an organized criminal is likely to hide the body or do something with it in order to make it disappear, a disorganized offender is likely to leave the body at the crime scene without hiding all the possible evidence in order not to let the police trace the steps and stages of the crime. According to the study by Healey et al. (2014), these behavior samples trace back to the offenders’ childhood. In particular, organized criminals generally descent from families where parents were stable and strict; however, disorganized offenders always come from the deviant behavior families, where alcohol or/and drugs ruled were inseparable parts of the environment these people grew in.

Regarding an example of Herman Mudgett, the first serial killer in the USA, it is possible to claim that he was an organized criminal, because his murderers were planned precisely, and he committed them in the most accurate manner in order to confuse the police. The biography of the criminal coincides with all the necessary requirements in order to refer him to the category of organized criminals. Another proof to the fact that he was an organized criminal is his childhood period. Mudgett’s parents used to occupy serious positions at work and had very strict character (this was mainly applied to Mudgett’s father). Furthermore, when Mudgett studied at the university, he used to work with corpses (since he was to be a doctor). He was aware of various medical approaches which would be used to confuse the police when investigating the crime scene.

In conclusion, regardless of the numerous studies on the differences between the two types of offenders, organized and disorganized, the criminology sphere is still not able to provide absolute assurance and guarantees in the detection of a possible criminal as well as preventative measures.
About the author:
Emily Barnet is a freelancer at https://customwritingonline.co.uk While studying at the university, she loved writing on various topics, and she also wrote blog posts for her university. Later she found a job that she is working on now because she does what she loves most about writing. She writes works on various topics, you can find them at the service we mentioned early, and more information on how to write a scientific paper, articles, and reviews.

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