Characterizing Criminal Careers

Abstract

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.

A biopsychosocial model of the development of chronic conduct problems in adolescence.

“…By age 13, 40% of African Americans have been retained a grade in school, in contrast with 25% of White children (Meisels, 1992), and African Americans have been disproportionately placed into special education classes for emotional disturbance (Wang, Reynolds, & Walberg, 1986). Lifetime chances for arrest for a violent crime are 50% for African American males but only 14% for urban White males (Blumstein & Cohen, 1987). Even more striking differences hold in the probability of rearrest (Elliott, 1994), Once an African American male enters the judicial system, employment opportunities dry up, and both society and the individual may lose hope.…”

Distinguishing Between Effects of Criminality and Drug Use on Violent Offending

“…Instead, the estimated rates combine the frequency of crimes committed during active periods together with an intermittency rate of moving between active and inactive periods during the observation period. This characterization of intermittent offending (introduced in alternative forms in Barnett, et al ,1989;Nagin and Land, 1993) is an extension of earlier, more restrictive assumptions of an active career bounded by a single initiation point (usually occurring during the teenage years), and continuing to another single point of permanent termination from offending (Blumstein, et al, 1986;Blumstein and Cohen, 1987).…”

An OR Missionary’s Visits to the Criminal Justice System

“…The research on the feedback model and its concerns with issues of first arrests and recidivism led naturally into consideration of the characterization of individuals' "criminal careers" (see Blumstein et al 1986 andBlumstein andCohen 1987b). This moves from the macro model that focuses on crime rates and the aggregate feedback process to a micro depiction of the behavior of individual offenders and the longitudinal depiction of their criminal activity.…”