Correlates of Specialization and Escalation in the Criminal Career: Summary Report

摘要

This research examined the effects of adolescent correlates of crime on patterns of specialization and escalation in the criminal career. Although a small, but growing, body of research has shown adult offenders tend to specialize in (repeat) the same crime type and/or to escalate the severity of crime types over their criminal careers, there has been little work aimed at trying to account for the factors that predict offense sequences. The results reported above show that adolescent correlates of criminal behavior predict future types of offending, which has consequences for the observed patterns of specialization and of escalation. To summarize, these results provide only weak evidence of specialization and of escalation across a sequence of ten offenses, once offender background characteristics have been controlled statistically. However, and substantively important, these results also indicate that background characteristics of the offender, such as age, race, family background, whether crimes are committed in a group context or alone, and social psychological assessment, are useful predictors of the types of offenses that may be committed over time.