Purpose This paper aims to refine our understanding of life course offending patterns across gender and race/ethnicity and to advance work in this area by examining how gender and race/ethnicity interact to influence life course offending patterns. Methods We use criminal justice system data to construct a longitudinal offending cohort that includes all individuals born in 1983/1984 with at least one court finalization for a criminal offense in the state of Queensland between the ages of 10 and 25 years. The data include 41,280 offenders (25.6 % female; 8.9 % Indigenous Australian) responsible for 209,872 offenses (M=5.08, SD=12.31). Coupling these data with state-level census data for those born in 1983/1984 (N=129,782), we estimate cohort offending rates overall and disaggregated by gender and race/ethnicity both independently and jointly. Focusing on the offenders, we use semiparametric groupbased modeling to identify the number and longitudinal distributions of offending trajectories within the cohort and compare how subgroups defined by gender, Indigenous status, and their combination sort into these trajectories. Results Most of the birth cohort has little to no contact with the criminal justice system through age 25. However, patterns are not uniform across gender or race/ethnicity, with males and Indigenous Australians most likely to fit the serious and chronic offending trajectories. Gender and race/ethnicity also interact to influence offending patterns with non-Indigenous females significantly more likely than any other group to avoid system contact, while Indigenous males have comparatively exaggerated rates of contact. Moreover, Indigenous females offend in ways more similar to non-Indigenous males than females and, in some instances, evidence even more serious offending. J Dev Life Course Criminology (2015) Conclusions Developmental and life course models should highlight not just the operant developmental dynamics across key life stages or the relevant age-graded risk and protective factors at play, but also how gender and race/ethnicity condition these processes both independently and jointly.

Aconsiderable amount of international research has adopted a criminal careers framework to improve our understanding of offending patterns across the life course. Recent innovations in statistical modelling techniques such as Semi-Parametric Group-based Method (SPGM) have provided researchers with tools to model offending trajectories. While this framework and these techniques may improve our understanding of life course offending patterns, few Australian studies have adopted such an approach. SPGM was employed in the current study to model the offending patterns of the 1983–84 Queensland offender cohort (n = 4,470) to address three research questions: (1) How many distinct offending trajectories could be identified and what was the nature of these trajectories? (2) How were sex, Indigenous status, socioeconomic disadvantage, and remoteness related to offending trajectory membership? and (3) Are juvenile offending trajectories predictors of adult offending? Findings indicated that there were three distinct groups of juvenile offenders: Early Peaking-Moderate Offenders, Late Onset-Moderate Offenders, and Chronic Offenders. Males and Indigenous offenders were overrepresented in the chronic offending trajectory. Support for the utility of the model was found, as Chronic Offenders were more likely to have offended as adults. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed and the need for further trajectory research within an Australian context is emphasised.

This study assessed the longitudinal costs of offender trajectories in Queensland (Australia) to provide policymakers with evidence that could be used to promote the use of crime prevention programs. Few studies have assessed these costs and minimal research has been conducted outside the United States. The study addressed three research questions: (1) What are the monetary costs of crime? (2) What is the optimal number of offender trajectories in an Australian offender cohort? and (3) What are the monetary costs of officially recorded offending for individuals on different offender trajectories? The Semi-Parametric Group-based Method (SPGM) was used to determine the number of offender trajectories in the Queensland Longitudinal Database. This database included 41,377 individuals who were born in 1983 and 1984 and guilty of offences in Queensland that were committed when aged 10 to 25 years old. The costs of crime were assessed using two approaches. First, criminal justice system costs were estimated based on the number and type of contacts that individuals had with the criminal justice system as well as the length of any supervision served. Second, wider social and economic costs were assessed based on offence type. Results indicated that there were five offender trajectories, including two chronic, one moderate and two low trajectories. When costs were applied to the offender trajectories, offenders in the two chronic groups were 4.8% of the cohort but accounted for 41.1% of the total costs. On average, each chronic offender cost between $186,366 and $262,799 by the time they turned 26 years old, with 60% of the costs accounted for by the criminal justice system. On average, each chronic offender cost over 20 times more than offenders in the two low offending groups. These findings provide further evidence for the potential benefits of implementing interventions that target chronic offenders.

A study was conducted to determine whether prior research had accurately conceptualised community correctional officers' experience of role conflict on the basis of officers' role preferences. It was hypothesised that officers who were welfare workers or punitive officers would experience inter-role conflict while those who attempted to combine the welfare and punitive roles (protective agents) would experience intra-role conflict and role ambiguity. Furthermore, an exploration of how inter-role conflict, intra-role conflict, role ambiguity, and officers' role preferences were related to occupational burnout was conducted. It was found in this study that officers' preferences for the role of welfare worker, protective agent, or punitive officer were not related to the level of inter-role conflict, intra-role conflict, or role ambiguity experienced by officers. Officers' role preferences were not related to burnout. Inter-role conflict and intra-role conflict were associated with emotional exhaustion. These findings call into question the whole tradition in the community corrections literature of inferring role conflict from officers' role preferences and necessitate that the whole issue of whether officers experience role conflict be revisited by employing direct measures of role conflict.

A fundamental challenge to developmental and life-course (DLC) criminology research is access to appropriate longitudinal data to examine hypotheses concerning causal risk factors for offending and within-individual change over time, and to empirically test DLC theories. In this paper we present a powerful method for collecting appropriate data – linked administrative data. The Queensland Linkage Project includes three population-based longitudinal linked administrative databases – the Queensland Longitudinal Data (QLD) – QLD 83, QLD 84 and QLD 90. We describe the methodology of linking administrative data, the establishment of the QLD datasets and a selection of the work facilitated by these data. This work addresses issues raised by the editors including the effects of life events and the timing of risk factors (child maltreatment) on further offending, the monetary costs of offending across the life-course and the development of adult-onset offending. We finish by describing current work on the Queensland Linkage Project where mental health system data are being integrated with justice system data.