Criminal Careers and "Career Criminals," Volume I (1986) / Chapter Skim
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career length is central to the decisions of the criminal justice system. Together, these four key dimensions characterize criminal careers: 1 1.
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Partitioning criminal activity enables research to focus more directly on the development and evolution of individuals' offending behaviors over time and their relationship to aggregate crime rates. For example, a drop in the aggregate index crime rate may reflect a decline in participation, a decrease in frequency, a shift to less serious crimes, or a shortening of career lengths.
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The greatest demographic differential is that attributable to sex: even for all nontragic offenses, male participation rates based on official records are 3 to 5 times those for females; the ratio is higher for more serious crimes. 3 Risk Factors in Criminal Participation Research suggests that adverse family influences and early antisocial behaviors are major risk factors associated with participation in delinquency and crime.
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, there is considerable convergence in estimates of A for any given offense type: averages of 2 to 4 violent crimes per year for active violent offenders and 5 to 10 property CRIMINaL CAREERS AND CAREER CRIMINALS crimes per year for active property offenders. The average A of inmates is higher than that of offenders not incarcerated, which is to be expected since the greater activity of high-rate offenders increases their exposure to arrest and because selectivity in criminal justice decisions increases the risk of incarceration of those offenders if arrested.
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is 5 years for 18-year-oIc3 inclex offenders, but it is 10 years for index offenders who are still active in their 30s, and it does not begin to clecline for active offenders until they are in their 40s. This finding that residual career length increases through the 20s to reach a maximum in the 30s-contradicts the wiclely hell!
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Evaluations of interventions to upgrade employment skills or to assist the reentry of ax-inmates into the community have not documented success in modifying offenders' careers in the United States, although such programs have met with some success in the United Kingdom. Given the Beard of interventions that have demonstrated general effectiveness in modifying careers, decision strategies focused on career criminals have recently become especially prominent, which has led to research on how criminal career information can be used to achieve greater crime control, especially through incapacitation of the most serious offend Incapacitation Under 1970 incarceration policies, incapacitation was estimated to have reduced the number of FBI index crimes by 10 to 20 percent.
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In assessing such classification rules, the pane! consiclered several factors: · the extent to which existing decision practices aIreacly focus on offenders whose criminal careers tend to be the most serious; · ethical limitations on the proper influence of predictions in decision making and on the choice of predictor variables; · methodological issues in constructing and validating a prediction scale and classification rule; and · the record-keeping implications of a criminal career orientation to decision Existing Decision Practices Because criminal justice decision makers do not routinely articulate their decision processes, it is difficult to know the extent to which predictions about offenders are incorporated into their decisions.
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On the basis of criminal career research, current decision practices could be improved, in terms of crime control through incapacitation, if more weight were given to the juvenile record and to serious drug use. Ethical Limitations Opinions differ on the extent to which it is ethically proper for predictive considerations to influence the choice of criminal justice sanctions.
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Specific Classification Rules Several prediction-based rules for cIassifying offenders have attracted sufficient attention to warrant assessment by the panel. Two have been applied in parole decision making and invoke similar variables: the Salient Factor Score of the United States Parole Commission and the Iowa Risk Assessment Instrument.
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AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH The area of criminal career research is sufficiently promising from both knowIedge and policy perspectives to warrant a significant effort with a long-term com CRIMINAL CAREERS AND CAREER CRIMINALS mitment for support. Key features of the effort should be improved measurement of the dimensions of criminal careers; measurement of their distributions, which are still known only imprecisely; measurement of the variation of the dimensions over the course of a criminal career; and better identification of the factors that influence criminal careers.
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Research activities that relate closely to incapacitation policy include the development of improved methods for cIassifying individuals in terms of their criminal career dimensions. Strong candidate cIassification variables include those that characterize prior juvenile and adult criminal activity the age of initiation, the frequency and total number of arrests and convictions, and the mix of crime types.
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