Criminal Lifestyle Specialization: Female Offending in England and Wales

Abstract

In criminal careers research, specialization has usually been defined through prespecifying spheres of criminal activity (violent/nonviolent or sexual, violent, burglary, theft, etc.) and then determining the amounts of criminal activity lying within these spheres over a certain time period. However, there is increasing recognition that some offenders work in well-defined domains of offending, which cut across these groups. Thus, some offenders might be involved in both burglary and theft, but unwilling to engage in violent activity, whereas others might also be involved in violence. The authors propose an alternative approach to specialization using latent transition analysis. This approach seeks to identify such domains of activity, which would represent criminal lifestyles. Offenders staying within a domain over time can be defined as lifestyle specialized; those moving between domains are lifestyle versatile. The criminal lifestyles themselves can represent different degrees of diversity. The concept is assessed on England and Wales birth cohort data on female court convictions and comparisons are made with traditional measures of specialization. The authors identify that some females engage in one criminal lifestyle and move to non-offending, others will progress to more diverse lifestyles as they age. Late starters will also tend to engage in diverse patterns of offending.

LMest: An R Package for Latent Markov Models for Longitudinal Categorical Data

“…The mixed LM model is illustrated by using a simulated dataset similar to the one analyzed in Bartolucci et al (2007); see also Francis, Liu, and Soothill (2010) and Pennoni (2014). The data are related to the complete conviction histories of a cohort of offenders followed from the age of criminal responsibility, 10 years.…”

What Are the Odds?

“…Early research using transition matrices, factor analyses, and simple comparisons of crime involvement demonstrate that there is a lot of versatility in offending with minor specialization (Bursik, 1980;Farrington, Snyder, & Finnegan, 1988;Hindelang, 1971;Hindelang, Hirschi, & Weis, 1981;Kempf, 1987;Klein, 1984;Petersilia, 1980;Rojek & Erickson, 1982;Wolfgang, Figlio, & Sellin, 1972). Yet, current research using more advanced statistical methods, such as log-linear methods, latent class analysis, item response theory, and short-term data from smaller time periods, finds higher levels of specialization (Britt, 1996;Francis, Liu, & Soothill, 2010;Francis, Soothill, & Fligelstone, 2004;McGloin, Sullivan, & Piquero, 2009;Osgood & Schreck, 2007;Sullivan, McGloin, Pratt, & Piquero, 2006;Sullivan, McGloin, Ray, & Caudy, 2009). Because of this theoretical and methodological debate, specialization has become one of the most widely studied topics in criminal career research, appealing to crime scholars and public policy specialists alike (Mazerolle, Brame, Paternoster, Piquero, & Dean, 2000).…”

Modelling escalation in crime seriousness: a latent variable approach

“…For this particular group of offenders, the common analytical issue is the sudden occurrence of the occasional high serious crime as part of the criminal history which occur more often in this class than for the offenders in the other two classes. This is represented in the model by the high estimates of v 11 and v 22 .…”

“…The term 'hidden Markov model' is also sometimes used when the focus is on long time series of observations and where the number of cases is small and the time sequence is long [2, p. 5]. These models have commonly been used in criminology to identify patterning in the types of offences committed and how offenders may transit from one type of offending to another as they age [3,11]. Because the nature of these Markov models are rather different in concept to the models in Sects.…”