Group and solo robberies: Do accomplices shape criminal form?

New frontiers in criminal careers research, 2000–2011: A state-of-the-art review

“…The interconnectedness between the antisocial propensity of individual offenders and the manifestation of their criminal careers explains the disparate findings that emanate from research on co-offending (Alarid, Burton, & Hochstetler, 2009;Andresen & Felson, in press;Carrington, 2002Carrington, , 2009Conway & McCord, 2002;D'Alessio & Stolzenberg, 2010;McGloin, Sullivan, Piquero, & Bacon, 2008;Svensson & Oberwittler, 2010;Van Mastrigt & Farrington, 2009, 2011, escalation or offense progression (Armstrong & Britt, 2004;Cale, Lussier, & Proulx, 2009;Cusson & Proulx, 2005;Dabney & Hollinger, 2002;DeLisi, Hochstetler, Scherer, Puhrmann, & Berg, 2008;Le Blanc, 2002;Liu, Francis, & Soothill, 2008, in press;Lussier & Healy, 2010;Piquero et al, 2006) and offense seriousness (Benda, Corwyn, & Toombs, 2001;Berg & DeLisi, 2005;Piquero, 2000b;Piquero & Chung, 2001;Ramchand, MacDonald, Haviland, & Morral, 2009). Although there is evidence for criminal careers that progress linearly in terms of the seriousness of behavior and that involve specific forms of criminal behavior (Loeber & Hay, 1997), most do not necessarily follow such an orderly progression.…”

Testing the impact of group offending on behavioural similarity in serial robbery

“…However, where one offence was committed by the offender on their own and the other as part of a group (i.e., GL pairs) there will be less behavioural similarity, consistent with evidence offenders behave differently when they are working alone than when they offend in a group (e.g., Alarid et al, 2009;Porter & Alison, 2006b).…”

“…The prevalence of group offending varies by type of offence (Alarid, Burton, & Hochstetler, 2009;Deakin, Smithson, Spencer, & Medina-Ariza, 2007;Erikson, 1971;Hindelang, 1976;Hochstetler, 2001;Weerman, 2003) and is more common in predatory street crimes such as robbery compared to other offence types such as sex offences and fraud (van Mastrigt & Farrington, 2009). In fact, the majority of robberies are committed by groups (e.g., Kapardis, 1988;Walsh, 1986); a phenomenon that is not surprising given offenders are sufficiently heterogeneous from each other for series committed by different offenders to be separated from one another.…”

“…The impact of group dynamics on behavioural consistency and distinctiveness is as yet untested in the case linkage literature. However, research on cooffending has found that group offences are more likely to be planned (Alarid et al, 2009), to target multiple victims (Hauffe & Porter, 2009), and be more violent than lone offences (Porter & Alison, 2006a, 2006bWoodhams, Gillett, et al, 2007). This suggests that the crimes an offender commits with a group might differ from those they commit alone, potentially reducing behavioural similarity between cases and thus making their crimes more difficult to link.…”

A partner in crime: Assortative matching and bias in the crime market

“…See for example Alarid et al (2009). 12 Setting D2 = Y (1 − α) would relax the behavioral conditional independence assumption, where α is the additional probability of success in case the partner gets arrested, whose realization occurs after the matching choice has been completed, in the second stage of the game. from now on).…”