Journal ArticleDOI
The true value of lambda would appear to be zero: an essay on career criminals, criminal careers, selective incapacitation, cohort studies, and related topics*
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The authors argue that the distinction between incidence and prevalence does not deserve the theoretical, research, or policy attention it has been claimed to merit, and that the current focus of criminological research on the career criminal, on selective incapacitation, and on longitudinal research remains unjustified.Abstract:
The idea of selective incapacitation and the distinction between prevalence and incidence (participation and lambda) justify the search for a group of offenders whose criminality does not decline with age and who may be identified solely on the basis of legally relevant variables. This paper questions such research, arguing that the decline in age with crime characterizes even the most active offenders. and that the distinction between incidence and prevalence does not deserve the theoretical, research, or policy attention it has been claimed to merit (Farrington, 1985; Blumstein and Graddy, 1981–1982). In doing so, it relies on research results widely accepted in criminology. Thus, the current focus of criminological research on the “career criminal,” on selective incapacitation, and on longitudinal research remains unjustified.read more
Citations
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Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy.
TL;DR: It is suggested that delinquency conceals 2 distinct categories of individuals, each with a unique natural history and etiology: a small group engages in antisocial behavior of 1 sort or another at every life stage, whereas a larger group is antisocial only during adolescence.
Book
Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives
TL;DR: Maruna as discussed by the authors argues that to truly understand offenders, we must understand the stories that they tell - and that in turn this story-making process has the capacity to transform lives, and provides a fascinating narrative analysis of the lives of repeat offenders who, by all statistical measures, should have continued on the criminal path but instead have created lives of productivity and purpose.
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Age, criminal careers, and population heterogeneity: specification and estimation of a nonparametric, mixed poisson model*
Daniel S. Nagin,Kenneth C. Land +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a new approach to the analysis of individual criminal careers is proposed, based on nested, mixed Poisson models in which the mixing distribution is estimated nonparametrically.
Journal ArticleDOI
Life-course desisters? trajectories of crime among delinquent boys followed to age 70*
Robert J. Sampson,John H. Laub +1 more
TL;DR: The authors examined trajectories of offending over the life course of delinquent boys followed from ages 7 to 70, concluding that desistance processes are at work even among active offenders and predicted life-course persisters.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Life-Course View of the Development of Crime
Robert J. Sampson,John H. Laub +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a life-course perspective on crime and a critique of the developmental criminology paradigm, arguing that persistent offending and desistance can be meaningfully understood within the same theoretical framework, namely, a revised agegraded theory of informal social control.
References
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Age and the Explanation of Crime
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the age distribution of crime is sufficiently invariant over a broad range of social conditions that these uses of the age distributions are not justified by available evidence.
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Age, Crime, and Social Explanation
TL;DR: In this article, Hirschi and Gottfredson have argued that proposed sociological explanations of the observed relationship between age and crime are in error and that their arguments rest on faulty logic and on misstatements of the empirical evidence currently available.
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Estimation of Individual Crime Rates from Arrest Records
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Prevalence and recidivism in index arrests: a feedback model
TL;DR: For example, this paper found that the large differences in race-specific arrest rates are predominantly attributable to difference in participation, and not to differences in recidivism for those who do get involved.
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Could Successful Rehabilitation Reduce the Crime Rate
TL;DR: There has been a return to justice and away from the treatment model, at least theoretically, but the problem has not been resolved and legislation and sentences continue to reveal an untidy compromise between rehabilitative (treatment) and treatment.