Analyzing Theories

Description

Life course and developmental theories of crime often emphasize distinct offender

typologies, such as Moffitt’s (1993) life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited

taxonomy. These categorizations imply unique causal processes for different offender

groups. Grapes and Super Smash bros melee

First, describe the offender typologies proposed by Moffitt (1993) and the hypothesized

etiological differences between the groups. Then, drawing on the results presented by

Sampson and Laub (2005) and Doherty and Ensminger (2014), assess the empirical

evidence for prospectively predicting distinct offender trajectories from childhood risk

factors in the Glueck data and the Woodlawn study. Discuss whether the findings

support categorical typologies with distinct etiologies or a more general life course

view. Finally, comment on the strengths and limitations of group-based trajectory

modeling for making inferences about the development of crime over the life course. Be

specific, using examples from the course materials.

Approximately 8 pages in length, double-spaced, 12 pt, Times New

Roman font (excluding a references page and a final “name” page)

Your pages should be numbered
Do NOT create a cover page. Just start the page answering the following

question

Unformatted Attachment Preview

Theoretical Origins
•
Moffitt’s dual taxonomy theory builds on prior strain, control, and learning theories of
crime by integrating key concepts into a life-course framework.
•
It adopts the idea from strain theory that adversity in one’s environment can lead to
antisocial outcomes. However, Moffitt argues that strain alone is not sufficient to explain
sustained criminal careers.
•
From control theory, Moffitt incorporates the idea that ties to family, school, and
prosocial activities can inhibit antisocial behavior. Weak bonds to these social institutions
can reduce social constraints against deviance.
•
Social learning theory informs the understanding of how reinforcement of aggressive
behavior develops. Children exposed to criminal environments may mimic antisocial
models.
Key Points:
Adolescence-limited offenders:
•
•
•
Start offending only during adolescence, as this is a period with more opportunities and
rewards for antisocial behavior due to peer influences, lack of supervision, etc.
Their antisocial behavior is temporary and they often desist by early adulthood as social
controls increase.
Make up the majority of adolescent offenders.
Life-course-persistent offenders:
•
•
•
•
Display high levels of aggressive and antisocial behavior that begins in childhood and
persists into adulthood.
Have neuropsychological deficits that interact with their criminogenic environments
across life stages, sustaining their antisocial trajectory.
Exposed to risk factors across multiple domains (individual, family, school, peers,
neighborhood) starting in childhood that exacerbate their problematic behaviors.
Make up only 5-10% of offenders but are responsible for the most serious and violent
offenses.
Moffitt argues that interventions should target life-course persistent offenders early in life before
their antisocial behaviors become crystallized. For adolescence-limited offenders, rising social
controls in adulthood will lead them to naturally desist.
Key Assumptions & Propositions
•
Crime has different age patterns depending on the type of offender (adolescence-limited
or life-course-persistent).
•
Life-course persistency is caused by the interaction between neuropsychological deficits
and criminogenic environments from childhood to adulthood.
•
Without effective interventions, life-course persisters will show increasing diversity,
specialization, and frequency of offending as they age.
•
Adolescence-limited offenders spontaneously desist as social controls rise with maturity
and adult responsibilities.
Moffitt’s Choice of Taxonomy
•
The dual taxonomy categorizes offenders based on empirically observed differences in
the continuity of antisocial behavior across age groups.
•
Moffitt chose the categories based on consistent evidence that a small group shows
conduct disorder early in life and offends longer, compared to a larger adolescencepeaked group.
Supporting Evidence
•
Studies show neurological deficits associated with violenrt persisters but not adolescencelimiteds.
•
Longitudinal analyses reveal life-course persisters experience multiple risk factors
starting in childhood.
•
Self-report studies find differences in offense characteristics between the two groups.
•
Population studies confirm stable aggregate age-crime curves.
Moffit:
Adolescence-limited and life time offenders
• Taxonomy
LCP: (heterotypic continuity) meaning that there antisocial behavior is extended from
adolescence into adulthoods
THE FOLLOWING ARE BIO/SOCIAL EXPLANATIONS
• Early onset
• Continuity of offending into adulthood
• Environmental
• Difficult child
• Neurological Deficits- (child abuse,)
• Mental disorders
•
•
•
Environmental (family attachment bonds, child-rearing practices, parent-sibling deviance,
and socio-economic status)
Small group of offenders (5
They have material goods )
Adolescent limited offenders
THE FOLLOWING ARE SOCIAL LEARNING EXPLANATIONS:
Onset in adolescence
-DISCONTINUTY of anti social behavior into adulthood
• Social/boilogical matuirty gap
• Social learning/ mimicry/initiation
• It is in this social.biological gap that adolescence mimic the roles of lifetime offenders
• They mimic their roles because they have material roles because it looks attractive to them,
thus they have access to material goods, and adult roles, and are successful in romantic
relationships
• THEY DO NOT HAVE NEURGOLOGICAL DEFICTS
• THEY ARE MERELYY OFFENDING DURING A PERIOD IN WHICH THEY ARE
EXPERIMANTING IN BEING ADULTS BEFORE THEY CAN GET THE OPP TO
BECOME AN ADULT
• THE MOTVIAITION TO MIMICS ADULT ROLES dimininshes into adulthood because
they can now experience adult roles
• The group size (almost everyone else)
Moffit does not suggest that AL offender need to be closesly tied to life course persisters in order
to offend because they are only just trying to be like them.
Types of offense: There is very little difference in the type of offense and the number of offesnes
commited by both adolesnce limtied and offender persister.
Moffit suggests we must look at the characterisitcs
The strong difference between these two groups is knowing right from wrong, must be fairly
strong to desist.
LIMITATION: this theory does not contend for implications such as what would happen to
AL offenders who were arrested and released thus limiting there job opps.
• Also doesn’t recognize that the long-term problems of AL offenders such as:
(ADOLESCNNCE PERSITTERS)
1. Labeling snares likes arrest or social stigma, keeps them labeled as a offender and limits
their adult roles.
Journal of Criminal Justice 42 (2014) 517–526
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Criminal Justice
Do the adult criminal careers of African Americans fit the “facts”?
Elaine Eggleston Doherty a,⁎, Margaret E. Ensminger b
a
b
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri – St. Louis, 324 Lucas Hall, One University Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63121
Department of Health, Behavior and Society, Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, 624 N. Broadway, 7th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21205
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Available online 6 October 2014
a b s t r a c t
Purpose: A major gap in the criminal career research is our understanding of offending among African Americans,
especially beyond early adulthood. In light of this gap, this study describes the criminal career patterns of a cohort
of African American males and females.
Methods: This paper uses official criminal history data spanning ages 17 to 52 from the Woodlawn Study, a community cohort of 1,242 urban African American males and females. We use basic descriptive statistics as well as
group-based modeling to provide a detailed description of the various dimensions of their adult criminal careers.
Results: We find cumulative prevalence rates similar to those for African Americans from national probability
sample estimates, yet participation in offending extends farther into midlife than expected with a substantial
proportion of the cohort still engaged in offending into their 30s.
Conclusions: The descriptive analyses contribute to the larger body of knowledge regarding the relationship
between age and crime and the unfolding of the criminal career for African American males and females. The
applicability of existing life course and developmental theories is discussed in light of the findings.
© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
In 1986, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a two
volume report entitled “Criminal Careers and ‘Career Criminals’”
(Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher, 1986), which sparked some resurgence in research investigating the criminal career, defined as “the
longitudinal sequence of crimes committed by an individual offender”
(Blumstein et al., 1986, p. 12). Fueling this revitalization of criminal
career research in the 1980s was the debate regarding the invariance
of the age-crime curve (Hirschi & Gottfredson, 1983). Criminal career
researchers argue that the age-crime curve varies substantially across
time and social conditions (Farrington, 1986; Steffensmeier, Allan,
Harer, & Streifel, 1989) and propose that the aggregate age-crime
curve accommodates a variety of offending trajectories. One important
implication of this notion is that the age-crime curve should be disaggregated so that participation in offending can be studied separately
from frequency of offending.
The ability to study criminal careers in detail was facilitated in the
1980s by the fact that the subjects of several longitudinal research studies
on crime and delinquency were reaching adulthood at that time.1 These
longitudinal studies, which follow the same individuals over a long period
of time, were essential to investigate the various dimensions of the criminal career such as the prevalence (participation), incidence (frequency),
and seriousness of offending, as well as recidivism, onset, termination,
and career length, to name a few (Blumstein, Cohen, & Farrington, 1988).
⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 314 516 5033; fax: +1 314 516 5048.
E-mail address: [email protected] (E.E. Doherty).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2014.09.006
0047-2352/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Since the 1986 NAS report, there have been considerable advances in our
understanding of the criminal careers among white populations, males
in particular. However, the core issue is that although our knowledge is
growing with respect to participation, onset, and offending careers into
early adulthood among African Americans and Hispanics (i.e., from adolescence to the late 20s) (e.g., Loeber, Farrington, Stouthamer-Loeber, &
White, 2008; Reingle, Jennings, & Maldonado-Molina, 2011; Tracy &
Kempf-Leonard, 1996) and into later adulthood for Hispanics (Jennings,
Zgoba, Piquero, & Reingle, 2013) we still know very little about the
long-term criminal careers among African Americans.
For instance, the two longest criminological longitudinal studies, the
Glueck follow-up study (see, e.g., Laub & Sampson, 2003) and the
Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development (see, e.g., Farrington,
Piquero, & Jennings, 2013), follow individuals into late adulthood shedding light on the adult criminal career into the 30s, 40s, and 50s, yet
both focus on white males only. With respect to non-white populations,
Jennings et al. (2013) recently reported on the offending trajectories of a
cohort of Hispanic males from age 18 to 50. Yet, a major gap in the
criminal career research that remains is our understanding of offending
beyond early adulthood for African Americans. In a response to this
gap, this study provides a systematic descriptive account of the criminal
career patterns of an African American community cohort of males and
females followed from age 17 to age 52.
The “facts” of adult criminal careers
In the 2003 issue of Crime and Justice, Piquero, Farrington, and
Blumstein conducted an extensive review of the criminal career research
518
E.E. Doherty, M.E. Ensminger / Journal of Criminal Justice 42 (2014) 517–526
spanning close to 150 pages, which outlines the state of the evidence
with respect to the dimensions of the criminal career, theoretical contributions, and methodological considerations (see also DeLisi & Piquero,
2011; Farrington, 2003). With respect to the criminal career dimensions,
several “facts” have emerged. For instance, 1) prevalence tends to peak in
late adolescence such that fewer individuals continue offending into
adulthood; 2) yet among the smaller group who remain active offenders,
the frequency of offending remains high and does not decline with age;
3) an earlier age of onset is related to a longer criminal career and an
increased recidivism probability; and 4) the majority of offenders desist,
although perhaps at different times throughout the life course. However,
these “facts” have largely been based on white male populations.
Recently, several samples that follow African Americans into young
adulthood have begun to inform our understanding of the criminal careers of this population. For instance, with respect to the age-crime
curve, the Pittsburgh Youth Study, which includes 56% African
Americans, finds evidence similar to those of other studies with respect
to the age-crime curve; arrests for moderate and serious violence peak
in adolescence and decline in the early 20s (Loeber et al., 2008). However, Elliott’s (1994) analysis of serious violent offending among the
National Youth Survey (NYS) sample shows that as this timeline extends into the thirties, the trends for black males decrease in the early
twenties before beginning to increase again in the mid-twenties and
continuing to increase into the early thirties (Elliott, 1994).
In light of these studies into early adulthood, one multifaceted area
of research that is needed is extensive descriptive data on the criminal
career dimensions of African American males and females, especially
those that extend into late adulthood (see DeLisi & Piquero, 2011;
Piquero, Farrington, & Blumstein, 2003). Moreover, the foundation of
several contemporary theories that explain offending over the life
course has been restricted to certain populations for which we have
data, largely neglecting key demographic categories and bringing their
applicability into question. With respect to race and the criminal career,
contemporary theoretical questions include 1) Do chronic or acute
stressors common in the lives of many African Americans influence patterns of African American offending over the life course (e.g., Agnew,
1992)?; 2) Do African Americans have a unique lived experience requiring a race-specific theory to explain offending (Unnever & Gabbidon,
2011)?; 3) Do African American desisters differ from their persisting
peers with respect to adult life events and social bonds, as predicted
by Sampson and Laub (1993)? 4) Are African Americans more likely
to desist if they have multiple stakes in conformity, or the “respectability
package,” as suggested by Giordano, Cernkovich, and Rudolph (2002)?
5) How might the continued substance use of African Americans into
midlife (see Doherty, Green, & Ensminger, 2008; French, Finkbiner, &
Duhamel, 2002) impede the processes of desistance (Schroeder,
Giordano, & Cernkovich, 2007)?
While there are notable studies that have begun to investigate these
types of questions using samples that include African Americans
(e.g., Doherty & Ensminger, 2013; Edin, Nelson, & Paranal, 2001;
Giordano et al., 2002; Nielsen, 1999; Piquero, MacDonald, & Parker,
2002), we view these questions as “premature,” in that they “cannot
be approached until a more fundamental base of knowledge exists”
(Lieberson, 1985, p. 9) regarding the criminal career patterns of
African Americans. This is not to say that there have not been great
strides in our understanding of criminal careers over the past
30 years; however, there has yet to be a detailed account of the criminal
careers of African American males and females similar to the accounts of
whites that expand across the majority of the life course. This basic gap
in our knowledge base still exists due to the fact that, to date, there have
been no developmental longitudinal studies of offending that focus
specifically on African American males and females and extend into
mid adulthood. This lack of detailed data is particularly troubling in
light of the findings suggesting that African Americans persist in criminal
offending longer than whites and therefore, may not follow the typical
age-crime curve (Elliott, 1994).
This paper uses official criminal history data spanning ages 17 to 52
from the Woodlawn Study in order to provide a detailed description of
the various dimensions of the criminal career for African Americans. The
Woodlawn Study is a prospective developmental study of a community
cohort of first grade, African American males and females from the
Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago (N = 1,242). Specifically, we ask
a series of descriptive research questions: 1) What are the rates of
participation and frequency among this cohort of African Americans?
2) What are the rates of serious offending (i.e., violence) among this
cohort? 3) What are the criminal career trends with respect to onset,
termination, and career length? 4) Is there an association between age
of onset and recidivism? 5) What is the shape of the longitudinal patterning of individual-level offending over the life course for this
African American cohort? In answering each of these questions, we
also consider the importance of differentiating these dimensions by
gender.
Data and methods
The Woodlawn Study
The Woodlawn Study is an epidemiological, prospective study focusing on a cohort of African American children and their families. In 1966,
nearly all first grade children (N = 1,242; 636 females and 606 males)
in Woodlawn, a neighborhood community on the South Side of Chicago,
were included in the study (see Kellam, Branch, Agrawal, & Ensminger,
1975). At the start of the study in 1966, Woodlawn was overcrowded
with 90,000 people living in an urban area built to house 45,000.
While Woodlawn was a community of low to median incomes and
high unemployment, it was somewhat economically heterogeneous,
including working-class, middle-class, and welfare families due to residential segregation of African Americans at the time. By the 1970s,
when the cohort was around 10 years old, the population of Woodlawn
had decreased to 54,000 people, remained largely African American
(97%), and had the 8th highest percentage of families living below the
poverty line (27% as compared with 12% in Chicago). Moreover, at
that time, Woodlawn had the highest rate of male juvenile delinquency
(Council for Community Services in Metropolitan Chicago, 1975).2
In the 1966-67 school year, the cohort was in first grade in the nine
public and three parochial schools in Woodlawn. At this time, teachers
and mothers (or mother surrogates) reported on the children’s social
adaptational status, their mental health, and the family and classroom
contexts. The cohort was again assessed in adolescence (approximately
age 16), at age 32, and again at age 42 (see Doherty et al., 2008;
Ensminger, 1990; Ensminger, Anthony, & McCord, 1997; Fothergill,
Ensminger, Green, Robertson, & Juon, 2009; Green, Doherty, Stuart, &
Ensminger, 2010; Kellam et al., 1975). Table 1 provides an overview of
the cohort characteristics in adulthood with respect to several dimensions of life. In general, by the age 42 interview, this cohort had
moved out of Woodlawn but 62% remained in the Chicago area, 40%
lived in neighborhoods with a drug and/or gang presence, and onequarter remained below the poverty threshold.
Official criminal record data
Collecting and coding the criminal records
Criminal records from the Chicago Police Department and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were searched for the entire cohort in 1993
and spanned the age of majority (age 17 in Illinois) to age 32. In the
1990s, the criminal history information was coded combining arrests
over the 17 to 32 age period. In order to capitalize on the annualized
nature of the data, in 2008, with the support of a grant from the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, we coded the criminal history data for each age
and crime type for ages 17 to 32 from the paper “rap” sheets.3 In 2012, to
supplement the existing data to age 32 (Elder & Taylor, 2009), we
received a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to access
E.E. Doherty, M.E. Ensminger / Journal of Criminal Justice 42 (2014) 517–526
Table 1
Description of Woodlawn respondents at ages 32 and 42 from self reports
Current residence:
Within Woodlawn
In Chicago Area
Outside Chicago
Neighborhood environment:
Drug trafficking moderate to heavy
Gang presence
Currently married or cohabiting
Completed high school
Employed in the last week
Below Federal poverty threshold
Early Adulthood
(age 32, 1992)
n = 952, 47.9%
males
Mid-Adulthood
(age 42, 2002)
n = 833, 44.9%
males
9.3%
75.0%
15.7%
6.5%
61.8%
31.7%
61.9%
66.3%
35.8%
79.7%
63.1%
38.9%
40.1%
41.5%
41.7%
81.6%
73.7%
25.6%
the criminal history record information through the Illinois State Police
and the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ILCJA) for the
full Woodlawn cohort extending these histories to age 52.4
We established extensive coding decisions and schemes similar to
those used by Laub and Sampson in coding the Glueck data (Laub &
Sampson, 2003). This process began with coding the arrest date, type
of arrest charge (up to 3 charges), type and method of disposition, and
sentence.5 We then categorized the charge types based on the Illinois
Criminal Code to synthesize the data for analysis. Examples of the
crime types include violent (e.g., homicide, assault, rape, and robbery),
property (e.g., burglary, larceny, auto theft, fraud, and criminal damage), drug/alcohol offenses (e.g., narcotics, both selling and possession,
and driving under the influence6) and other offenses (e.g., public
order crimes, non-violent sex crimes, and weapons offenses7). Total
offending is the sum of these four offense types. We exclude all traffic
offenses.
Creating longitudinal criminal histories
The final step of the coding process included converting the data to
represent the number of offense counts by crime type at each age (17
to 52) for each individual. Mortality information was integrated into
the longitudinal criminal histories to safeguard against presuming
someone had stopped offending who had instead died. Mortality is
assessed through searches of the National Death Index (NDI) as well
as by corroborating reports of deaths from families and friends (n =
132 as of 2009, 11% of the original cohort).
Among the 565 subjects who were arrested (46% of the original
cohort), 35% were sentenced to jail or prison at least once between
ages 17 and 52 (20% of the 181 arrested women and 42% of the 384
arrested men). The inclusion of days incarcerated would be ideal to
safeguard against underestimating the actual level of offending in any
given year (Eggleston, Laub, & Sampson, 2004; Piquero et al., 2001).
Unfortunately, we do not have the exact number of days incarcerated
at each age. As a proxy, we incorporate the sentencing data from the
arrest records into the criminal histories such that a person is considered incarcerated in any year where he or she has zero offenses and is
known to have been sentenced to more than one year in prison at that
age. Using this strategy, we attempt to reduce the chances of presuming
someone has desisted from offending who in fact was incarcerated.8
Final sample
Although 568 cohort members were arrested between the ages of 17
and 52, we removed three of those cases due to the extent of conflicting
data in the multiple sources of information, leaving a final arrested sample of 565 individuals. Of the 674 with no arrest record, we removed 8
who died before age 17 as well as 14 who self-reported being incarcerated for more than 6 months at the age 32 interview yet had no arrest
record, which also represented conflicting data. This left a final sample
519
of 1,217 individuals with valid criminal history information from ages
17 to 52 (565 arrested and 652 not arrested).
Analytic strategy
Adult criminal career dimensions9
We estimate the trends in prevalence and seriousness of offending
over the life course using the percent arrested at each age for any crime
(prevalence) and for violence in particular (seriousness). We estimate
the frequency of offending using the mean number of offenses each
year among the active offenders (3-year smoothed). Age of onset and
age of termination are defined as the age of the first adult arrest
(i.e., age 17 or older) and the age of last arrest, respectively. Finally, we estimate the relationship between age of onset and recidivism using conditional probabilities of a second arrest (given a first arrest) by age of onset.
Long-term offending trajectories
In order to model the long-term patterns of offending from ages 17
to 52, we use a group-based trajectory method. Specifically, we employ
the group-based semiparametric mixed Poisson model, which estimates the predicted number of offenses per year at each age for each
trajectory group. The semiparametric mixed Poisson model (Jones,
Nagin, & Roeder, 2001; Nagin, 1999, 2005) allows a disaggregation of
offending trajectories to reveal variability in offending over time and
is particularly effective for descriptive purposes. This model assumes
that the population is comprised of discrete Poisson distributions with
a λ rate of offending resulting in a number of different groups of individuals who demonstrate similar patterns of offending over time. Each
developmental trajectory assumes a cubic relationship that links age
and offending (Nagin, 2005, p. 33). This type of method is specifically
designed to identify and depict discrete groups of individuals who are
homogenous in their behavior within their trajectory yet distinct from
those following other trajectories (e.g., those who persist through adulthood versus those who desist). As a result, this technique has been used
by several criminal career researchers to disentangle the individual level
offending trajectories across numerous longitudinal samples (for a
review, see Jennings & Reingle, 2012; Piquero, 2008).
Results
Our research questions span several of the common criminal career
dimensions, namely participation, frequency, seriousness, onset, career
length, and the identification of persisters (e.g., career criminals or
chronic offenders) and desisters. While it is informative to highlight
the criminal career dimensions of the Woodlawn cohort, it is also
important to situate our findings with what is known about the adult
criminal careers of offenders among other longitudinal cohorts. Although there is a wealth of knowledge regarding criminal careers
from a multitude of longitudinal studies (see e.g., Blumstein et al.,
1986; DeLisi & Piquero, 2011; Piquero et al., 2003), we simplify this
comparison by focusing on Laub and Sampson’s follow-up study of
Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck’s classic Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency
study (Glueck & Glueck, 1950; Laub & Sampson, 2003) and Farrington’s
Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) (Farrington et al.,
2013). 10 Although these studies and the Woodlawn study differ with
respect to selection into the study, race, and gender, they are similar
in their extension into late adulthood (into the 50s and beyond). Moreover, the extent of published information and the impact of the findings
on criminological scholarship also make these studies important
comparisons when situating our findings.
Participation and frequency
Participation and seriousness
Estimates from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997
(NLSY97), a national probability sample, show that close to 30% of
E.E. Doherty, M.E. Ensminger / Journal of Criminal Justice 42 (2014) 517–526
30.0
a: Percent of Male Cohort (n=589) Arrested by Crime
Type, By Age
Violent
25.0
Property
Drug/Alcohol
20.0
Percent
African American males are arrested by age 18 (29.6%) (including juvenile arrests) with this risk increasing to close to 50% by age 23 (48.9%).
Similarly, 11.8% of African American females are arrested by age 18 rising to close to one-fifth arrested by age 23 (18.4%) (Brame, Bushway,
Paternoster, & Turner, 2014, p. 6). Although the Woodlawn data does
not include juvenile arrests, the corresponding percentages are 46.3%
of the males and 14.5% of the females arrested between ages 17 and
23. These percentages increase to 65.2% of the 589 males (n = 384)
and over one-quarter of the females (28.8% of the 628 females (n =
181)) arrested at least once by age 52 (see Table 2). Indeed, this 65.2%
figure for the Woodlawn males is over twenty percentage points higher
than the 42% of the Cambridge men convicted up to age 56 (Farrington
et al., 2013, p. 16).
Table 2 highlights these high rates of total arrests as well as the high
rates of violence among this cohort with over one-quarter of this community cohort having at least one violent arrest (28.4%; 45.8% of the
male cohort and 12.1% of the female cohort). Moreover, 65.3% of those
with at least one violent arrest committed multiple violent offenses
with 46.0% of the 346 violent offenders being arrested 3 or more times
for violence (7.8% had 10 or more arrests) (data not shown).
In general, criminal career researchers have found that participation
declines with age; however the timing of the decline varies from sample
to sample based on the data used and age range studied (see Piquero
et al., 2003). Laub and Sampson report criminal activity among the
Glueck delinquent sample that continues well into middle adulthood
(30s and 40s) before eventually declining with age. For instance, 65%
of the Glueck men (representing a juvenile delinquent sample) were
arrested between ages 25 and 31, 60% were arrested between the ages
of 32 and 39, and 44% between ages 40 and 49 (see Laub & Sampson,
2003, p. 90). The corresponding percentages for the Woodlawn men
are 47% between 25 and 31, 40% between ages 32 and 39, and 29%
between ages 40 and 49. While the magnitude of the percentages are
lower for the Woodlawn men (representing a community cohort
sample), the percent change over the life course is similar; the prevalence in offending from age 25 to 49 declined 32% for the Glueck men
compared to a 38% decrease in the percentage of offending Woodlawn
men.
Fig. 1 displays the rates of participation in offending by crime type for
males and females across the life course. For the males (see Fig. 1a), property crime participation declines from a peak of 27.8% of the male cohort
being arrested between the ages of 17 and 21 to 7.5% of the male cohort
arrested for a property offense between the ages of 47 and 52. The corresponding percentages for the females are a 7.8% peak between ages 17
and 21 falling to 1.4% of the female cohort arrested for a property offense
at some point between the ages of 47 and 52 (see Fig. 1b). For both
genders, participation in drug and alcohol offending remains relatively
stable; around 10% of the males and 2% of the females were arrested for
drug and alcohol crimes at each age across the life course.
These patterns are similar to the Glueck sample of white male delinquents who show a decline in property and stability in drug and alcohol
offending into midlife (see Laub & Sampson, 2003, p. 90). However, unlike the Glueck sample who decline precipitously in their rates of violent
crime participation (from 33% between 17 and 24 to 16% between 25
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
17-21
22-26
27-31
32-36
37-41
42-46
47-52
Age
9.0
b: Percent of Female Cohort (n=628) Arrested by Crime
Type, By Age
Violent
8.0
Property
7.0
Drug/Alcohol
6.0
Percent
520
5.0
4.0
3.0
2.0
1.0
0.0
17-21
22-26
27-31
32-36
37-41
42-46
47-52
Age
Fig. 1. Participation by Gender and Crime Type.
and 31) (Laub & Sampson, 2003, p. 90), violence trends among the
Woodlawn men show a steady to increasing pattern from the early
20s into the 30s before falling to close to 20% of the males from this community cohort arrested for violence into their mid-30s. In fact, the prevalence rates of property and violence are similar throughout the 20s and
30s for the Woodlawn men (see Fig. 1a). Violence among the females
also shows a steady rate even farther into adulthood (throughout the
40s) with approximately 3% of the cohort arrested for violence between
ages 17 and 41 before falling to below 1% by age 52 (see Fig. 1b).
Moreover, with respect to violence (a measure of seriousness of
offending), 70% of the 384 male offenders were arrested for a violent
crime, which is comparable to the 75% arrested for a property offense
(data not shown). Importantly, the male violent offenders (n = 270)
are responsible for 90% of all of the male cohort’s arrests and are also
likely to be violent recidivists with the majority of violent males having
three or more violent arrest incidents (52.6%). Among the violent
female offenders (n = 76), the majority have only one violent arrest
incident (52.6%) with over three-quarters arrested once or twice for
Table 2
Particpation and frequency of offending by crime type
Total Cohort (n = 1217)
Total
Violent
Property
Drug/Alcohol
a
Males (n = 589)
Females (n = 628)
%
Mean (sd)a
Range
%
Mean (sd)a
Range
%
Mean (sd)a
Range
46.4
28.4
33.9
23.7
8.84 (12.70)
3.73 (4.48)
5.13 (8.11)
3.03 (3.02)
1 to 93
1 to 32
1 to 80
1 to 20
65.2
45.8
49.1
39.6
10.68 (13.87)
4.17 (4.89)
5.73 (8.08)
3.24 (3.24)
1 to 93
1 to 32
1 to 56
1 to 20
28.8
12.1
19.6
8.9
4.94 (8.57)
2.16 (1.19)
3.73 (8.02)
2.13 (1.61)
1 to 83
1 to 10
1 to 80
1 to 7
The mean and standard deviation are assessed among those arrested