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OCR for page 198
An Agenda for Future Research
BACKGROUND
As the previous chapters of this report
indicate, the past decacle has witnessed
considerable progress in efforts to mea-
sure the basic dimensions of criminal ca-
reers ant! the factors associated with
them. Much of that progress is attribut-
able to a growing interest in the criminal
career paradigm as an appropriate and
effective way to study the people proc-
essed by the criminal justice system, their
patterns of offending, the factors that in-
fluence their offending, and the potential
influence of public policies both within
the criminal justice system and outside
it-on indiviclual criminal careers.
The earlier chapters have also shown
that the state of knowleclge regarding
criminal careers is increasing rapidly.
Some basic estimates of the mean values
of career dimensions among different
subpopulations have begun to be clevel-
opecI, and some estimates have been
found to be consistent in independent
studies with different modes of measure-
ment, lending greater confidence to the
results. Estimates of the individual of
fending rate, A, have been particularly
info`~ative because they highlight the
considerable diversity among offenders.
The emerging picture of career cliver-
sity has motivated efforts to develop pre-
dictors of those career dimensions. Such
attempts have been stimulating and pro-
vocative for both researchers and deci-
sion makers, ant] have also encouraged
critical attention to the role that predic-
tion in its current state of development
should have in criminal justice decision
making. That attention has reinforced the
necessity for developing better informa-
tion on the strength and validity of vari-
ous candidate predictors and has lecl to a
focus on the underlying technical issues
involved in classification and prediction.
In addition, attention to the ethical ques-
tions that are involvecl has resulted in
some convergence of the different view-
points.
The policy value of current and future
research on criminal careers is already
substantial. This value derives partly
from a recognition that an indiviclual of-
fender the unit underlying the criminal
career paradigm- is the primary subject
I98
OCR for page 199
AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
of decision making within the criminal
justice system. For example, identifying
life events or individual characteristics
that influence the onset of criminal activ-
ity and determining the effect of preven
I99
elements of this high-priority project, we
turn to some important specific research
questions that should be pursued; many
of them could be addressed within the
context of the proposed longitudinal
five interventions in reducing the likeli- study, but they need not be. In all cases,
honcl of filcher`? criminal h~h~vior urn they derive from concerns that have been
raiser! in earlier chapters of this report
about important issues that need more
careful measurement or validation or that
are not known at all. These research ques
tions are organized into three major cate
gories: (1) exploration of promising inter
vention strategies; (2) continuation of
basic research on criminal career dimen
sions and their correlates; and (3) new
directions in measurement and mocleling
of criminal careers. The final section
addresses some organizational arrange
ments for carrying out the proposed re
search agenda as well as for facilitating
effective and responsible implementation
as well-founded research results emerge.
~ of future criminal behavior are
important priorities for research with ma-
jor policy implications. In a similar vein,
the available research indicates that many
youths who have some contact with the
juvenile justice system do not persist in
criminal activity as adults, but further
research is needed on the factors that
influence the termination of a criminal
career. Basic research on the nature and
measurement of criminal careers, and
policy research on the effect of various
intervention strategies at different stages
of a criminal career, wfl! contribute to the
development of better policy options.
The criminal career paradigm high-
lights the need for longitudinal research
on both offenders and nonoffenders. And
the potential for results from research is
enhanced considerably by the opportu-
nity to capitalize on methodological de-
velopments in other fields that are exam-
ining the longitudinal progression of
"careers" in such areas as substance
abuse, mental health, and employment.
Building on developments over the
past decade, our research agenda first
presents a major new research initiative
that is now warranted as the next step-a
prospective longitudinal research project.
Such an effort would provide a basis for
tracking individual criminal careers over
time and for linking the characteristics of
an incliviclual's career to other life events
and experiences, especially to interac-
tions with the criminal justice system. A
longitudinal study couIcI now build from
the collection of measurements ofthe key
dimensions of the criminal career to link
them to factors that can more properly be
viewer! as causal.
Following a discussion of some of the
A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF
CRIMINAL CAREERS
Many issues about criminal careers
cannot be adequately addressed in cross-
sectional research: the influence of vari-
ous life events on an inclividual's criminal
career; the effects of interventions on ca-
reer development; and distinguishing
between developmental sequences and
heterogeneity across individuals in ex-
plaining apparent career evolution. An-
swering these and relatecI questions re-
quires a prospective longitudinal study of
individuals of different ages.
Recognition of the inherently Tongitu-
dinal and dynamic characteristics of crim-
inal careers has led over the past several
years to a number of studies that involved
longitudinal data collections. While each
of these studies has been valuable in its
own way, they have been limited, primar-
ily because of the small samples of seri-
ous offending that are involved. They
OCR for page 200
200
have provicled important theoretical in-
sights into the development of criminal
careers and methodological insights into
measurement of the phenomena; hence,
they have prepared the way for undertak-
ing a major longitudinal study of offend-
ing.
Even though the fundamental criminal
career phenomenon of interest is inher-
ently longitudinal, studying it Tongitudi-
nally rather than in a sequence of cross-
sectional samples is a matter of design
choice, for both economic and scientific
reasons. First, drawing and following a
single longitudinal sample may well be
less expensive than assembling the nec-
essary records on a comparable sequence
of multiple cross-sectional panels. Also, a
single longitudinal pane! avoids the vari-
ation across individuals in either a single
cross-sectional sample or in a sequence of
cross-sectional waves. Thus, a longitudi-
nal design is probably more efficient in
terms of cost per unit reduction of error.
Second, the recovery of life history
events for an individual is subject both to
considerable memory decay and to errors
in the sequencing of events in time. To
describe and understand criminal ca-
reers, it is essential to recover as many
offenses and other life events as possible
and to order them precisely in time. In
repeated cross-sections with different in-
dividuals, information would have to be
collected for a very long time on any
individual to attain the necessary level of
accuracy. Repeater! cross-sections involv-
ing the same individuals are needed to
achieve that level of accuracy. Further-
more, organizing information about in-
divicluals' group involvements requires
reconstruction of their social networks,
and a prospective longitudinal design
will more readily permit the recovery of
information on those relationships.
Thus, the pane! concludes that future
research on criminal careers should in-
clude, as a major component, a prospec
CRIMINAL CAREERS AND CAREER CRIMINALS
five longitudinal study with several co-
horts. Such a study would offer an arena
within which to pursue a broad range of
issues related to criminal careers, such as
the developmental experiences engen-
dering compliant behavior, the behav-
ioral precursors of subsequent delin-
quency and criminality, the influence on
subsequent behavior of interactions win
the juvenile and criminal justice systems,
and the factors associated with career ter-
mination. Generally, the project would
seek to make detailed measurement of
the initiation and termination of individ-
ual criminal careers, including a focus on
the distinction in those patterns among
different kinds of crime, especially be-
tween the more and the less serious. With
those criminal career observations, as
well as information on important life
events (e.g., family conflict, divorce,
school failure or dropout, drug initiation,
processing by the criminal justice system,
employment, marriage, etc.), the sequen-
tial ordering of events will begin to sug-
gest directions of respective influence.
This research would properly be aug-
mented by ethnographic studies to de-
velop information about group and com-
munity influences that might not be
elicited in the individual reports. Longi-
tudinal projects similar to what is pro-
posed here have had quite impressive
results.
The panel believes that a significant
effort should be invested now in the de-
sign of a longitudinal study and that the
federal government should take the lead
in initiating what promises to be a na-
tional resource for researchers as well as
for criminal justice policy makers. The
initial design effort should include (1)
defining the sampling frames and speci-
fying the appropriate sample sizes in var-
ious strata; (2) developing Me sampling
strategy, including making the selection
between representative Copulations 1
high-risk ~"la~vllo VllG111148, ˇllV1 ~J.~1-
aria
populations offering more in
OCR for page 201
AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
stances of serious offending and choosing
between drawing local samples for con-
venience, efficiency, and record com-
pleteness, and national samples for
breadth of representation; (3) cleveloping
reinterview schecluTes that are frequent
enough to capture event sequences accu-
rately yet not frequent enough to influ-
ence behavior; (4) formulating and testing
appropriate instruments; ant! (5) identify-
ing and planning experimental interven-
tions with randomly drawn subsamples.
Any such longitudinal project should
have a breadth of perspective that repre-
sents the diversity of disciplinary and
theoretical orientations that are relevant
to research on criminal careers. In adcli-
tion to the disciplines concerned directly
with criminal careers, those perspectives
include related individual careers in ed-
ucation, substance abuse, mental health,
and employment. All the perspectives
should contribute to the design of the
initial sampling plan and ofthe basic data
collection instruments. It is also impor-
tant that the data that emerge from such a
project be shared widely with the re-
search community-especially those in-
volved in the project design. Data col-
lected from such a project shouIc! be fed
into some public-use data facility quickly
so that all participants and the research
community would generally have access
to it.
One way to carry out the proposed
longitudinal study would involve the cre-
ation of a consortium of investigators to
design the project and to be responsible
for contracting with and overseeing an
appropriate organization to collect the
data. The instruments and procedures to
be used would be negotiated within the
consortium, ant! the results would be
made available to the consortium and the
research community generally for com-
mon use and analysis, with appropriate
safeguards to protect the subjects. This is
the kind of approach follower] by the
201
Bureau of Labor Statistics in its National
Longitudinal Stucly of Labor Force Par-
ticipation, by the U.S. Department of Ed-
ucation's High School and Beyond study
of 1972 and 1980 high school graduates,
and by the University of Michigan's Sur-
vey of Income Dynamics. A consortium
could also solicit other investigators to
suggest data that should be collected or
questions that should be addressed,
which-would be incorporated to the ex-
tent feasible and appropriate. This aspect
is similar in concept to the use of a space
shuttle to carry a diversity of experiments
for individual investigators. The design
and execution of the basic data collection
instruments are analogous to the large
overhead associated with creating and
flying the space shuttle, which can gener-
ally have capacity for augmenting its
"payload" to satisfy a broad constituency
of potential users.
A very different way to carry out the
study would be to identify an inclividual
investigator skilled ant! knowledgeable
in the relevant research issues and award
that investigator a grant to organize what-
ever staff, consultants, and advisers are
necessary for the project. Such an ap-
proach would undoubtedly attract a skill-
fu! investigator, but any single researcher
is likely to be limited to a particular the-
oretical perspective and consequently to
fad! to adequately address contributions
from other perspectives. Any individual
principal investigator is likely also to
want to monopolize the data collected
until all the results are assembled.
A variant to this approach would be to
involve multiple principal investigators
at their own institutions, with a steering
committee of the principal investigators
and other researchers who would bring
additional theoretical perspectives and
methodological skills. With this ap-
proach, each study would presumably be
of smaller scale than the single one, and
each investigator would be free to pursue
OCR for page 202
202
his or her design strategy, but the aggre-
gation of investigators would represent a
broad range of theoretical perspectives.
CRIMINAL CAREERS AND CAREER CRIMINALS
minants of termination of criminal ca-
reers, possible policy choices will be sug-
gested. The question of whether policy
Such a program represents a compromise
between the total commitment to a single
investigator with its limited perspective
and the coordination problems associated
with a consortium.
The panel has not tried to decide which
approach to the design and implementa-
tion of a major longitudinal stucly on crim-
inal careers would be best a consortium
of investigators in institutional setting, a
single major project, or an aggregation of
individual projects connected by a broad
steering committee" but it does believe
strongly that whatever approach is cho-
sen should be structured so that a range of
disciplinary perspectives can be reflected
in the research program and that the data
that are collected are shared with a broad
range of researchers. The specific choice
of organizational form should be decided
by researchers and probable funding
sources, such as the National Institute of
Justice, the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delin-
quency Prevention, the National Institute
of Mental Health, the National Institute
for Drug and Alcohol Abuse, and private
foundations.
SPECIFIC RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Research on Intervention Strategies
Much of the research on criminal ca-
reers that the panel has considered is
immediately applicable to the realm of
policy choices, and a number of research
efforts related to intervention strategies
are warranted: one class of efforts relates
to programs for successful prevention; an-
other involves other interventions that
may encourage career modification, inter-
ruption, or termination.
As research identifies dete~-~inants of
participation in criminal careers or deter
manipuiation of a statistically identified
determinant will result in a change in the
criminal behavior must then be explored
through well-designed experiments. An
important issue in this effort is the timing
of an intervention and the tradeoffs in
intervention effectiveness associated
with earlier or later action: errors associ-
ated with misidentifying high-risk popu-
lations diminish with older ages, but later
interventions may be less effective be-
cause the offending pattern is more dif-
ficult to change.
Preventive Interventions
The most attractive possibilities in pre-
ventive interventions appear to be par-
enting education, social learning and
behavior modification programs, and ed-
~cational enrichment. Replications of an
evaluation of a Head Start educational
program in Michigan are clearly war-
ranted`. Follow-up data on other Head
Start experiments should be collected to
compare the later criminal behavior of
treatment and control groups. If those
results appear encouraging, some new
pilot experiments could be undertaken,
leading eventually to larger-scale experi-
ments.
Analysis of the results from promising
interventions requires careful attention to
intermediate and long-term follow-up
data to evaluate their effectiveness. Many
preventive interventions appear to re-
duce the frequency of conduct disorders
or school problems in the short term (1 to
2 years) but are not successful in prevent-
ing delinquency. The multitude of one-
shot, nondefinitive research projects in
this area suggests that another approach is
warranted. The search for effective inter-
ventions requires systematic, cumulative
research with longer-term randomized
OCR for page 203
AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
experiments that are grounded in promis-
ing theoretical orientations.
Career Modification Strategies
Other interventions are more appropri-
ate after criminal activity has begun. Ca-
reer mollification strategies would benefit
from research on late teenage or early
aclult offenders who spontaneously desist
from offending and the identification of
offenders who are most likely to respond
to the intervention. Certain life events,
such as employment, may encourage ca-
reer termination, and this relationship
could be translated into a program of job
counseling for high-risk youth. Research
on career-modifying interventions for
younger adolescents has found behav-
ioral mollification strategies and programs
designed to enhance one's sense of re-
sponsibility to be tentatively encourag-
ing. The effectiveness of interventions
directed at modifying the criminal career
either through termination or reduction
in seriousness or frequency is easily
tester! through experiments. Such re-
search efforts would benefit from a 3- to
5-year follow-up, possibly in conjunction
with the major longitudinal effort recom-
mended earlier. Last, postprison adjust-
ment interventions that have not been
entirely successful might be made more
effective with a slight change in the pro-
gram design to alleviate the work disin-
centive effect that financial assistance
may induce during the transition back to
the community: for example, programs
might require some community service in
exchange for the assistance.
Selective Incapacitation
Decisions in the criminal justice sys-
tem are currently based in part on an
explicit intervention strategy of incapaci-
tation. Many criminal justice practitioners
already use fragmentary information
203
about criminal careers to make decisions
about incarceration, which temporarily
interrupts a criminal career. Some deci-
sion makers may also make erroneous
decisions by invoking wrong predictors
that they mistakenly believe to be valicI.
It is particularly important, therefore, to
measure the effectiveness of incapacita-
tion associated with current decisions
that do try to identify offenders with
higher individual crime rates and more
serious offending patterns. This effect
might be estimated from current self-
report data by measuring to what extent
higher-rate offenders are already receiv-
ing longer sentences. The greater the se-
lection of high-rate offenders in current
practice, the less the benefit one can an-
ticipate from cleveloping improver] pre-
dictors.
One can obtain some degree of selec-
tive incapacitation in a number of ways
without necessarily invoking any explicit
predictor variables. If some particular
crime types are associated with high-rate
offending, then incapacitation strategies
might be more effective by increasing the
likelihood that offenders convicted of that
crime type receive a sentence. This type
of incapacitation policy invokes informa-
tion that uniformly is accepted as appro-
priatc the crime type of conviction. Re-
search should focus on the benefit to be
attained by such a policy. If only a small
increment of predictability is provicled by
using other more controversial predictors
(such as employment status), then one
can avoid the ethical problems posed by
the use of those variables.
There is a need for further validation ot
the assumptions that underlie available
estimates of the crime control and prison
population effects of selective incapacita-
tion policies and for analysis of the sensi-
tivity of the estimates to violations of
those assumptions. Information is espe-
cially weak about crime spurts that occur
just before arrest or just after release from
OCR for page 204
204
jai! or prison, about possible interactions
between the frequency of offending (A)
and the probability of arrest following a
given offense (qY, about trends in q as
offenders age, about the degree to which
the crimes removed by incarcerating an
offender are replaced by other offenders
still in the community, ant! about the
influence of selective incapacitation strat-
egies on general deterrence effects. With
such infonnation incorporated into more
complete models, better estimates can be
developed of the incapacitation effects of
alternative policies on pretrial release,
. . r
assigning priorities tor court processing,
sentencing, and parole release.
Individual Deterrent Elects
Another important set of interventions
are the sanctioning actions ofthe criminal
justice system. In particular, it is still
uncertain whether time spent in prison
has an individual deterrent effect on
some offenders, in terms of reducing their
postincarceration criminal activity, or a
criminogenic effect, in terms of increas-
ing individual crime rates and lengthen-
ing criminal careers. Alternatively, both
effects may occur, but on iclentifiably dif-
ferent groups of offenders; if so, we need
to learn how to distinguish the two
groups.
Measurement of Criminal Career
Dimensions and Their Correlates
It is clear that improved measures of
criminal career dimensions are needed
especially career length, participation in
serious crimes, and the individual fre-
quency of criminal activity for the gen-
eral population and for high-risk subsets
of the population. But perhaps more im-
portant is the identification of particular
behaviors, life events (such as marriage or
first employment), or previous career
characteristics (such as juvenile criminal
CRIMINAL CAREERS AND CAREER CRIMINALS
activity) that can be linked to the course
of individual criminal careers. Such iclen-
tification may require frequent Tongitudi-
nal observations during key periods. Es-
tablishing such linkages is particularly
useful in view of the considerable diver-
sity among offenders in their individual
crime rates and their career length. If the
individuals with the highest values of A
and TR become candidates for selective
interventions, then it is essential to de-
velop information that will indicate the
feasibility of such decisions, ant] how
best to identify offenders who have the
highest values.
An important task in the study of crim-
inal careers is linking empirical relation-
ships to theoretical frameworks in order
to avoid accumulating diverse indepen-
dent correlations among fragmented sets
of variables. The nature of the criminal
career paradigm invites the application of
dynamic theories to account for the clevel-
opmental aspects of careers. Different
theories might well be needed to explain
the initiation of clelinquent behavior, the
persistence of criminal activity into adult-
hood, and the eventual termination of
offending. It is likely that theoretical per-
spectives from diverse disciplines can
make important contributions to this ef-
fort.
Individual Crime Rates
One of the most interesting and impor-
tant issues in criminal career research has
been the recent attention to developing
estimates of individual crime rates, A, and
the accumulation of reasonably consis-
tent, independent estimates of those rates
through both self-reports and official rec-
ords. If results continue to be consistent,
researchers will be encourged to under-
take furler measurements in both
mocles. Certainly furler measurement
and analysis are needecl, especially for
the serious crime types. In studying A,
OCR for page 205
AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
particular attention should be given to its
longitudinal variation during an individ-
ual's career. In what ways is the simoli-
fied mode! of a stable inclividual crime
rate in error, either in terms of age trends
in the value of A while active or in shifts
between high-rate and Tow-rate periods?
Some researchers have iclentified the lat-
ter scenario as particularly common
among heavy narcotics users. Are there
other life events that lead to a switch into
or out of a high-rate period, and does the
occurrence of high-rate periods follow
identifiable patterns?
The importance of individual crime
rates is emphasized by the consiclerable
skewness of the A distribution demon-
strated in the Rand self-report inmate
survey, which also highlights the noes! for
attention on the correlates of A as a high
research priority. Among the strong can-
didates as determinants are characteris-
tics of the juvenile career, particularly
information about the age of first juvenile
offense and specific offense types com-
mitted, and this research will require con-
tinuity of data in the juvenile and adult
periods. There are some indications that
the careers of adults in their mid-20s are
likely to be more serious if the juvenile
careers of those offenders started very
early. Moreover, certain types or combi-
nations of juvenile criminal behavior or
its frequency may be important indicators
of probable serious adult offending.
These issues neecl further development
and testing, and they probably could best
be addressed in a longitudinal context.
The influence of drug use on criminal
careers, particularly inctiviclual crime
rates, is a particularly complex issue. Se
1
rebus arug use as a juvenile or as an adult
is indicative of a high rate of offending for
those who engage in precatory crimes,
such as robbery and burglary. If an effec-
tive drug treatment program were avail-
able to deal with the offender's depen-
dency and if that depenclency couIct then
205
be reducer! along with the rate of of-
fending, then cirug-related criminal be-
havior could be modified by addressing
the offender's drug problem. This type of
intervention strategy requires identifying
other indicators that will suggest which
drug users are likely to be amenable to
treatment. But the drug-crime relation-
ship may also be closely tied to broader
environmental factors, such as historical
changes in the U.S drug trade, which may
have contributed to the rise in aggregate
crime rates in the 1970s. Thus, both the
predictive features and the manipulable
features of the drug-crime relationship
warrant consiclerably more exploration,
particularly in the context of available
drug treatments and their effectiveness
and the impact of environmental influ-
ences.
It is also important to study whether
the information contained in an individu-
al's history of arrests- the number, the
mix of types, their rate of accumulation
has more predictive power than the infor-
mation in conviction records alone. Re-
search on this question could contribute
to the debate over using complete arrest
histories rather than only conviction rec-
ords. A part of this question should in-
clude a comparison of adult only and
combined adult and juvenile records to
estimate the incremental value of infor-
mation about juvenile careers in identify-
ing serious adult careers. During the
early stages of an adult career, full and
ready access to the juvenile record is
important; at present, there is often sharp
discontinuity in records at the age of tran-
sition (18 years in most jurisdictions).
Furler research on the impact of this
bifurcated court system on young adult
offenders is neecled.
Group Owning
Exploring the effect of group influ-
ences on criminal behavior might benefit
OCR for page 206
206
from the perspective of the criminal ca-
reer paradigm. It would be desirable to
identify groups of offenders whose crim-
inal careers are linked through joint par-
ticipation in some of the same offenses.
Studies oftheir respective career patterns
should indicate whether certain group
patterns, such as a diversity of partners,
are associated with high- or low-rate of-
fending. It would be particularly impor-
tant to determine to what extent some
iclentifiable individual offenders serve as
recruiters to offending and to what extent
behavior can be explained as compliant
responsiveness to recruitment efforts.
The importance of group influences at
initiation, the transition from group to
solo offending, and the role of groups in
later adult careers are other research is-
sues related to group influences on crim
inal careers.
Career Length
Initial research on career length has
yielded some valuable insights regarding
its relationship to age: termination rates
during the 30s tend to be the lowest, a
reflection of the fact that offenders who
are still active in their 30s, especially
those who started before age 20, are
among the most committed to a criminal
career. The use of existing data on the
correlates of recidivism to explore pat-
terns across follow-up periods of different
lengths would help isolate other corre-
lates of career length. Nonrecidivism can
be a reflection of a combination of termi-
nation and diminished A, and those two
effects should be distinguished. The
longer the follow-up period, the more
likely it is that nonrecidivism reflects ca-
reer termination. Long-range studies of
career length will require individual ar-
rest histories or self-report records for
years after many careers have terminated.
Two variables often associated with
nonrecidivism are steady employment
CRIMINAL CAREERS AND CAREER CRIMINALS
and marriage: they may well be associ-
ated with career termination, and they
warrant closer study. The further ques-
tion of whether explicit intervention
through facilitating these transitions (e.g.,
through special counseling efforts) also
has an effect should also be pursued. It
may be that selection differences associ-
ated with these transitions by offenders
result in diminished criminality, but that
interventions oriented at achieving those
ends do not. This possibility can be tested
in appropriately structured experiments.
Last, ethnographic studies that focus in
detail on individual life histories can be
expected to provide a richness of detail
about factors contributing to termination
of criminal careers that would not be
available in even the most careful survey
study.
Participation
Future research on participation is
likely to benefit less from further mea-
surement and more from attention to im-
portant correlates of initiation of criminal
careers and the different correlates of mi-
nor and serious criminal involvement. In
particular, more research is needed on
life events that may be linked to criminal
behavior in offender populations but that
have not been adequately stuclied in a
longitudinal context. Examples of these
include abusive family situations, paren-
tal alcohol or drug abuse, divorce or death
of a parent, or other traumatic life events,
particularly if they occur in the preschool
or elementary school years.
This type of research is particularly
valuable for indicating which indivicluals
are most likely to initiate delinquent ca-
reers, which individuals are likely to
commit only minor offenses and then ter-
minate their delinquent activity, and
which individuals are likely to move on to
more serious delinquency. If such indica-
tors could be clevelopecl, the potentially
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AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
effective intervention strategies clis-
cussec! earlier might be more effectively
targeted.
New Directions in Measurement
and Modeling
Much too often the two approaches to
ˇ ˇ ˇ 1 ˇ
measuring criminal career c .lmenslons-
self-reports and official records have
been presented as mutually competitive.
They are much more appropriately
viewer] as complementary mocles of ob-
servation of a common unclerlying proc-
ess, ant! specific effort shouIc! be clirectec!
at deriving estimates, especially of A ant!
its distribution, that use information from
both ciata sources. The strengths of each
approach will help to illuminate, ant! ul-
timately to correct, the sources of error in
the other.
Specifically, it is important to learn
more about some key linkages, particu-
larly that between the arrest process that
official records depict anc! the unclerlying
crime process that is of primary concern.
A key element in this linkage is the sam-
pling probability from crimes to arrests-
the probability of an arrest conclitional
upon a crime en c! any bias it contains or
correlations it might clisplay with the un-
clerlying incliviclual crime rate. Self-
reports, in conjunction with official rec-
ords for the same inclivicluals, provide an
opportunity for exploring this linkage.
Such exploration is an issue of high pri-
ority, largely because improver] insight
into the error structure of the two ap-
proaches of measurement, the connection
between their error structures, and the
link between arrests and the unclerlying
crime process wouIc! increase the useful-
ness of the large numbers of official-
record ciata sources that are available as
primary records for studying criminal ca
reers.
Most research on trends in crime seri-
ousness over a criminal career has re
207
veaTec! incliviclual diversity, albeit with
some greater tendency for offenders to
repeat the previous offense type or to stay
within the group of property or violent
offenses. Most of those results, however,
derive from observations of the arrest
process, and inferences about patterns
in the underlying crime process have
proven to be rather difficult. This area is
of considerable interest and importance
for developing knowledge about the
structure of criminal careers. It also has
import for policy because of the signifi-
cant influence that crime-mix patterns
could have on incapacitative effects. One
important stumbling block has been the
fact that most of the data on crime-mix
patterns have reflected the arrest process,
and arrest patterns are not necessarily
reflective ofthe underlying crime process
because of the great variability in arrest
probability (q) across different crime
types. The arrest process has been domi-
nant because the sequence of arrests is
well recorded in official arrest histories,
and the sequence of crimes is rarely
asked for in self-reports.
These issues could be pursued more
directly for serious offenses in self-report
questionnaires that probe into sequences
of participation by first asking respon-
dents if they have ever done a particular
offense and then asking them when they
first did it and when they last did it. The
r
issue ot c ranges in crime mix may pOSSl-
bly be more effectively addressed by
focusing on changes in crime-type partic-
ipation patterns rather than the micro-
analysis of the sequence of crime types
that is easily available from arrest records.
Further research on estimates of
incapacitative effects is also needed. Es-
timation of the incapacitative effects of
imprisonment are most commonly com-
puted using a formula derived from a
mode! first introduced in 1973. This
model uses standard assumptions for trac-
tability: homogeneous offenders, a Pois
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208
son stream of crimes, exponential career
lengths, parameters that are constant over
time, and prison sentences that are short
compared with career lengths and incle-
pendent of prior record. The panel's anal-
yses have shown that the incapacitation
effects estimated by Greenwood (1982)
are very sensitive to the effects of finite
career lengths. Further exploration is
needed on the sensitivity of the results to
mode! assumptions, and changes in the
mode] are needed to reflect the conse-
quences of the considerable heterogene-
ity in values of A. Also, the mode! should
take account of the fact that sentences
often do reflect predictive considerations
and the possibility that sentences could
be related to a judge's estimate of an
individuaT's offending frequency.
Recent developments in research on
stochastic processes associated with hier-
archical distributions offer promise for
further development of the incapacitation
model (Lehoczky, Volume II). Any such
model clevelopment should be tied
closely to knowledge about the structure
of criminal careers and to the potential
incapacitative effects associated with
those criminal career histories. Also,
models should be extender] to reflect var-
ious theoretical perspectives on the fac-
tors that influence criminal career climen-
sions. One such model, reflecting a
labor-market viewpoint, was clevelopec!
by Flinn (Volume II); other theoretical
approaches should be pursued.
In exploring various selective incapac-
itation polices, it would be desirable to
measure the selective incapacitation ef-
fects associated with several classification
instruments. Any such attempt should en-
gage in simulated experiments using in-
dividual arrest data. It is important in the
simulated experiments that the data set
on which the experiments are run be
different from the one that gave rise to the
classification rule in order to avoid
shrinkage problems (see Chapter 61.
CRIMINAL CAREERS AND CAREER CRIMINALS
Seemingly powerful predictors that
emerge in Me first stage can then be
tested experimentally for their potential
usefulness in actual applications.
SUPPORTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL
ARRANGEMENTS
In this final section we identify two
organizational arrangements that could
facilitate the further development of a
cohesive research community and the ex-
pansion of knowleclge about criminal ca-
reers: continuation of the current Crime
Control Theory Program at the National
Institute of Justice (NIl) and develop-
ment of a criminal career research data
repository.
Continuation and Expansion of the
Crime Control Theory Program
Much of the research on criminal
reers reviewed by this pane! has been
supported by the Crime Control Theory
Program at NIT, which also supported the
work of the panel. Over a period of 6
years, with a limiter! budget of less than
$l million per year, this program has
made some important contributions to
knowledge about criminal careers and
their policy usefulness. We believe that
much of the success of this program has
been a direct consequence of its research
management strategy. The program man-
agers provide general guidance on the
policy objectives; give heavy emphasis to
peer review for research proposals; dis-
play a strong commitment to the continu-
ity of the research stream, to the clevelop-
ment of a research community, and to
interchange of information through an-
nual meetings at which research results
are critically examined by peers and col-
leagues; and Took to the scientific review
process for filtering valid from invaTicl
results. This strategy, which the panel
endorses, has long been associates! with
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AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
effective progress in medical research
and in the physical sciences. The panel
hopes that this effort will not only be
continued, but that additional resources
will be provider] to permit the program to
support some of the research questions
discussed in this chapter.
Criminal Career Data Repository
A major need common to all research
on criminal careers is access to a rich set
of data on individuals. Ideally, such data
would record cletailed information on
how the sample was drawn; on crime and
arrest sequences; on each inclividuaT's
early childhood experiences; on his par-
ents, siblings, and peers; on school expe-
riences ant] work experiences; on deviant
behavior of various sorts; and on interac-
tion with the criminal justice system. No
single data source yet collected contains
so rich a set of information on an appro-
priately broact sample. In some cases,
data are available only for juvenile years;
in other cases, only aclult arrest events are
available; and in only a few cases are
indiviclual background data available. To-
gether, however, the wide variety of in-
formation that has aIreacly been collected
and used in indiviclual criminal career
research projects represents a rich collec-
tion on which consiclerable secondary
analysis is warrantee! and should be pur-
sued.
In order to facilitate such secondary
analysis, it would be appropriate to orga-
nize and code those data sets so that they
can be made accessible to a large commu-
nity of potential users for comparative
research and cross-vaTidation. The com-
munity working with the data would be
in a strong position to test prediction
moclels developed in one setting or from
one sampling frame against data collected
209
in another and to cross-validate various
stuclies. Even within a single study, the
data from the initial construction sample
from which a particular predictive mode!
was developed could be tested against a
validation sample, which would develop
measures of shrinkage as part of valida-
tion.
The initial data sets to be maintained in
a criminal career data repository should
include, at a minimum, the Rand inmate
surveys, the National Youth Survey of
Elliott et al., the official-record arrest data
collected ant! analyzed by Blumstein and
Cohen, the clata on two Philaclelphia co-
horts collected by Wolfgang et al., the
various cohort data of Shannon, Robins,
McCorcI, and the London longitudinal
data of West and Farrington. The location
of such a repository would have to be
explored, but one possibility is the al-
ready-established Criminal Justice Ar-
chive an(1 Information Network (CIAIN)
at the University of Michigan, the current
repository for all data collected with NIT
support; the data maintainer] in the
C.lAIN are available to any user.
The field of criminal career research is
beginning to yield valuable information
on the dimensions of criminal careers-
participation, frequency, seriousness, and
career length and the factors associated
with each dimension. Advances in mea-
surement an(l modeling have been instru-
mental in the accumulation of knowledge
about individual careers. Additional re-
search that a(ldresses the questions pose
in this chapter will contribute to more
effective strategies to prevent, mollify,
interrupt, or terminate criminal careers.
Progress can be expected from secondary
analysis of available data, from well-
designed experiments, and, most impor-
tantly, from a major program of Tongitudi-
nal study.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
criminal career
