The measurement of specialization and escalation in the criminal career: An alternative modeling strategy

Recent research using indices of specialization and escalation, such as the forward specialization coefficient and the escalation coefficient, have generally shown that repeat offenders tend to commit the same type or a more serious type of crime on successive arrests. Unfortunately, there are two important limitations to the use of specialization and escalation indices: (1) the meaning and interpretation of the coefficients is often unclear, and (2) the coefficients cannot be tested for statistical significance across groups. In an attempt to account for these limitations and to extend prior research in this area, this paper applies a class of log-linear models developed for studying social mobility tables with matched categories (for one or more groups) to crime-type switching tables. The benefits of using these models, in comparison with prior specialization and escalation research, are that the parameter estimates can be interpreted directly as tests of specialization and escalation in a meaningful way and the parameter estimates can be tested for equality across groups, such as age, race, and gender. The application and interpretation of these models are illustrated with arrest data from a sample of felony offenders in Michigan.     

Estimating the numbers of prison terms in criminal careers from one-step probabilities of recidivism

A method of using estimates of one-step probabilities of recidivism, i.e., conditional probabilities of individuals returning to prison for the jth time given release for the (j-1)st time, to estimate the numbers of prison terms expected to be accumulated by the individuals, is presented. The method is illustrated by calculating the expected numbers of prison terms separately for racial and gender groups in a large data base of Western Australian prisoners. The recidivism probabilities for these data were estimated by fitting Weibull mixture models to the (possibly censored) times to recidivate. The probabilities increase strongly asj increases from 1 to 6, then level off. Large differences between them are due to racial and gender group and these are reflected in the differing expected prison career durations for these groups. The effect of interventions which might lower recidivism is discussed in the light of the method as applied to these estimates.     

Earnings prospects,matching effects,and the decision to terminate a criminal career

This study represents an effort to investigate the age pattern of criminal involvement from an economist's perspective. It presents a dynamic stochastic model of sequential search and match evaluation which is used to explain the reasons for, and the timing of, the decision to terminate a criminal career. The behavioral implications derived from the theoretical model are tested using individual National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data. Estimation results strongly support the prediction of a negative relation between theoption value of retaining a criminal career and desistance decisions. More specifically, the effects of current and future expected criminal earnings are shown to be negative, substantial, and statistically significant in determining desistance probabilities. Retiring behavior is also significantly responsive to variables measuring personal costs of punishment and the availability and attractiveness of a legal income-generating activity in ways consistent with theoretical expectations.     

Recidivist criminal behaviour and executive functions: a comparative study

This study sought to analyse the relation between executive functions and criminal recidivism. We assessed a set of cognitive abilities associated with executive functioning in a group of recidivist offenders (n = 19), primary offenders (n = 25) and non-offenders (n = 30). Our results, tested with nonparametric statistics and Monte Carlo method, revealed that there were no executive differences between both groups of offenders but, when compared with non-offenders, the recidivists showed a worse performance in Trail Making Test part B, and the primary offenders presented a significant lower score on Porteus Maze Test Age score. This study suggests that there can be a different pattern of executive functioning deficits associated with the offenders’ criminal record: recidivism may be more related to mental flexibility impairments and primary offenders’ antisocial behaviour may be aggravated by planning deficits.     

The criminal career of men convicted of rape: evidence from a Norwegian national cohort

The extent to which sexual offenders are a group separate from other types of offenders has been debated for many years and investigated from different perspectives. The present study investigated similarities and differences regarding socio-economic background, criminal history and recidivism involving new crimes between rape offenders and three other groups: other sexual offenders, non-sexual violent offenders and other offenders. Data came from Norwegian population registers containing information on all crimes investigated from 1992 to 2012. The sample consisted of all persons convicted in 2002 and 2003 (N = 36,951). Background characteristics and estimated recidivism risk was described using hazard models. Results indicated that men convicted of rape (n = 142) had lower levels of education and that a higher percentage of them were on social benefits compared to the other crime groups. A large majority (79%) of rape-convicted men had previous convictions. Rape offenders were considerably more criminally active and diverse than the other crime groups. Prior criminal record, irrespective of type, increased the risk of recidivism in general. Controlling for other background characteristics did not alter this outcome. Treatment of convicted rapists needs to take into consideration that this offender group has much in common with violent offenders in general.     

试论刑事政策与国际刑法的关系

刑事政策是对犯罪有组织的反应,国际刑法以研讨国际犯罪为己任,对国际犯罪的研究需要以刑事政策为视角。本文通过分析刑事政策的含义及其国际化特征与国际刑法的发展方向,在刑事政策的视野下,揭示国际刑法的发展趋势——刑事政策的国际刑法化与国际刑法的刑事政策化,进而把握刑事政策与国际刑法两者的契合性。     

Participation in and frequency of delinquent behavior: A test for structural differences

In this paper we address whether there are distinctive differences in the processes determining participation in offending vs frequency of offending. We develop a number of tests to examine not only whether the correlates of participation and frequency are similar but also whether the same underlying statistical model is consistent with the data on both these dimensions of a criminal career. The tests are applied using data from the first two waves of the National Youth Survey. While the findings are not without ambiguities, they do not support the idea that distinguishing among the dimensions of a criminal career is a fundamental requirement for conducting sound research on the causes of crime and delinquency.     

关于完善重新犯罪防治政策出台机制的思考

我国重新犯罪率呈上升趋势,且日益突出,制定科学有效的重新犯罪防治政策已经摆在我们面前。然而,在目前,支持重新犯罪防治政策制定的平台建设不尽人意。没有一个好的政策制定平台,不可能有好的政策出台。为提高重新犯罪防治政策制定的科学水准,国家应当考虑建设与完善下面平台：重新犯罪信息发布平台,智囊库。     

Micro-models of criminal careers: A synthesis of the criminal careers and life course approaches via semiparametric mixed poisson regression models,with empirical applications

Much recent research and debate in criminology have centered around how to conceptualize and model longitudinal sequences of delinquent and criminal acts committed by individuals. Two approaches dominate this controversy. One originates in thecriminal careers paradigm, which emphasizes a potentialheterogeneity of offending groups in the general population—thus leading to a distinction between incidence and prevalence of criminal offending, a focus on the onset, persistence, and desistence of criminal careers, and the possibility that criminals are a distinctive group with constant high rates of offending. Another approach places criminal events within a broader context ofstudies of the life course by explicitly substituting the conceptualization of “social events” for that of “criminal careers”. With respect to analytical models, this approach emphasizes a potentialheterogeneity of offenders with respect to order of criminal events from first to second to higher orders and thus suggests an analysis of the “risks” or “hazards” of offending by order of offense. Some extant commentaries on the criminal careers and life course approaches to conceptualizing and modeling longitudinal sequences of delinquent and criminal events committed by individuals have emphasized their differences and incompatibilities. In contrast, we apply recently developed semiparametric mixed Poisson regression techniques to develop conditions under which the two conceptual/modeling approaches are formally equivalent. We also modify the semiparametric mixed Poisson regression model of criminal careers to incorporate information on order of the delinquent/criminal event and develop an empirical application. This modification demonstrates the complementarity of the criminal careers and life course approaches, even though they have somewhat different foci.     

罪刑法定视域中的刑法适用解释

The judicial interpretation of criminal law should be an application interpretation to individual cases that is guided by judges and participated by the prosecutor and the accused, for which the judicial judgment should be combined with the application of criminal law of specific cases, and the criminal precedents should be as a carrier. The Supreme People’s Court should change from the previous practices of issuing normative and abstract interpretation to the dual approaches of the interpretation of criminal law application through direct creation and indirect acknowledgement. Liang Genlin, Professor and Vice Dean of Law School of Peking University and as a visiting professor of University of Tuebingen (2001–2002). His main research focuses on criminal law and criminal policy, and his important publications include “On the Structure of Punishment”, “Liang Genlin’s Review on Criminal Policy, Volume I, Criminal Policy: Standpoint and Category”, “Liang Genlin’s Review on Criminal Policy, Volume II, the Arm of the Law: Expand and Limit”, “Liang Genlin’s Review on Criminal Policy, Volume III, Criminal Sanction: Manner and Choice”. Besides, he has also published over 40 discourses on criminal law and criminal policy since 1996.     

The economics of crime and criminal law: An antithesis to sociological theories?

The relationship between sociology and economics of crime has been dominated by mutual prejudice and misunderstanding. This paper tries to contribute to a change of this stale of affairs by showing that, on the one hand, the economics of crime does not as a method imply politically conservative policy recommendations and, on the other hand, that insights of the sociology of crime may enrich the economic approach considerably. This is done via a brief survey of the economics of enforcement, the literature on the relation of income distribution and unemployment on crime, and the literature relating sociological theories of crime to methodological individualism.     

An exploration of burglary in the criminal histories of sex offenders referred for civil commitment

Commission of nonsexual crimes generally antedates officially recorded sexual offenses. In particular, burglary has been hypothesized to be a potential ‘stepping stone’ in the development of one's sexual criminal career in the same way that marijuana has often been considered a ‘gateway drug’ to more serious drug-related offenses. The present study examined the officially recorded criminal histories of 828 male sex offenders to determine the relevance of burglary in their criminal histories. One third of the men in the sample (n=281, 34%) had been charged at least once for burglary. These 281 men committed a total of 762 separate incidents of burglary. Offenders with at least one officially recorded charge for burglary (BSOs) were compared with those with no such charges (SOs). Next, the characteristics of each burglary were examined and four distinct types of burglary were identified: nonsexual, covertly sexual, overtly sexual, and combination burglary/rape. BSOs accrued twice as many charges as the SOs and were significantly more likely to have an earlier age of onset, a longer criminal career, more employment problems, elementary school problems, antisocial behavior, and substance abuse.     

Toward a quantitative typology of burglars: a latent profile analysis of career offenders

Burglary is a serious, costly, and prevalent crime but prior typologies of burglars are mostly speculative and based on qualitative data. Using a sample of 456 adult career criminals, the current study used latent profile analysis to construct a methodologically rigorous quantitative typology. Four classes of burglars emerged: young versatile, vagrant, drug-oriented, and sexual predators. All groups demonstrated significant involvement in varied forms of crime, but the sexual predator group was the most violent and had the most serious criminal careers. Connections to the criminal career literature are offered and suggestions for further empirical study of offender typologies are discussed.     

刑事立案监督的现状与制度完善

刑事立案监督工作是检察监督的重要组成部分,是塑造检察监督形象,提高检察机关权威、整体推进检察监督的重要环节。本文在对我国当前司法实践中刑事立案监督工作存在问题及其原因进行分析的基础上,提出相关完善建议。     

A survival model with dependent competing events and right-hand censoring: Probation and parole as an illustration

Researchers are frequently interested in estimating the elapsed time until the occurrence of an event, such as an arrest following release from prison, dissolution of a marriage, and death following the onset of a disease. Estimation is often hindered by the occurrence of a competing event, which prevents the event of interest from being observed, and by limited follow-up periods. A parametric procedure developed in this paper is suitable for dealing with nonrepeatable competing events when the events are correlated and when independent righthand censoring also exists. Weak distributional assumptions are accommodated by using a Box-Cox transformation and by explicit modeling of heteroscedasticity. The procedure is applied to data pertaining to failure on probabation and parole.     

Repositioning the corporate criminal: comparing and contrasting corporate criminal liability in Canada and Finland

ABSTRACT

Over the past two decades, a number of states in the Global North have introduced laws aimed at holding corporations criminally liable. While there is an important literature examining these legal regimes there is a paucity of comparative work interrogating the different political struggles and processes leading to corporate criminal liability (CCL) legislation. This paper addresses this lacuna by comparing and contrasting the development of CCL in Canada and Finland. By scrutinizing the law reform processes in each jurisdiction, the paper documents how CCL emerged under different conjunctures in each country, yet were shaped similarly by hegemonic beliefs in the non-criminal status of corporation, the importance of advancing private enterprise and established jurisprudence. Of particular note are the ways in which dominant notions of legal individualism and the universal legal subject constrained legislative efforts to hold corporations criminally to account therein preventing corporate misconduct from being processed as “real” crimes.     

The judicial response to crime and the criminal: A utilitarian perspective

This paper examines the hypothesis that the sentencing decision of the criminal court is consistent with utilitarian principles and that the judiciary uses the length of incarceration as an instrument for the maximization of societal well-being. A theoretical model is developed, whose principal arguments are offender and offense attributes, resource costs, the availability of alternative sanctions, and the general crime rate. Four questions are considered: (i) How does a utilitarian court respond to a general increase in crime? (ii) How does the availability of alternative sanctions affect the length of incarceration ? (iii) How does a utilitarian court respond to offenders who are more likely to recidivate? (iv) How does the court respond to offenders who commit more serious offenses? The model is empirically evaluated, using cross-sectional data for the state of Georgia for individuals sentenced to prison in 1978 for a UCR index offense. The theoretical model provides few specific behavioral rules for the court to follow. Answers to the foregoing four questions are shown to depend upon both the efficacy of sanctions and the cost of the administration of those sanctions. It is not possible to predict, for example, how a utilitarian court should respond to a rise in crime or how it should respond to offenders who are likely to commit more serious offenses. The empirical analysis shows that, in fact, the sentence length varied inversely with the general offense rate, with the likelihood of imprisonment, and with the length of postprison probation. The evidence also indicates that sentences vary with the individual's original record but not with the offender's age or race. With the exception of possible gender bias, the court's sentencing behavior was consistent with utilitarian principles.     

刑事政策执行方式研究——兼论宽严相济刑事政策的贯彻

中国刑事政策源远流长，因时因地不同而产生了不同的刑事政策，而各个刑事政策的执行方式也大相径庭，而其直接后果则是刑事政策执行的失败与成功。学界历来不缺对刑事政策本身的研究，但对刑事政策的执行方式却鲜有论述，本文分析了现存刑事政策执行方式的不足，提出了刑事政策执行在理论上存在的三种可能方式，并认为综合式执行方式是中国目前刑事政策执行方式的首选。