Linking juvenile and adult patterns of criminal activity in the Providence cohort of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project
Introduction
In the mid-1980s, a comprehensive review of the criminal career literature, Criminal Careers and ‘Career Criminals’, was issued by the National Research Council (Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher, 1986). In this report, the authors claimed that there were distinct dimensions of offending and that the characterizations of the dimensions might vary across demographic groups based on sex and race. The report identified several dimensions that were important for the study of criminal careers and career criminals including: participation, frequency, seriousness, specialization, persistence, and career length (desistance).
Much information has been learned regarding patterns of offending within the criminal career dimensions of onset Farrington et al., 1990, Tibbetts & Piquero, 1999, Tolan, 1987, prevalence and frequency Elliott, 1994, Nagin & Land, 1993, Nagin & Smith, 1990, offense seriousness (Blumstein, Cohen, Das, & Moitra, 1988), chronicity (Piquero, 2000a), specialization Blumstein et al., 1988, Britt, 1996, Bursik, 1980, Klein, 1984, Mazerolle et al., 2000, Piquero, 2000b, Piquero et al., 1999, offense frequency and persistence (Blumstein & Cohen, 1979, Canela-Cacho et al., 1997, Chaiken & Chaiken, 1982, Dean et al., 1996, Horney & Marshall, 1992, Paternoster et al., 2001, Piquero et al., 2001, Piquero et al., 2002, Piquero et al., 2002), as well as desistance Farrington & West, 1995, Laub et al., 1998, Shover & Thompson, 1992, Sommers et al., 1994, Warr, 1998, and career length Blumstein et al., 1982, Greenberg, 1975, Shinnar & Shinnar, 1975, Spelman, 1994. A key finding from this line of research indicated that in any cohort of subjects, (1) many individuals will never commit a crime (much less be arrested for a crime), (2) some individuals will commit one or two crimes and desist, and (3) a small subset will continue offending frequently over time. As these results imply, in any cohort of subjects, there is an uneven distribution of offenses (Fox & Tracy, 1988, p. 261), with a small percentage of offenders being responsible for a large percentage of the criminal acts, a finding that has been replicated across different time periods and cultures, and with different operationalizations (i.e., self-report and official records) of criminal offending Blumstein et al., 1985, Loeber & Farrington, 1998, Piquero, 2000a.
The consistent finding of chronic offenders, their skewed offending patterns, their involvement in serious, violent criminal activity, and their longer career lengths has contributed to the development of several theoretical models, developmental in nature, that focus on the etiology and course of the chronic offender. These include theories advanced by Loeber and Hay (1994), Moffitt (1993), and Patterson and Yoerger (1993) that highlight a small group of offenders responsible for a significant portion of criminal activity, especially offenses that are violent in nature. Although these theoretical models occupy some common ground, one in particular, Moffitt's developmental taxonomy, has developed patterns of expectation regarding criminal activity, especially as they relate to potential race and sex differences across offending pathways.
Moffitt's (1993) developmental taxonomy decomposes the aggregate age–crime curve into two hypothetically distinct groups of offenders. The first group of offenders, adolescence-limited, is hypothesized to engage in crimes solely during the adolescent period. The primary causal factors for this group includes physical maturation and association with delinquent peers. Moffitt expects the crime-type repertoire of adolescence-limiteds to include property offenses such as theft and vandalism, as well as offenses that symbolize adult life such as smoking and drinking. Importantly, these offenders are largely expected to refrain from involvement in violent acts. For the majority of adolescence-limited offenders, their prosocial skills and attitudes allow them to recover from their delinquent experimentation, and they cease offending as adulthood approaches.
The second group of offenders in Moffitt's scheme, the life-course persisters, is hypothesized to engage in antisocial activities and criminal acts throughout the life span. Made up of less than 10 percent of the population, the primary determinants of criminal activity for life-course-persistent offenders lie in the interaction between poor neuropsychological functioning and deficient home and socioeconomic environments. Unlike their adolescence-limited counterparts, the life-course persisters are believed to continue their criminal involvement throughout most of their lives (i.e., they are unlikely to desist). Another important distinction between the two groups of offenders is the hypothesis that life-course persisters are expected to engage in the full range of criminal activities, especially those acts that take on a violent, person-oriented nature. A good deal of research has tended to support some of the key hypotheses arising from Moffitt's typology Bartusch et al., 1997, Moffitt et al., 1996, Moffitt et al., 1994, Piquero, 2000c, Piquero & Brezina, 2001, Tibbetts & Piquero, 1999, though some research has questioned the existence of only two offender groups D'Unger et al., 1998, Nagin et al., 1995, the causal factors predicting group membership (Paternoster, Dean, Piquero, Mazerolle, & Brame, 1997), and the ability to account for both male and female criminal career patterns (Kratzer & Hodgins, 1999; though see Moffitt, Caspi, Rutter, & Silva, 2001).
Section snippets
Current focus
Although much has been learned from the study of criminal careers, except for a few expositions Elliott, 1994, Tracy et al., 1990, Wolfgang et al., 1972, little attention has been paid toward race and sex comparisons regarding criminal career dimensions Blumstein et al., 1988, Mazerolle et al., 2000, Tracy & Kempf-Leonard, 1996, Tracy et al., 1990. In fact, demographic correlates of offenders' criminal careers have received little attention in studies to date (Kempf-Leonard, Tracy, & Howell,
Data
The study sample was drawn from the Providence cohort of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP) (Niswander & Gordon, 1972). The majority of the Providence cohort (86 percent) was recruited from a 50-percent sampling of all registered clinic patients at a major maternity hospital in Rhode Island. The study sample consisted of all members of the cohort who were born from March 1960 to August 1966 (N=3828), excluding those known to have died prior to age seven. Approximately half
Prevalence, frequency, and violence by age eighteen
The analysis began by presenting criminal history information related to prevalence, frequency, and violence by age eighteen. For the full sample, across all three dimensions, males were significantly more likely than females to exhibit a higher prevalence and frequency of criminal activity (t=14.04, t=10.70, respectively). Male offending prevalence by age eighteen was a little over 19 percent versus 5 percent for females. Violent offender prevalence also revealed a statistically significant
Discussion and conclusion
The purpose of this study was to explore how patterns of juvenile and adult criminal activity were related among a cohort of individuals participating in the Providence portion of the NCPP. In particular, the study examined several dimensions of delinquent criminal careers, including prevalence, frequency, chronicity, and specialization-in-violence, as well as how demographic and juvenile offending measures predicted adult offender status. Since little research had examined how certain criminal
Acknowledgements
This article is based upon research supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. YR4-CCRP1 to the National Consortium on Violence Research. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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