Co‐offending and the Development of the Delinquent Career*

Abstract

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.

The same the whole world over? A review essay on youth offending from the 1980s and youth justice in contemporary China

“…This echoes Pitts's (2008) observation of increasing gang crime in London. In the western contexts, a rich body of literature on peer influence and youth gangs (for example, Carrington, 2009;Decker and Pyrooz, 2010;von Lampe and Johansen, 2004;Hallsworth, 2013) suggests the tendencies of youth to co-offend. Worldwide, it is argued that gangs are a key factor in the fields of violence and victimisation (see Decker and Pyrooz, 2010), while in China a survey carried out in Shangdong in 2004 shows that 53.42 per cent of the total of 1,600 juvenile offenders committed offences in groups of three to seven or more.…”

Décisions policières sous la Loi sur le système de justice pénale pour les adolescents. L’influence du sexe et de l’apparence ethnique1

“…Carrington (2009) pose l'hypothèse qu'une infraction commise en groupe est le résultat de l'infl uence du groupe de pairs, tandis qu'un jeune agissant seul a présenté une réelle volonté de commettre un acte criminel. Les policiers sont donc plus sévères à l'égard des adolescents qui témoignent individuellement d'une intention de commettre un crime.…”

“…Les policiers sont donc plus sévères à l'égard des adolescents qui témoignent individuellement d'une intention de commettre un crime. Par ailleurs, les jeunes agissant en groupe seraient plus susceptibles de comprendre la leçon transmise par l'intervention policière (Carrington, 2009) ; les policiers croiraient donc que le recours au système pénal traditionnel n'est pas nécessaire.…”

Searching For Influential Actors in Co-Offending Networks: The Recruiter

“…The literature on co-offending is substantial (Conway and McCord, 2002;McGloin et al, 2008;van Mastrigt and Farrington, 2011;Carrington, 2002Carrington, , 2009Piquero, Farrington and Blumstein, 2007;Reiss and Farrington, 1991;van Mastrigt, 2008). Although the term itself was coined by Reiss (1980) only 30 years ago, many of the early, 20 th century crime scholars have considered co-offending to one extent or another (e.g., Cloward and Ohlin, 1960;Cohen, 1955;Shaw and McKay, 1942;Shaw and Moore, 1931;Sutherland, 1947).…”

“…We know little about how recruitment varies across crime types and across offenders, or what the scope of recruitment is in large samples (cf. Carrington, 2009;Sarnecki, 2001). For instance, McGloin and Nguyen (2012) were the first to lay out more fundamentally the circumstances in which instigation takes place, following a dearth of research on this issue -but even that seminal paper was limited in scope and generalizability, given its data sources (discussed below).…”