On either a good day or bad day, what, exactly, in the present and or near recent vernacular, is a violent offender?

Just curious to see what other people think / know / feel about this particulr term.... phrase....and or phenom as the case may be.

Is this a term for which people generally, easily agree is for the most part conclusively defined?... or is this a term for which, on a case by case application of the term, may well require at least a decent portion of guess work?

To a large extent there seems to be legal components attributing to this term. I am by no means someone who makes a career in making law and or enforcing laws and or interpreting laws previously made - a collective, somewhat fuzzzy phenom unto itself, but I do have enough working experience with law to have come to this realization. Whenever the kind of language that, historically, is used to define/create specific legal definitions that in turn serve as a good portion (the component parts) of man-made law, and this kind of language is allowed to trickle into play for a given situation, objective undestanding & clarity of the situation is liable to quickly becomes a difficult if not impossible prospect due to the attendant murk & subjectivity, or what those in the biz may claim are "interpretive skills/powers", inherently required in order to derrive practical meaning out of such langauge.

Anyone?