Investigating the Stability of Co‐offending and Co‐offenders Among a Sample of Youthful Offenders*

Abstract

Scholars have long argued that delinquency is a group phenomenon. Even so, minimal research exists on the nature, structure, and process of co‐offending. This investigation focuses on a particular void, namely the stability of 1) co‐offending and 2) co‐offender selection over time, for which divergent theoretical expectations currently exist that bear on issues central to general and developmental/life‐course theories of crime. By relying on individual‐level, longitudinal data for a sample of juvenile offenders from Philadelphia, we find that distinct trajectories of co‐offending exist over the course of the juvenile criminal career. This inquiry also develops an individualized measure of co‐offender stability, which reveals that delinquents generally tend not to “reuse” co‐offenders, although frequent offenders show a greater propensity to do so. The discussion considers the theoretical and policy implications of these findings as well as provides some avenues for future research.

Locating Central Actors in Co-offending Networks

“…Reiss [13] concludes that the majority of co-offending groups are unstable, and their relationships are short-lived. This is corroborated by McGloin et al, [15] who showed that there is some stability in co-offending relationships over time for frequent offenders, but in general, delinquents do not tend to reuse co-offenders. Reiss et al [14] also found that cooffenders have many different partners, and are unlikely to commit crimes with the same individuals over time.…”

“…However, Reiss [13] also states that high frequency offenders are "active recruiters to delinquent groups and can be important targets for law enforcement." It should be noted that the findings of these works were obtained on very small datasets: 205 individuals in [14], and 5600 individuals in [15], and may therefore not be representative.…”

Invited Address: James Joyce, Alice in Wonderland, the Rolling Stones, and Criminal Careers

“…The minimal research on co-offending patterns in criminal careers shows that it exhibits a strikingly similar profile to the aggregate age-crime curve van Mastrigt and Farrington 2009), that there are distinct trajectories of co-offending over the course of the juvenile criminal career and that juvenile delinquents generally tend not to ''re-use'' co-offenders, though frequent offenders show a greater propensity to do so (McGloin et al 2008), that higher levels of co-offender network redundancy (more dense networks) are related to higher levels of specialized offending in group crimes, but no such relationship exists with overall (i.e., solo and group) offending diversity (McGloin and Piquero 2009), and that the presence of more co-offenders (i.e., larger groups) will be related to an increased likelihood of violent crime (McGloin and Piquero 2010). However, these studies emerge from two select data sources (the Cambridge data of South London males and a sample of juvenile offenders followed to age 17); thus, there is an important need to examine cooffending patterns in other data sources, across distinct offense types, and throughout the entire life-course.…”

Detection and Analysis of Hidden Activities in Social Networks

“…Community mining has many related properties to the graph-cut problem. In general social network analysis and community mining can be seen under graph mining [25]. The sub-graph identification is very useful in community mining.…”