COMPARING DELINQUENCY CAREERS IN COURT RECORDS AND SELF‐REPORTS*

Most knowledge about delinquency careers is derived from official records. The main aim of this paper is to compare conclusions about delinquency careers derived from court referrals with conclusions derived from self‐reports. Data are analyzed from the Seattle Social Development Project, which is a prospective longitudinal survey of 808 youths. Annual court and self‐report data were available from age 11 to age 17 for eight offenses. The prevalence of offending increased with age, in both court referrals and self‐reports. There was a sharp increase in the prevalence of court referrals between ages 12 and 13, probably because of the reluctance of the juvenile justice system to deal with very young offenders. The individual offending frequency increased with age in self‐reports, but it stayed constant in court referrals, probably because of limitations on the annual number of referrals per offender. There was significant continuity in offending in both court referrals and self‐reports, but continuity was greater in court referrals. The concentration of offending (and the importance of chronic offenders) was greater in self‐reports. An early age of onset predicted a large number of offenses in both self‐reports and court referrals. However, an early onset predicted a high rate of offending in court referrals but not in self‐reports, possibly because very young offenders who were referred to court were an extreme group. About 37% of offenders and 3% of offenses led to a court referral. The more frequent offenders were less likely to be referred to court after each offense, but most of them were referred to court sooner or later. There was a sharp increase between ages 12 and 13 in the probability of an offender and an offense leading to a court referral. It is concluded that criminal career research based on self‐reports sometimes yields different conclusions compared with research based on official records.     

EVALUATING THE BREADTH OF POLICY ENGAGEMENT BY ORGANIZED INTERESTS

This article probes the variation in the breadth of policy engagement among organized interests. The literature, heavily shaped by large‐n US studies of Washington and its lobbying system, suggests many reasons for organized interests to focus policy engagement relatively narrowly. This claim of policy specialization has been long repeated in the British public policy literature. The aim of this article is to empirically test the extent to which expectations of narrowed engagement hold in a UK context. This article uses a new Scottish dataset that tracks actual engagement by any organized interest on executive policy consultations over a 25‐year period. It tracks over 90,000 ‘mobilization events' by over 18,000 organizations in 1,690 distinct consultation issues across the entire Scottish policy system. In analysing these data, we concern ourselves with establishing: (1) the extent of generalized engagement; (2) the type of organized interests that are more or less general in their engagement; and (3) the extent to which a specialized style of policy engagement is on the increase over time. In the process, we develop measures that are appropriate for assessing breadth of engagement using issue‐based policy data.