In a recent paper published in this journal, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1986)' argue that the concepts of criminal careers, career criminals, selective incapacitation, prevalence, and incidence, and longitudinal studies all have little value for criminologv. In our view their paper misrepresents these concepts and our research on these topics. We are pleased to have the opportunity in this paper to develop these concepts more clearly and to show their relevance for criminology.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Wiley and Law and Society Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Law &Society Review. This study replicates and then extends Wilson and Boland's (1978) theory of the deterrent effect of policing on crime rates inAmerican cities by linking it to recent thinking on control of urban disorder and incivilities (Sherman, 1986; Skogan and Maxfield, 1981). The theory posits that police departments with a legalistic style tend to generate policies of proactive patrol (e.g., high traffic citation rate and frequent stops of suspicious or disorderly persons), which in turn may decrease crime rates either (1) indirectly, by increasing the probability of arrest, or (2) directly, by decreasing the crime rate through a deterrent effect regarding perceived threat of social control. We test both these propositions in an examination of robbery rates in 171 American cities in 1980. Overall, the major results suggest that proactive policing has direct inverse effects on aggregate robbery rates, independent of known determinants of crime (e.g., poverty, inequality, region, and family disruption). Moreover, when we demographically disaggregate the robbery rate the direct inverse effect of aggressive policing on robbery is largest for adult offenders and black offenders. We examine the reasons for these findings and discuss their theoretical and policy implications.

Most knowledge about crime and criminals derives from cross-sectional analyses that link crime rates in a community with a community's attributes. The criminal-career approach focuses on individual offenders and considers their crime-committing patterns as a longitudinal stochastic process. This approach, which invokes parameters characterizing participation rate, initiation rate, termination rate and the associated career length, and individual offending frequency, offers some important new insights. For example, annual offending frequency appears to be reasonably constant with age for those offenders who stay criminally active, termination rates are relatively low for active offenders in their 30s, and offending frequencies seem to be relatively insensitive to demographic attributes for active offenders. All these observations are opposite to those that would be derived from cross-sectional analysis.

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The results of a survey of public attitudes about appropriate length of prison sentences for convicted offenders are reported. Two main questions are addressed: 1) degree of consensus within the population about appropriate sentences for different offenses and 2) the relationship between the desired sentences expressed by the public and the actual time served by offenders in prison. The analysis suggests considerable agreement across various demographic groups on the relative severity of sentences to be imposed for different offenses, but disagreement over the absolute magnitude of these sentences. These results suggest the feasibility of generating consensus on a proportional, just deserts sentencing schedule, but difficulty in establishing the “constant of proportionality.” The sentences desired by the public are found to be consistently more severe than sentences actually imposed, suggesting the need for greater public awareness of current imprisonment practices so that expectations of the determinate sentencing schedules will be realistic and consistent with limited prison capacity.

ING THE EFFECTS OF CRIMINAL SANCTIONS ON CRIME RATES 187 (1978), for a development of the relationship between individual crime rates and incapacitative effects.

2 Id. at 07. • It should be emphasized that Durkheini was quick to point out that societal normality should not be cotnfused with individual normality. While the existence of some crime is normal for society, that does not mean that the individual criminals are to be considered nornial. The fact that there are persons with poor control meclanisns may be determined by the social structure, but these persons are, nevertheless, maladjusted at the level of the individual. Similarly, he maintains that while crimc is nornmal that does not mean that it should not be regarded with displeasure. Just as a pain is a normal, yet uncomfortable attribute for biological organisms, so crime is a normal, but abhorrent feature of social life. I E. DURKHEIM, TnE DivisIoN OF LABOR IN SOCIETY 79 (G. Simpson transl. 1964).

We develop a leading indicator model for forecasting serious property and violent crimes based on the crime attractor and displacement theories of environmental criminology. The model, intended for support of tactical deployment of police resources, is at the microlevel scale; namely, 1-month-ahead forecasts over a grid system of 141 square grid cells 4000 feet on a side (with approximately 100 blocks per grid cell). The leading indicators are selected lesser crimes and incivilities entering the model in two ways: (1) as time lags within grid cells and (2) time and space lags averaged over grid cells contiguous to observation grid cells. Our validation case study uses 1.3 million police records from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, aggregated over the grid system for a 96-month period ending in December 1998. The study uses the rollinghorizon forecast experimental design with forecasts made over the 36-month period ending in December 1998, yielding 5076 forecast errors per model. We estimated the leading indicator model using a robust linear regression model, a neural network, and a proven univariate, extrapolative forecast method for use as a benchmark in Granger causality testing. We find evidence of both the crime attractor and displacement theories. The results of comparative forecast experiments are that the leading indicator models provide acceptable forecasts that are significantly better than the extrapolative method in three out of four cases, and for the fourth there is a tie but poor forecast performance. The leading indicators find 41-53% of large crime volume changes in the three successful cases. The corresponding workload for police is quite acceptable, with on the average 5.2 potential large change cases per month to investigate and with 31% of such cases being positives.