Violence in criminal careers: A review of the literature from a developmental life-course perspective

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Abstract

The criminal career paradigm focuses on the prevalence and frequency of crime along with an emphasis on offense specialization, age of onset and desistance, offense seriousness, and career length. Coinciding with the criminal career framework, developmental/life-course criminology offers more complex theoretical explanations for crime which highlight the importance of age-graded developmental risk factors that affect offending over the course of a criminal career. This review provides a systematic examination of the role of violence in criminal career and developmental/life-course research with a specific focus on its prevalence and frequency and its share of the offense repertoire. The results show that the incidence of violence is rare in one's criminal career except for a small group of chronic offenders who are responsible for a majority of the violent offenses. Regarding specialization, evidence suggests that offenders are spectacularly non-specialized and violent offenders can primarily be characterized as frequent offenders who offend more often and thereby have a higher probability of committing a violent offense in their criminal career. Conclusions and directions for future research are discussed.

Introduction

Violence, broadly defined, is a far-reaching criminal justice and public health problem and has received significant governmental attention, including reports commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS; Reiss & Roth, 1993) and the U.S. Surgeon General (Elliott, Hatot, Sirovatka, & Potter, 2001), which have summarized the state of the problem and potential policy responses for reducing violence. Aside from these efforts, dozens of theoretical, methodological, and policy-relevant studies have also focused on the problem of violence, some of which have aimed at identifying ‘the violent offender’ in such a way as to prevent their initiation (and continuation) of violent offending over the life-course.

Considering the overwhelming breadth of the knowledge base with respect to violent offending, we focus our attention on a specific aspect of this literature. At the same time, we are sensitive to the fact that there are different conceptualizations and operational definitions of violence (and aggression) and that some of these have life-course-specific definitions. Thus, we limit our review to violence as it pertains to criminal acts that involve injury or the threat of injury. In criminological terms, we focus on offenses that typically violate the criminal law such as homicide, rape, robbery, and assault. As such, this review focuses on violent offending, defined in an official, legal capacity.

The purpose of this review is to examine the longitudinal nature of offending as it pertains to violence and to assess whether violence is a unique or regular component of criminal careers. In this regard, we are primarily interested in describing and understanding the nature and types of offenses observable throughout an offender's criminal career in order to determine whether there may be some violence specialists or whether violent offenders are merely frequent offenders who roll the dice more often and thereby periodically include a violent offense as part of their offending repertoire.

Our review proceeds in the following manner. First, we provide a brief overview of some prominent theoretical frameworks that adopt a life-course lens in order to understand the longitudinal mix of criminal offending—and with a specific focus on violence. We then review the research literature with respect to violent offending in criminal careers, paying careful attention to the mix and type of offending across the criminal career. We conclude our review by summarizing the key conclusions from this line of research and by outlining a research agenda aimed at filling in some of the research gaps in the violence and criminal careers literature.

Section snippets

Theoretical frameworks of longitudinal (violent) offending patterns

As construed in criminology, the developmental life-course perspective (DLC) offers a comprehensive outlook to the study of crime because it considers the multitude of factors that affect offending across different time periods and contexts (Thornberry, 1997). A key assumption of DLC is that changes with age and delinquency and criminal activity occur in an orderly way (Thornberry, 1997, p. 1). In addition to studying longitudinal offending patterns, this perspective attempts to identify the

State of the research

Although aggression certainly begins at the earliest stages of the life-course (Tremblay et al., 1999), most violence, as defined in this review (i.e., criminal violence), begins in the second decade of life. The prevalence of violence approaches 40–50% in adolescence, tends to peak in late adolescence, and drops off dramatically in early adulthood. Its onset, duration, and continuity into adulthood has received some attention (Elliott et al., 2001), but has been hampered because there are few

Conclusions

This review sought to provide a summary of the empirical literature on the nature of violent offending throughout individual criminal careers. As a result, several key conclusions were reached.

First, only a small proportion of offenses committed throughout most individual criminal careers are violent. Although this is true more so when analyzing official as opposed to self-report records (the latter containing more reports of involvement in violence), it nevertheless holds that violent

Future research directions

Although there are a clear set of conclusions that have emerged from studies investigating the nature of violent offending throughout individual criminal careers, several limitations from the studies should direct future inquiry. Below, we list several of these limitations and outline a research agenda for subsequent research.

First, there is a need for further consideration (though not necessarily acceptance) of a violence-specific theory (Felson, 2009, Karstedt and Eisner, 2009, Tittle, 2009).

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