Arrest Trajectories Across a 17-Year Span for Young Men: Relation to Dual Taxonomies and Self-Reported Offense Trajectories

• NCJ Number: 221114
• Journal: Criminology Volume: 45 Issue: 4 Dated: November 2007 Pages: 835-864
• Author(s): Margit Wiesner; Deborah M. Capaldi; Hyoun K. Kim
• Date Published: November 2007
• Length: 30 pages
• Grant Number(s): R37 MH 37940; HD 46364
• Sponsoring Agency: National Institute on Drug Abuse; National Institute of Mental Health; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

The study evaluated the impact of different operationalizations of offending behavior on the identified trajectories of offending and related findings to hypothesized dual taxonomy models.

Abstract

The study demonstrated limited convergence of trajectory findings across official records versus self-report measures of offending behavior. The pattern of findings from this study on officially recorded arrest trajectories, and from prior research with the same sample on self-reported offending trajectories overall suggest limited convergence of results across different assessment methods of offending behavior. Such limited convergence was to be expected given the much larger prevalence of crime when assessed by self-reported as compared with official records. The findings suggest that our understanding of crime careers might increase by using these complementary data sources to examine crime trajectories for the same sample. The findings identifies three trajectories of officially recorded offending behavior: rare offenders at 69 percent, low-level chronic offenders at 22 percent, and high-level chronic offenders as 9 percent; the majority of young men in the study belonged to the rare offender group. The three groups were distinct from each other and well separated. Prior research with 203 young men from the Oregon Youth Study (OYS) identified 6 offender pathways, based on self-report data. The current study used official records data for the same sample: boys selected from schools in the higher crime areas of a medium-sized metropolitan region in the Pacific Northwest considered to be at heightened risk for later delinquency when compared with others in the same region. Assessment on the OYS was yearly, multimethod, and multiagent, including in-person interviews and questionnaires for self and parents at the Oregon Social Learning Center, telephone interviews that provided multiple samples of recent behaviors, home observations, videotaped interaction tasks, school data, and court records data. Semi-parametric group based modeling indicated three distinctive arrest trajectories. Both chronic arrest trajectory groups were characterized by relatively equal parts of early onset offenders, which indicated some divergence from hypothesized dual taxonomies. Tables, figures, references