Enduring Risk? Old Criminal Records and Predictions of Future Criminal Involvement

Abstract

It is well accepted that criminal records impose collateral consequences on offenders. Such records affect access to public housing, student financial aid, welfare benefits, and voting rights. An axiom of these policies is that individuals with criminal records-even old criminal records-exhibit significantly higher risk of future criminal conduct than do individuals without criminal records. In this article, the authors use police contact data from the 1942 Racine birth cohort study to determine whether individuals whose last criminal record occurred many years ago exhibit a higher risk of acquiring future criminal records than do individuals with no criminal record at all. Findings suggest that there is little to no distinguishable difference between these groups.

Desistance from Offending in the Twenty-First Century

“…This approach aims to identify the point at which former offenders are statistically indistinguishable from the general population in their risk of offending. This research reveals that following arrest, a seven-year crime-free period results in statistical similarity between ex-offenders and nonoffenders (Kurlychek et al 2007). The "time clean" for redemption varies by crime type; it is shorter for property offenders (roughly five years) than for violent and serious offenders (roughly eight years) (Blumstein & Nakamura 2009, Bushway et al 2011.…”

The Adolescence–Adulthood Transition and Desistance from Crime: Examining the Underlying Structure of Desistance

“…Even with protective factors such as within-individual changes or social-contextual factors promoting the deceleration of offending, negative life events (e.g., alcohol/drug use, financial difficulties, significant interpersonal conflicts, and negative mood) may favor the movement away from a nonoffending state back to an offending state (e.g., [84]). Given the heterogeneity in the probabilities of offending in adulthood and that these probabilities are not static, but dynamic and subject to several factors starting with the process of aging (e.g., [41]). In other words, with age, the probabilities of a relapse decrease.…”

Invited Address: James Joyce, Alice in Wonderland, the Rolling Stones, and Criminal Careers

“…Here, the focus is not on finding a specific life event or cause that all-of-the-sudden makes an individual stop offending, but instead focuses on the relationship between time and offending frequency by examining the individual offending data in order to derive estimates of how likely an individual is to offend at a specific point in time given their previous level of involvement and then develops estimates of an individual's predicted probability of offending to assess the point in time in which an individual's probability of offending becomes virtually indistinguishable from a non-offender. Several recent examples of this line of work have generated very useful preliminary estimates and substantive implications for public policy (Kurlychek et al 2007).…”