Criminal Careers and "Career Criminals," Volume I (1986) / Chapter Skim
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7. An Agenda for Future Research
7. An Agenda for Future Research
Pages 198-210
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From page 198... ...
Much of that progress is attributable to a growing interest in the criminal career paradigm as an appropriate and effective way to study the people processed by the criminal justice system, their patterns of offending, the factors that influence 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.
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From page 199... ...
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.
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From page 200... ...
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 engendering compliant behavior, the behavioral precursors of subsequent delinquency and criminality, the influence on subsequent behavior of interactions win the juvenile and criminal justice systems, and the factors associated with career termination. 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 between the more and the less serious.
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From page 201... ...
Any such longitudinal project should have a breadth of perspective that represents the diversity of disciplinary and theoretical orientations that are relevant to research on criminal careers. In adclition to the disciplines concerned directly with criminal careers, those perspectives include related individual careers in education, substance abuse, mental health, and employment.
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From page 202... ...
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 Delinquency 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 careers 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; another involves other interventions that may encourage career modification, interruption, or termination.
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From page 203... ...
Many criminal justice practitioners already use fragmentary information 203 about criminal careers to make decisions about incarceration, which temporarily interrupts a criminal career. Some decision makers may also make erroneous decisions by invoking wrong predictors that they mistakenly believe to be valicI.
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From page 204... ...
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 increasing individual crime rates and lengthening criminal careers.
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From page 205... ...
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.
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From page 206... ...
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 issues 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.
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From page 207... ...
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.
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From page 208... ...
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 expansion of knowleclge about criminal careers: continuation of the current Crime Control Theory Program at the National Institute of Justice (NIl)
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From page 209... ...
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 cohorts collected by Wolfgang et al., the various cohort data of Shannon, Robins, McCorcI, and the London longitudinal data of West and Farrington.
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