Analyzing Criminal Trajectory Profiles: Bridging Multilevel and Group-based Approaches Using Growth Mixture Modeling

Over the last 25 years, a life-course perspective on criminal behavior has assumed increasing prominence in the literature. This theoretical development has been accompanied by changes in the statistical models used to analyze criminological data. There are two main statistical modeling techniques currently used to model longitudinal data. These are growth curve models and latent class growth models, also known as group-based trajectory models. Using the well known Cambridge data and the Philadelphia cohort study, this article compares the two “classical” models—conventional growth curve model and group-based trajectory models. In addition, two growth mixture models are introduced that bridge the gap between conventional growth models and group-based trajectory models. For the Cambridge data, the different mixture models yield quite consistent inferences regarding the nature of the underlying trajectories of convictions. For the Philadelphia cohort study, the statistical indicators give stronger guidance on relative model fit. The main goals of this article are to contribute to the discussion about different modeling techniques for analyzing data from a life-course perspective and to provide a concrete step-by-step illustration of such an analysis and model checking.

Singing the same tune? International continuities and discontinuities in how police talk about using force

This article focuses on a research project conducted in six jurisdictions: England, The Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Venezuela, and Brazil. These societies are very different ethnically, socially, politically, economically, historically and have wildly different levels of crime. Their policing arrangements also differ significantly: how they are organised; how their officers are equipped and trained; what routine operating procedures they employ; whether they are armed; and much else besides. Most relevant for this research, they represent policing systems with wildly different levels of police shootings, Police in the two Latin American countries represented here have a justified reputation for the frequency with which they shoot people, whereas at the other extreme the police in England do not routinely carry firearms and rarely shoot anyone. To probe whether these differences are reflected in the way that officers talk about the use of force, police officers in these different jurisdictions were invited to discuss in focus groups a scenario in which police are thwarted in their attempt to arrest two youths (one of whom is a known local criminal) by the youths driving off with the police in pursuit, and concludes with the youths crashing their car and escaping in apparent possession of a gun, It might be expected that focus groups would prove starkly different, and indeed they were, but not in the way that might be expected. There was little difference in affirmation of normative and legal standards regarding the use of force. It was in how officers in different jurisdictions envisaged the circumstances in which the scenario took place that led Latin American officers to anticipate that they would shoot the suspects, whereas officers in the other jurisdictions had little expectation that they would open fire in the conditions as they imagined them to be.

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Examining the Divergence Across Self-report and Official Data Sources on Inferences About the Adolescent Life-course of Crime

Both self-report and official crime data have known limitations, leading to the critical question as to whether inferences about the adolescent life-course of crime are different across these data sources. Using both official and self-report arrest data on a sample of subjects drawn from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) longitudinal cohort study, this paper examines the extent to which individual age-arrest curves are comparable across these data sources. Particular attention is given to examining whether criminal career dimensions, namely participation, frequency of arrest, age of onset, and continuity in behavior, are similar across data sources. Additionally, this paper examines whether the key predictors of youth crime (e.g., family processes, peer influence, and neighborhood disadvantage) function similarly across measurement types. Findings reveal that a sizable number of youth self-report being arrested without having a corresponding official arrest record, and a sizable proportion of those youth with an official arrest record fail to self-report that they had been arrested. Despite significant differences across the two arrest measures on many criminal career dimensions, the effects of family supervision, parent–child conflict, and neighborhood disadvantage operate similarly across data types.

Youth offending and youth transitions: the power of capital in influencing change

Neither the literature on offending nor that on desistance adequately explains the short-term nature of youth offending, young people’s propensity to desist from offending as they reach early adulthood and the importance of youth transitions in helping or hindering young people’s access to legitimate and conventional opportunities and responsibilities. It is suggested in this article that the three phases of offending—onset, maintenance and desistance—run parallel courses with the three phases of youth transitions—childhood, youth and adulthood and that both these processes are influenced by discrepancies in levels of capital for young people at each stage. In a recent Scottish study of desistance, Bourdieu’s concepts of capital are used to demonstrate the commonalities between youth offending and youth transitions and to better understand young people’s search for integration and recognition—whether this be through offending or conventionality. The article concludes that the concepts of capital and youth transitions could both be employed more usefully in the field of criminology to explain the transient nature of offending in youth and the greater likelihood of desistance once legitimate and sustainable opportunities are found to spend as well as to accumulate capital in early adulthood.

Estimating the Number of Crimes Averted by Incapacitation: An Information Theoretic Approach

This paper presents an information theoretic approach for estimating the number of crimes averted by incapacitation. It first develops models of the criminal history accumulation process of a sample of prison releasees using their official recorded arrest histories prior to incarceration. The models yield individual offending trajectories that are then used to compute the number of crimes these releasees could reasonably have been expected to commit had they not been incarcerated—the counterfactual of interest. The models also afford the opportunity to conduct a limited set of policy simulations. The data reveal a fair amount of variation among individuals both in terms of the number of crimes averted by their incarceration and the responsiveness of these estimates to longer incarceration terms. Estimates were found not to vary substantially across demographic groups defined by offender race, gender, or ethnicity; variations across states and offense types were more pronounced. Implications of the findings and promising avenues for future research are discussed.

Researching the use of force: the background to the international project

This article provides the background to an international project on use of force by the police that was carried out in seven countries. Force is often considered to be the defining characteristic of policing and much research has been conducted on the determinants, prevalence and control of the use of force, particularly in the United States. However, little work has looked at police officers’ own views on the use of force, in particular the way in which they justify it. Using a hypothetical encounter developed for this project, researchers in each country conducted focus groups with police officers in which they were encouraged to talk about the use of force. The results show interesting similarities and differences across countries and demonstrate the value of using this kind of research focus and methodology.

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The impact of the US legislation on company measures of control and prevention

The spectacular business scandals in recent years have led both the legislative and business companies to rethink and redesign their strategies. This article analyzes the worldwide impact of reforms in economic crime legislation emanating from the USA. Empirical data are reported showing that the US regulations are generating a spillover effect spreading beyond its sphere of operation. It is particularly notable that international stock-exchange-listed companies are orienting themselves increasingly toward the legal standards of the USA. Translated from the German by Jonathan Harrow, Bielefeld.

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Desistance or Displacement? The Changing Patterns of Offending from Adolescence to Young Adulthood

Research has devoted substantial attention to patterns of offending during the transition to early adulthood. While changes in offending rates are extensively researched, considerably less attention is devoted to shifts in the type of offending displayed during the transition to adulthood. Changes in the type of offending behavior suggest a pattern of “displacement” or shifts between various types of crime, rather than desistance from deviant behavior. In this paper, I integrate methods previously developed in stratification research and use longitudinal data from the National Survey of Youth that span the transition to adulthood to examine the extent to which desistance and displacement of deviant behavior are defining attributes of offending during the transition to early adulthood. The findings indicate that while desistance is clearly present, altering patterns of offending, or within-person displacement, rather than termination of illicit activity is most evident in the data.

Torn between two targets: German police officers talk about the use of force

Considering earlier research into police use of force as well as the judicial and practical frame of police work in Germany, the article presents the results of an empirical study on the individual and collective legitimization of the use of force by German police officers. There are numerous justifications for the use of force expressed by focus group participants in eight German Federal States who were responding to a hypothesized scenario. In the discussions observed within the groups, reference is first made to the state’s duty to prosecute alleged offences and the measures or formal actions to do this—hence, the legal authority to use force. In the course of the discussions, however, it became obvious that illegal violence may occur, although it was not perceived as such by the officers. Overall, and after an intensive analysis of the focus group discussions, it can be stated that use of force (whether legal or not) depends on the police officer’s perception of the resistance of the person being engaged with. In this regard, different social–cultural or physical–material factors can be identified. They have different influences on the individual legitimization of police actions, intertwined with the perception of the situation as constructed by the officer. Three ways of perceiving the situation can be deduced, resulting in different patterns of justification for the use of force.

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Economic analysis of the legal standard for deceit in English tort law

Scholars of law and economics have produced a huge amount of literature on how to design an optimal legal standard in tort law to regulate international torts. However, there are few works to use these theories in the analysis of tort law in an individual jurisdiction. In this paper, I apply a law-and-economics analytical framework to the study of the legal standards for deceit in English tort law with an aim to show that the law-and-economics approach could generate new insights valuable to broad our understanding of the law of deceit.

To Discipline and Publish: Scottsboro and Narratives of Delinquency

With the economics of racism of the 1930s and 1950s American South in mind, our essay explores the relationship between the act of writing and institutional penology. Taking an obscure, but visceral autobiographical account by Paterson and Conrad (Scottsboro Boy, Garden City Doubleday, 1950), we examine how discipline, punishment, and institutional identity emerge out of publishing, or, as Foucault put it, “the power of writing.” Narratives of delinquency born out of a racialized penal economy tend to resist attempts to tame the criminal, making institutional survival a productive discourse, and its articulation, a unique revolutionary act.

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Measuring corporate environmental crime rates: progress and problems

The problem of corporate crime rates has been the subject of debate, speculation and operationalization for decades, largely stemming from the complexity of measuring this type of crime. Examining corporate environmental crime poses challenges and creates opportunities for advancing the discussion of corporate crime rates, but criminologists are less familiar with environmental data. In the current paper, we review the strengths and weaknesses of existing environmental data that can be used to construct the components of an environmental crime rate. We also present a corporate environmental crime rate derived from data on violations of the Clean Water Act and describe problems with using it in real world data. Implications for theory, practice and future research are discussed.

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The Costs to Criminal Theory of Supposing that Intentions are Irrelevant to Permissibility

I attempt to describe the several costs that criminal theory would be forced to pay by adopting the view (currently fashionable among moral philosophers) that the intentions of the agent are irrelevant to determinations of whether his actions are permissible (or criminal).

Revisiting Incapacitation: Can We Generate New Estimates?

A substantial body of empirical research examines how the huge expansion in incarceration in the United States since the early 1970s has influenced crime. These studies merge the effects of three conceptually distinct paths by which incarceration might reduce crime: general deterrence, specific deterrence and incapacitation. This issue of the Journal focuses specifically on the incapacitation path. This Introduction reviews the individual papers and offers the editors’ judgment as to the plausibility of progress using different research strategies. It emphasizes the potential for using individual level data to take advantage of natural experiments.

The Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations: An Exploratory Method for Discrete Multivariate Analyses of Crime Data

Derived from comparative approaches in both qualitative and quantitative research, the current study describes a simple exploratory technique for the multivariate analysis of categorical data. This technique is referred to as the conjunctive analysis of case configurations. After describing the logic and underlying assumptions of this conjunctive method, it is applied and illustrated in the study of the federal sentencing of drug offenders. The relative value of this conjunctive approach for purposes of exploratory data analysis and its overall utility as a method for confirmatory research are also discussed.

Criminal victimization in contemporary China: a review of the evidence and challenges for future research

The rapid economic growth in China over recent decades has been accompanied by higher levels of crime, but there have been few studies of the Chinese experience of criminal victimization. A recent victimization survey of a representative sample of households in Tianjin represents a major effort to fill this gap in the literature. The present paper reviews the research based on the Tianjin survey along with other studies of crime and criminal victimization in China that have been published since 1990. We summarize the major findings, discuss the theoretical perspectives and methodological strategies that have been applied, identify the limitations of the research to date, and offer suggestions for future research.

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Ethics in the workplace

The right to request flexible working has been introduced into the UK employment laws against a background of post-fordist work practices, which already allow for employer rather than employee flexibility. This paper posits the idea that for the individual employee to benefit from these new rights what is required is the situation of dialogues within the workplace that take place in an ethical frame that recognises the employee as an individual.

Affect and Fairness in Economics

A strained relationship exists between mainstream economics and ethics. Over the last decade, behavioral economists have strongly argued for the importance of fairness in motivating behavior, based on substantial experimental evidence. Two main approaches to the modeling of fairness have been proposed: the outcome-based inequity aversion approach, and the intention-based reciprocity approach. Both approaches have been quite successful in explaining the experimental evidence. Nonetheless, this paper questions the role that is assigned to fairness in these models and the way fairness is incorporated, using recent experimental findings concerning emotions and fairness perceptions. The analysis supports the view that feelings are important for justice, also from a policy perspective, and pleads for closer attention being paid to the functioning of emotional brain systems.

Sentencing Using Statistical Treatment Rules: What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us

The existing literature seriously misinterprets the available evidence on the predictability of high rate criminal offending and thus the potential value of statistical treatment rules that impose stiffer punishments on offenders with higher predicted risk of recidivism. The misinterpretation results from the failure to take account of the fact that the data used in existing risk assessment exercises come from environments characterized by informal (and sometimes formal) attempts by judges and other actors to base penal treatments on expected recidivism. Findings of little or no predictive power for baseline covariates may simply indicate the efficient use of the available information. We lay out the problem in detail, provide examples from several literatures and then consider general solutions to the problem.

Thinking Critically About Rural Gender Relations: Toward a Rural Masculinity Crisis/Male Peer Support Model of Separation/Divorce Sexual Assault

After decades of neglect, a growing number of scholars have turned their attention to issues of crime and criminal justice in the rural context. Despite this improvement, rural crime research is underdeveloped theoretically, and is little informed by critical criminological perspectives. In this article, we introduce the broad tenets of a multi-level theory that links social and economic change to the reinforcement of rural patriarchy and male peer support, and in turn, how they are linked to separation/divorce sexual assault. We begin by addressing a series of misconceptions about what is rural, rural homogeneity and commonly held presumptions about the relationship of rurality, collective efficacy (and related concepts) and crime. We conclude by recommending more focused research, both qualitative and quantitative, to uncover specific link between the rural transformation and violence against women. This paper was presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Los Angeles, California. Some of the research reported here was supported by National Institute of Justice Grant 2002-WG-BX-0004 and financial assistance provided by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Vice President for Research at Ohio University. Arguments and findings included in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of the US Department of Justice or Ohio University. Please send all correspondence to Walter S. DeKeseredy, e-mail: walter.dekeseredy@uoit.ca. All of the names of the women who participated in DeKeseredy and colleagues’ rural Ohio study and who are quoted have been changed to maintain confidentiality.

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