Partners in crime? Post-release recidivism among solo and co-offenders in Norway

ABSTRACT

Co-offending may increase offenders’ criminal capital in ways that impact their subsequent offending behaviour, and while highly theorized, the relationship between co-offending and reoffending has received less attention in empirical research. This study relies on Norwegian registry data to explore patterns of registered co- and solo offending before and after offenders’ first release from prison, by assessing differences in total, solo and co-reoffending between (1) co-offenders and solo offenders and (2) co-offenders embedded in different co-offending networks. The sample is based on 10 complete release cohorts, and co-offending networks are constructed from 22 years of administrative police data. Egocentric network analysis is used to obtain measures of degree centrality and tie strength. Results show that recidivism rates are higher among individuals with a co-offending network at release, and there is a consistent, positive relationship between degree centrality and reoffending. There is also a positive correlation between time spent in prison and the likelihood of co-offending after release, but there are no incidents of repeated co-offending (i.e. reoffending with co-offenders acquired before incarceration). The analysis hereby confirms several well-known patterns of co-offending in a new national context and highlights how incarceration can shape the nature and longevity of egocentric co-offending network ties.     

Do cities influence co-offending?

The nexus between urbanity and crime is interpreted as being congruent with either social breakdown or subculture theory. Each of these perspectives offers differing conceptualizations of the causal mechanisms responsible for this linkage, but adjudicating between them has proven exceedingly difficult because their respective predictions are similar. Each theory posits that an urban environment amplifies criminal activity. Using data derived from the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), this study contributes to the literature by investigating whether urbanization influences co-offending behavior. The determination of whether urbanity affects co-offending has theoretical relevance because social breakdown theory argues that urbanity produces interpersonal estrangement that impedes the development of friendship networks needed to facilitate group-based criminal offending. Conversely, subculture theory postulates that an urban environment propagates deviant subcultures that act to engender group-based rather than individualist criminality. Multivariate regression results furnish evidence supporting social breakdown theory by demonstrating that urbanity decreases co-offending behavior.     

Capitalizing on Criminal Accomplices: Considering the Relationship between Co-offending and Illegal Earnings

This study investigates whether co-offending offers an avenue towards criminal success. Specifically, it considers if current and prior co-offending experience is related to the probability of reporting illegal earnings as well as the amount of these earnings. Using data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, we estimated fixed-and random-effects models to test whether co-offending experience is related to self-reported illegal earnings. The models also estimated whether “historical” co-offending experience predicted current illegal earnings. Across both modeling strategies, current and historical co-offending predicted the probability of reporting non-zero illegal earnings, net of offending frequency and controls. There is minimal evidence of a relationship between co-offending experience and the amount of illegal earnings, however. These findings lead us to conclude that access to a relatively common criminal connection—the co-offender—offers tangible benefits to adolescent offenders, primarily by affecting their ability to translate criminal opportunities into monetary gain.     

Imprisonment and co-offending: results from a 10-year follow-up study

A recurring question in criminological research is whether prisoners meet new accomplices in prison. This article’s objective is to study co-offending among individuals who have served prison sentences. The frequency of co-offending among individuals who have been in the same prison at the same time will be examined. If gender, age, type of prison, offence type and prior experience of co-offending are significant for this type of co-offending will also be examined. The study population comprised all inmates released from a Swedish prison during a half year in 2001–2002 (n = 3.930). The follow-up period is 10 years. The results show that only 3% of those who have been in the same prison at the same time are suspected of committing offences together subsequent to release. The likelihood of being suspected of committing an offence together following the conclusion of a joint stay in the same prison is higher for those released from a closed prison who are aged 31–40, and who had committed large proportion of their offences together with others prior to the relevant prison sentence. The results suggest that the concept of criminal capital is not important for future co-offending after a joint stay in prison.     

Friends with(out) benefits: co-offending and re-arrest

Research shows that co-offending has contradictory effects on rates of re-arrest. On the one hand, group offending may be riskier: for example, co-offenders might be targeted by police or might snitch to protect themselves. Criminal networks may also have indirect effects: offenders embedded in criminal networks commit more offences and thus should have a higher risk of being arrested at some point. On the other hand, networks generate steady criminal opportunities with relatively low risk of arrest and high monetary benefits (e.g. drug trafficking). Few authors have empirically explored the relation between co-offending and re-arrest. This article does so using data from seven years of arrest records in the province of Quebec, Canada. The analysis is designed to explore why some offenders are re-arrested after an initial arrest while others are not. It focuses on the factors involved in re-arrest, considering two distinct levels of measures of co-offending. The first level of analysis takes into account a situational measure that indicates whether a given offence was committed by co-offenders (group offence). The second level is used to examine whether being part of a criminal network influences re-arrest. For offenders embedded in such networks, two network features (degree centrality and clustering coefficient) show that the global position of individuals within the Quebec arrest network are analysed. Our results suggest that co-offending is a crucial factor that should be taken into account when looking at the odds of being caught again. The use of generalised linear mixed model brings interesting nuances about the impact of co-offending. The article adds to the recently growing literature on the link between networks and criminal careers.     

The networks of drug offenders

The serious drug and drug smuggling offenders active in Stockholm are linked by means of co-offending to other persons in large criminal networks. Within these networks, the individuals have large numbers of superficial and transient contacts with one another. It appears to be particularly important to have contacts with other drug offenders throughout Sweden, and particularly in the Skåne region. The majority of the convicted drug offenders have a Nordic background. The study indicates that dealers in the Stockholm area know drug smugglers in Sweden’s metropolitan areas. In their turn, the drug smugglers in the metropolitan areas have contacts with persons involved in the smuggling of other goods primarily in the county of Skåne. A large proportion of the persons included in the data set were suspected of committing drug offences and appear to be focused to some extent on drug offending and on offences involving one or two illicit substances. They also engage in other types of criminal activity to a large extent, however, and are thus not exclusively specialised in drug offending. Persons involved in serious drug crime, including drug smuggling, are often males in their thirties. These individuals often choose other males as co-offenders. It is generally common to commit drug offences together with co-offenders and the most criminally active individuals are also those with the largest numbers of co-offenders. The co-offending partnerships that commit drug offences are not particularly durable over time, however, and it is unusual for drug offenders to restrict themselves to committing offences with one and the same co-offender.     

‘Criminal families’ and the court: co-offending in Amsterdam, 1897–1902

This article focuses on a specific aspect of the history of crime: co-offending (offending with one or more accomplices) in a family setting at the end of the nineteenth century. The aims of this article are to analyze how genders interacted in a criminal setting and to show a possible bias in the court's decision to prosecute ‘criminal families’, either in relation to the people involved or to the environment in which the crime was committed. This article also questions the relevance of the concept of the civilizing mission in a court setting towards ‘criminal families’ and compares it with the reality of the court's work. The study is based on the archives of Amsterdam's Arrondissementsgerecht between 1897 and 1902. This court was in charge of trying criminal offences committed in Amsterdam and its surrounding area (a semi-urban environment within a 25-kilometre radius) according to the 1886 Dutch code of laws. Urban and semi-urban co-offending criminal rates in Amsterdam and its surrounding area are compared, as well as gender patterns and class origins in relation to the crimes committed, in order to highlight a possible prejudice towards working-class offenders. The analysis reveals a high rate of co-offending in female criminality and more gender interactions in the urban environment. However, the results also show that, despite a general anxiety towards working-class families and rising crime rates, magistrates were not more inclined to prosecute them. The family situation was taken into account before trials, and semi-urban families were not treated more leniently than urban families.     

Can Cohort Replacement Explain Changes in the Relationship Between Age and Homicide Offending?

This paper focuses on shifts in the age distribution of homicide offending in the United States. This distribution remained remarkably stable with small but significant changes over a long period of time. Then between 1985 and 1990 the rates of homicide offending doubled for 15-to-19 year olds and increased nearly 40% for 20-to-24 year olds, while the homicide offending rates decreased for those over 30. In addition to this “epidemic of youth homicide,” which lasted through the mid-1990s, there have been systematic changes in the age distribution of homicide in the United States associated with cohort replacement over the past 40 years. We introduce an estimable function approach for estimating the effects of age, period, and cohort. The method allows us to assess simultaneously the impacts of periods and cohorts on the age distribution of homicide offending. We find that although the age curve remains relatively stable, there are shifts in it associated systematically with cohort replacement. Cohort replacement accounts for nearly half of the upturn in youth homicides during the epidemic of youth homicides, but a significant fraction of that upturn is not associated with cohort replacement.

Co-offending in Canada,England and the United States: a cross-national comparison

This article compares the characteristics of police-reported co-offending groups and solo offenders in Canada, England and the United States. Comparative analysis of crime in these three countries is fostered by the relative similarity of their substantive criminal codes (all originating in English common law), their approaches to law enforcement, and their crime recording procedures. The data include over 100,000 incidents cleared by a large UK police force, 2.5 million incidents in Canada, and 1.3 million incidents in 36 states in the United States, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Comparative analyses include the prevalence of co-offending, the size and composition of co-offending groups, and key correlates of group crime, such as offence type and the age and sex of participants. Substantial similarities are observed across the three data sets, although there are also intriguing differences. These findings are discussed in relation to ongoing attempts to draw general conclusions regarding the nature and extent of group crime and co-offending networks.     

Maybe I Should Do This Alone: A Comparison of Solo and Co-offending Robbery Outcomes

There has been a notable increase in co-offending research in recent years, with most studies focusing on the causes and correlates of co-offending. There is little known, however, about the consequences of co-offending and how it may influence crime event outcomes for the offender. The present study compares the monetary reward and arrest risk of solo and co-offending robberies. Data from the National Incident Based Reporting System were analyzed to examine the characteristics and outcomes of robberies perpetrated by one, two, three, and four or more offenders. Though co-offending incidents were associated with greater total property value stolen, co-offending incidents resulted in significantly less property value per offender, controlling for other incident characteristics. The likelihood of an incident resulting in an arrest significantly increased with the number of offenders. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and research on the real and perceived benefits and costs of co-offending.     

RATE OF OFFENDING IN JUVENILE CAREERS: FINDINGS OF CONSTANCY AND CHANGE IN LAMBDA *

This study examines changes in the rate of offending in a sample of 8,834 males whose official juvenile law-violating careers included 26,650 offense episodes between ages 8 and 17 The rate of offending of active offenders (i.e., lambda) varied substantially as a function of age, increasing monotonically with age. Lambda, however, was not related to the age at first offense. In fact, the average lambda was amazingly constant at each individual age level regardless of the age at which offending began or desisted. Results are discussed in the light of age-crime curves known from other data sets and from the perspective of developmental changes in the rate of offending as youths grow older.     

Women and crime in contemporary China: a review essay

In the neoliberal West, while the growing awareness of women’s crimes in academic criminology has greatly extended our knowledge and understanding of the relation between women and crime, the growing visibility of female crime in popular culture brings with it a set of distinct problems that relate to the common misrepresentation of the actuality of female crime. In this article, we question whether similar trends can be identified elsewhere. We seek to address this question by focusing on female offending in China since the 1980s. Following a partial and preliminary account of female offending in this vast country, our attempt is to make some meaningful comparison and also to identify one or two key theories that might enable us to better understand the increased visibility of female offending in this non-“Western” country – one destined to play a much more active role in global culture and politics as the twenty-first century unfolds.     

The significance of offending behavior for predicting sexual recidivism among sex offenders of various age groups

Based on a sample of 682 male sex offenders, this study investigated variables of the offending behavior for predicting sexual recidivism in different age groups. The sex offenders were allocated into four age groups. For each group, those characteristics of offending behavior showing a significant bivariate correlation with sexual recidivism were extracted. Using logistic regression, we then analyzed their incremental validity above and beyond a previously developed Crime Scene Behavior Risk (CBR)-Score, which measures the risk of sexual recidivism without taking into account the offenders' age (Dahle, Biedermann, Gallasch-Nemitz, & Janka, 2010). Age-specific offending behavior variables with incremental validity were combined with the general CBR-Score into age-specific scores and examined for their predictive accuracy. We also analyzed the extent in which these age-specific scores showed incremental validity above and beyond the Static-99 (Hanson & Thornton, 1999). For three of the four age groups, age-specific Crime Scene Behavior Risk-Scores could be determined which were incrementally valid above and beyond the Static-99. Predictive accuracy varied between AUC=.74 and AUC=.90 (r=.28 to r=.49) depending on age group. The results are discussed within context of recent findings on the latent dimensions of actuarial risk assessment variables.     

Self-serving aspects of social cognition among adult offenders

Abstract

The different cognitive beliefs about offending exhibited by offenders are discussed. The question addressed in this paper concerns the extent to which beliefs and social knowledge about offending differentiate between different characteristic types of offending (drug abuse, theft, sexual and violent). Two hundred and ninety adult male prisoners in four Taiwanese prisons provided self-reported criminal histories. From these a crime index indicative of the proportion of offences of each type (or specialism in offending) was calculated for each offender. Offenders legitimize their own offending while they tend to regard the offences of others negatively. In this way, cognitive representations may reinforce an offender's specific pattern of criminal acts while also insulating them from pressures towards other criminal activities. Evidence is presented that offenders' social knowledge development is consolidated around crime themes.     

Criminal thinking as a moderator of the perceived certainty–offending relationship: age variations

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the perceived certainty of punishment and general criminal thinking interact and whether the effect varies as a function of age. Data from all 1354 members (1170 males, 184 females) of the Pathways to Desistance study were used to test whether perceived certainty, general criminal thinking, and their interaction predicted subsequent offending during late adolescence (16–18 years of age) and emerging adulthood (20–22 years of age). The results showed that while perceived certainty and general criminal thinking failed to interact at age 17, general criminal thinking moderated the effect of perceived certainty at age 21. During emerging adulthood, offending was more common and varied in young adults with low certainty perceptions and high criminal thinking than it was in emerging adults with high criminal thinking and high certainty perceptions or low criminal thinking and either high or low certainty perceptions.     

Extending the Study of Continuity and Change: Gender Differences in the Linkage Between Adolescent and Adult Offending

Recently, Paternoster etal. used data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, a longitudinal study of 411 South London boys mostly born in 1953, to investigate the linkage between adolescent and adult offending and found that variations in adult offending were consistent with a random process after conditioning on adolescent offending. In this paper, we test the robustness of this early study across data sources and genders. Here, we use data from the Dunedin New Zealand 1972 birth cohort study to replicate previous findings regarding stability and change in criminal offending between the adolescent and adult years. In particular, our interest centers on the stochastic properties of the adolescent and adult conviction distribution in the cohort and whether the structure of this distribution is similar for males and females. This replication and extension of prior work is especially important since criminologists have little understanding of the pattern of female adolescent offending or how the patterns are linked to adult offending for women. The analysis reveals that variation in adult offending after conditioning on adolescent offending is consistent with a random (Poisson) process. Furthermore, this pattern is evident for both the males and the females in the Dunedin New Zealand 1972 birth cohort.     

Group Delinquency in The Netherlands: Some Findings from an Exploratory Study

The phenomenon of group delinquency is, by and large, still terra incognita in the Netherlands. This paper presents a number of findings from a recent Dutch study on this subject. The findings result from a literature review, a (re-)analysis of Dutch self-report data and a number of interviews with informants and group members. Co-offending (i.e. offences that are committed by more than one person) and groups as a (semi-)organised association are two aspects of group delinquency that are considered here. Groups of youths hanging around and causing nuisance are the most visible manifestation of group behaviour. In 1997, according to a large survey, 12% of the Dutch population indicated that trouble caused by youth groups is an 'often occurring problem'. Concerning actual offending (with others), Dutch self-report data indicate that rates of co-offending are highest with vandalism, drug-related offences, intimidation, arson and participating in riots. Interviews with informants suggest that there is often a gap in local knowledge of problematic or criminal groups. It would seem that group delinquency is not paid structural attention by the various authorities. Besides employing informants, another means of gaining insight into groups is by computer analysis, using police data. This study has also looked at the characteristics of youths who commit offences with others. Findings concerning age, sex, ethnic background, type of offender and, finally, social identity are reported. In conclusion, some suggestions on how to tackle group delinquency are discussed.     

CO‐OFFENDING AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DELINQUENT CAREER*

This article examines the role of co‐offending in the development of the delinquent career. Hypotheses derived from Reiss's (1986, 1988) taxonomic theory of co‐offending are tested, using police‐reported data on the delinquent careers and co‐offending of 55,336 Canadian offenders. Support is found for a taxonomic theory and for age‐related and functional theories of co‐offending. The taxonomy consists of two types of offenders—high activity (3 percent) and low activity (97 percent)—whose co‐offending patterns differ during the teenage years but not during childhood. For low‐activity offenders as teenagers, the proportion of co‐offenses decreases with criminal experience. The rate of co‐offending by high‐activity offenders as teenagers is lower at onset than for low‐activity offenders, and it varies little with criminal experience. For both offender types, the proportion of co‐offenses decreases with age, is slightly less in males, and varies with the type of offense. For both offender types, the proportion of co‐offenses in childhood offending is greater than in the teenage years and is unrelated to the offender's age or criminal experience.     

ORGANIZATIONAL OFFENDING AND NEOCLASSICAL CRIMINOLOGY: CHALLENGING THE REACH OF A GENERAL THEORY OF CRIME*

This article examines and critiques Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime, with particular respect to its applicability to organizational offending. We question their views that the theory is adequately general and that typologies of crime are therefore unnecessary for criminological theory. Gottfredson and Hirschi have employed the case of white-collar crime to support their arguments, but they have con strained the test of their theory by focusing on the white-collar offenses that most resemble conventional crime. When organizational offending is included in white-collar crime, empirical and theoretical limitations of their project emerge. These limitations include the matters of defining and counting the phenomena of interest, the nature of the interest that commonly underlies them, and the role of opportunity in them. A satisfactory theory of organizational offending requires an adequate account of all these matters and will look substantially different from Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory of crime.