Crime And The Criminal Justice System - 1812 Words

Since my research question is based on crime and the criminal justice system, I needed to find a data sample that could give me a wide presentation of offenders, victims, and crimes. Looking at how police act before and after a suspect is taken into custody could be very helpful towards the answering of my research question. With roughly eleven seasons of Criminal Minds, it offers one of the best possible ways in order to gain the information and knowledge of how TV crime drama are depicting offenders, victims, crime and the criminal justice system. Criminal Minds is based on people who work for the Behavioral Analysis Unit, a subsection of the FBI, based out of Quantico, Virginia. Called in to assist local police departments, the BAU†¦show more content†¦African American offenders are not over-represented in TV crime drama like they are on news networks. Nevertheless, one common theme that all of the episodes had in common was the fact that all offenders had some sort of pa st trauma that turned them into the killers they presently were. In one episode in particular, a female killer started to abduct and torture other females because that’s what she went through. She felt she was getting back at the people who did it to her but was actually hurting innocent victims. In all of the episodes I watched, whether it be about missionary or hedonistic killers, or male or female serial killers, they all had been either abused, forgotten, or left by the ones they loved which caused them to enter the cycle of violence. In season two, episode three of Criminal Minds, a female serial killer was physically, emotionally and mentally abused and assaulted at a young age, ultimately resulting in her becoming a sadistic abductor who watches her victims being tortured and raped by her dominated partner. Reid, one of the agents of the BAU says â€Å"this is a rare case where the abused actually became the abuser... it’s a 1 in 8 occurrence.† Not only i s it rare for a serial killer to be female, but for a person who was abused to actually inflict what she felt on others is around twelve percent. After watching episodes to gain more insight and knowledge into how the BAU works, I