CRIMINAL CAREER RESEARCH: ITS VALUE FOR CRIMINOLOGY*

In a recent paper published in this journal, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1986)¹ argue that the concepts of criminal careers, career criminals, selective incapacitation, prevalence, and incidence, and longitudinal studies all have little value for criminology. In our view their paper misrepresents these concepts and our research on these topics. We are pleased to have the opportunity in this paper to develop these concepts more clearly and to show their relevance for criminology.     

The Future of the Rhodesias

Sir Alfred Beit has recently returned to this country aftera visit with a Parliamentary Delegation to Southern Africa.This article reproduces the more salient of the points he madein a lecture on the 29th November, under the Chairmanship ofSir John Chancellor, the first Governor of Southern Rhodesia.Sir Alfred is now Parliamentary Private Secretary to ColonelOliver Stanley.     

A PROSPECTIVE TEST OF A CRIMINAL CAREER MODEL*

In an earlier article in this journal, Barnett, Blumstein, and Farrington (1987) formulated a model that described the criminal careers of the multiple offenders in a cohort of London males that had been studied from their 10th to 25th birthdays. That model involved two subpopulations of offenders (denoted as “frequents” and “occasionals”), each characterized by a constant annual conviction rate (μ) and a constant probability (p) of terminating the career following a conviction. This article describes the results of a prospective and predictive test of the model using new data collected on the same offenders from their 25th to 30th birthdays. The original model accurately predicted the number of recidivists, the degree of recidivism risk, the total number of recidivist convictions, and the time intervals between recidivist convictions. However, the predictions for the frequents suffered some distortions introduced by a few “intermittent” offenders who seemed to have terminated their careers, but who re-initiated offending during the test period after a long gap.