THE IDENTIFICATION OF "CAREER CRIMINALS" FROM "CHRONIC OFFENDERS" IN A COHORT

The findings by Wolfgang et al. that 6.3% of their cohort had 52% of the recorded police contacts is well known. This retrospective analysis has been used to suggest that imprisoning these "chronic" offenders will avert a correspondingly disproportionate amount of crime. On prospective analysis of the arrest histories, however, the recidivism probability is found to be constant after the third contact, suggesting that prior record has little predictive value regarding future criminality. These observations raise important questions about the benefits of "career criminal" programs and their incapacitative effects.     

THE SOCIAL ECOLOGY OF URBAN HOMICIDE: AN APPLICATION OF THE "ROUTINE ACTIVITIES" APPROACH

The purpose of this paper is to use the recently developed "routine activities" approach to help interpret patterns of homicide in a major metropolitan area—Manhattan, New York We argue that the routine activities perspective suggests several distinctive hypotheses about the relationships among sociodemographic characteristics of victims, temporal features of the situation, and the probability of being involved in different kinds of homicide. More specifically, we hypothesize that the sociodemographic characteristics of age, sex, race, marital status, and employment status, along with temporal factors such as time of day, day of week and time of year, will be related systematically to the location of homicide (that is, The geographical proximity to the victim's household) and to the victim-perpetrator relationship (that is, the social proximity of participants: family members, friends, strangers). Detailed data on all recorded homicides occurring in Manhattan during 1981 are examined to evaluate the hypotheses. The results are generally consistent with expectations, indicating that the routine activities approach does indeed provide a useful framework for interpreting the social ecology of urban homicide.