Week #6

Question 1

Is there a difference between crime and criminality?

Answer 1

• Crime is an event that occurs in time and space

* Criminality could be understood more as a trait, or individual propensity or characteristic

Question 2

What are the findings of Wolfgang’s 1972 study?

Answer 2

• A small subgroup of offenders, or career criminals, accounts for the bulk of all delinquency occurring in a society

Question 3

What does Criminal Career Research focus on?

Answer 3

• Correlates of specific career components (i.e., correlates of e.g., prevalence, lambda, onset, specialization, etc.)

Question 4

What is the difference between prevalence, lambda, onset and specialization?

Answer 4

• Prevalence – what proportion of population is involved in crime
• Onset how early do they start
• Lambda – how often do they engage
• Specialization – do they do all types of crime or only specific

Question 5

What are some important criminal career findings?

Answer 5

1. Age of onset is typically 8-14, earlier with self-report data and later with official records
   i. It shows up earlier in the self report before they are reported and noticed by CJS
2. Age of desistance is typically 20 to 29 (though a small subset continue well into adulthood)
   i. When someone stops committing crime
3. Age of peak prevalence: peaks in the late teen years 15-19
   i. Is it because an increase in frequency of a few people or because of a increase of proportion of population involved in crime
4. Aggregate age curve reflects P, not lambda. Likewise, gender and race are correlated with P, not lambda
5. Age of onset: predicts a length and seriousness of the criminal career
6. Rank stability: There is marked continuity in offending and antisocial behaviour from childhood to the teen years and to adulthood
7. Chronic: A small fraction of the population commit a large fraction of all crimes; chronic offenders tend to have an early onset, a high individual offending frequency, and a long criminal career
8. Versatility: offending is more versatile than specialized, esp. For violent offenders
   i. Broad crimes
9. Non-criminal deviance: Analogous acts: offending seems to be part of a larger syndrome of antisocial behaviour that includes heavy drinking, reckless driving, promiscuous sex, etc.
10. Co-offending: most offenses up to the late teen years are committed with others, whereas most offenses from age 20 onwards are committed alone

Question 6

What are Gottfredson and Hirschi’s Critique of the Criminal Career Paradigm?

Answer 6

• Involvement in crime is sufficiently stable over the life course
• Offenders and be put on a continuum of criminal propensity (which they term low self-control)
i. Individuals at the higher end of the continuum showing higher criminal activity
• By the time the CJS is able to identify a career criminal, he tends to no longer be as active as he once was, they can’t be identified early enough in their careers to be useful for policy purposes

Question 7

Explain Sampson and Laub’s Age-Grade Social Control Theory?

Answer 7

• Social capital and turning points are important concepts in understanding processes of change in the adult life course
• Set out to examine crime and deviance in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in a way that recognized the significance of both continuity and change over the life course
• Propose that variations in adult crime unexplained by childhood behaviour are directly related to the strength of adult social bonds
• Adult social bonds not only have important effects on adult crime in and of themselves, but help to explain the probabilistic links in the chain connecting early childhood differences and later adult crime

Question 8

Explain Moffit’s “dual taxonomy”?

Answer 8

• Juvenile delinquency conceals two qualitatively distinct category of individuals, each in need of its own distinct theoretical explanation
• “Adolescent-limited” vs. Life course persistent

Question 9

Describe “adolescent-limited offenders:

Answer 9

• (The vast majority who are normal kids who dabble a bit in youthful recklessness and then grow out of it)
• Adolescence limited antisocial behavior is motivated by the gap between biological maturity and social maturity,
• For delinquents whose criminal activity is confined to the adolescent years, the causal factors may be proximal, specific to the period of adolescent development, and theory must account for the discontinuity in their lives.

Question 10

Describe Life course persistent Offenders:

Answer 10

• A small minority of people who are highly crime prone and remain so across the life course)
• Continuity is the hallmark of the small group of life-course-persistent antisocial persons
• For persons whose adolescent delinquency is part of a continuous lifelong antisocial path, a theory of antisocial behaviour must locate its causal factors early in their childhoods and explain the continuity in their troubled lives
• Persistent antisocial behavior has its origins in an interaction between children’s neuropsychological vulnerabilities and criminogenic environments

Question 11

Issues of State Dependence and Persistent Heterogeneity

Answer 11

• The state dependence argument suggests that the positive correlation between past and future criminal activity exists because the act of committing a crime transforms the offender’s life circumstances in some way that increases the probability that future crimes will occur.
• Persistent heterogeneity is the second interpretation. This explanation attributes the positive correlation to differences across persons in their propensity to commit crime.
i. Thus, individuals with the “highest” criminal propensity are likely to be involved in all sorts of antisocial, criminal, and deviant acts throughout the life course,

Question 12

What causes crime? (According to Weatherburn)

Answer 12

• There is no single factor or set of factors, which causes an individual to become involved in crime.
• Being criminal is not like having a disease.
• Most people at some stage in their lives commit crime of some sort, even if it involves nothing more serious than driving above the speed limit.

Question 13

What role do parents play in crime?

Answer 13

• Poor parent-child attachment, poor parental supervision and inconsistent, erratic discipline all increase the risk of involvement in crime.

Question 14

Explain Crime-Prone places?

Answer 14

• The most common characteristics of crime-prone neighborhoods are poverty, unemployment and income inequality.
• Crime also tends to become concentrated at particular locations where there are increased opportunities or incentives for committing crime

Question 15

What are other factors of influence?

Answer 15

• Crime rises or falls over time in response to a wide variety of factors.
• Economic factors (e.g. unemployment) appear to play an important role in shaping trends in property crime.

Question 16

Explain crime-reduction strategies?

Answer 16

• Because crime is not the result of any single factor or combination of factors, it makes no sense to seek to control crime by any single strategy or set of strategies.
• Emphasis on particular strategies should vary according to the nature of the crime problem at hand, the available options for influencing the problem and the urgency with which change is required.