The adolescence-adulthood transition and Robins’s continuity paradox: Criminal career patterns of juvenile and adult sex offenders in a prospective longitudinal birth cohort study

The Adolescence–Adulthood Transition and Desistance from Crime: Examining the Underlying Structure of Desistance

“…When special categories or subgroups of incarcerated offenders were examined, the general level of offending significantly declined in adulthood. In other words, consistent with previous studies (e.g., Stouthamer [51,53]), the findings indicated considerable discontinuity in that, for example, the serious, violent, or sexual adolescent offender did not necessarily become the serious, violent, or sexual adult offender, respectively. The only exception to this trend was the group of chronic adolescent offenders that were associated with continuity of offending in adulthood, irrespective of the conceptualization of desistance (see also [80]).…”

“…Mulvey et al [61] very early identified this fundamental limitation when they asserted that previous longitudinal studies have provided little theoretical understanding and policy concerning offenders in the "deep end" of the juvenile criminal justice system. While research on more serious subgroups of juvenile offenders, especially for chronic offenders (e.g., [49]), has dramatically increased in the past two decades with regard to desistance, other subgroups such as violent youth (e.g., [12,81]) and juvenile sex offenders (e.g., [58,55,53,56]) remain under-researched. Yet, in their study, Sampson and Laub [72] concluded that desistance was the norm even among serious and persistent juvenile offenders.…”

Perceptions of and support for sex offender policies: Testing Levenson, Brannon, Fortney, and Baker’s findings

“…Furthermore, many community notification laws treat sexual offenders as a homogenous group, when in fact they differ in important ways, including their individual levels of recidivism risk (Lussier & Gress, 2014;Sample & Bray, 2006). Finally, requiring sex offenders to register with the state for long periods (or a lifetime) implies that they are stable in their offending over time and cannot be rehabilitated, though empirical evidence does not support these assumptions (Hargreaves & Francis, 2014;Lussier & Blokland, 2014). Rather, as a group, sex offenders recidivate relatively less than other criminals (Hanson & Bussiere, 1998;Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2005;Langan, Smith, & Durose, 2003), and are not likely to specialize in sexual offending (Jennings, Zgoba, Donner, Henderson, & Tewksbury, 2014).…”

The Employment-Crime Association for Individuals Convicted of a Sexual Offense in their Youth

“…Therefore, it is difficult to formulate specific hypothesis regarding the employment-crime association for juvenile sex offenders beyond those that can be derived from the general theories. We emphasize that our interest is in general offending behavior and not specifically sexual offending as the majority of the juvenile sex offenders have criminal careers that resemble the careers of general high-risk offenders and sexual offending typically only occurs very infrequently [21,36,37,75].…”

“…Recent studies have found that the heterogeneity in the criminal careers of juvenile sex offenders is similar to that of juvenile offenders who have not committed a sex offense [11,12,36,37,75]. Also, Tewksbury [70] and Van den Berg et al [76,77] have shown that employment is correlated with reduced criminal behavior in juvenile sex offenders.…”