There are certain laws, practices and policies that the criminal justice apply in mitigating and preventing crime. There are however challenges in the future and the strategies that will have to be applied to deal with the evolving nature of certain crimes. This paper will analyse the expected future trends in cyber forensics, counter-terrorism and psychological profiling.
Future Trends in Criminal Justice
In cyber forensics, the experts are interested in preventing cybercrime which gets more complicated due to the dynamic technological advances that take place periodically. Cyber forensics was developed after the emergence of cybercrime where the criminals engage in identity theft, financial theft, espionage and unauthorized retrieval of personal information or details. Currently cyber forensics involves certain steps such as identification, isolation and preservation of the suspected hardware and software that was used to commit the crime.
The specialists will analyse the data, search for encrypted or hidden files and even recover deleted information using certain tools. In the future, there will be the use of better software, anti-spamware and anti-virus integrated into the operating systems. The users will have to be educated on identity theft and other cybercrimes and how they can prevent themselves from being attacked. In the future there will be international cooperation between countries in enforcing laws and resolving issues between countries that cite jurisdictional sovereignty and American influence.
There will also be a higher demand for experts with a blend of skills in forensics and law in order for the evidence to be utilized and accepted more in court. In the future, the forensic evidence may be contested more by criminals as they search for loop holes. Other expected trends in cyber forensics will include the investigation of live or running systems, remote forensic capabilities and new improved forensic tools (Bem, Feld, Heubner & Bem, 2008). The criminal justice will have to come up with laws to address the emerging cybercrimes and prevention.
In serial crimes, law enforcement officers introduced offender profiling where experts came up with a description of the physical, historical and psychological attributes of the offender. This helps to eliminate suspected groups of people and in the end capture the killer. Currently, there are certain methodologies used in psychological profiling. It is believed that the crime scene reflects the personality of the offender. The method of operation more commonly referred as the MO will remain the same. The current crime and other past and future crimes will definitely be related.
The offender has a signature that will be present in all the crimes he commits. It may be the words he uses, the way he kills or the way the crime scene is left after the act. It is also argued that the personality of the offender will not change. The personality of an individual is usually set or determined in his or her teenage years. In the future, the profilers will have to get certain accreditations in order to operate and be credible. This will require a standardization of the profiling process.
Profiling will therefore be more of a science than an art. As criminals get smarter and harder to trace, there will be need to invest in higher profiling education and skills acquisition. The profilers will begin to use computers to aid in profiling (Egger, 1999). There will also be the use of profile decoding where the experts analyse written documents by suspects. It is believed that what one communicates consciously has a relationship with what one is thinking unconsciously.
Terrorism has become an increasing challenge to the national security of several countries especially the United States of America as it becomes targeted by the extremists or fundamentalists. The United States has taken stern measures on governments believed to be not taking action against terrorist groups in their countries. In the future, there will be higher rates of terrorism as the criminals get more sophisticated and are able to evade detection. Governments will therefore focus on pre-terrorist prevention tactics and international cooperation will be expected at higher levels.
The governments will be interested in anticipating the risks of terrorism and the prevention measures. The danger is that state sovereignty may get blurred as expectations rise. Countries that do not support the new international laws will face serious sanctions and attacks destroying the peace, infrastructure and the economies of these countries. There will be tensions as the political aspect of national security gets intertwined with the laws of criminal justice.
References
Bem, D., Feld, F., Heubner, E. & Bem, O. (2008). Computer Forensics: Past, Present and Future. Journal of Information, Science and Technology, 5(3), 43-59.
Egger, S. (1999). Psychological Profiling: Past, Present, and Future. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 15; 242-261.
McCulloch, J. & Pickering, S. (2009).Pre-Crime and Counter-Terrorism Imagining Future Crime in the ‘War on Terror’. The British Journal of Criminology, 49(5), 628-645.
