Patterns of Juvenile Delinquency and Co-Offending

摘要

The analyses of offending in this randomly selected cohort of offenders active in an urban center during 1987 suggests that cooffending is a key ingredient to high rates of criminality. cooffending should become a feature in reckoning crime rates and understanding changes in them. Co-offending is also central to understanding individual differences in recidivism. Co-offenders should become targets of intervention strategies. And understanding the mechanisms by which peers influence intentional behavior should become a focus for theoretical developments, Inspection of official records indicates that little attention has been given to identifying co-offending in relation to crime events. Indeed, police records tend to undercount eo-offending, and published crime rates rarely take co-offending into account, Yet, without records that take account of co-offending, it is impossible to know how public safety is affected by crime prevention policies.