NCJ Number
222027
Journal
European Journal of Criminology Volume: 5 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2008 Pages: 69-98
Date Published
January 2008
Length
30 pages
Annotation
This article presents the findings of quantitative and qualitative research into the criminal careers of about 1,000 offenders who were involved in 80 extensively analysed cases of organized crime.
Abstract
The authors found that older offenders made up the majority of career criminals involved in organized crime, with more than three-quarters of their sample set of 1,000 being older than 30. Additionally, 28 percent of the offenders studied had no prior record of criminal offenses. Thus, the findings conclude that “late-starters, those who enter criminal careers later in life, make up a significant criminal population that has been overlooked in previous career criminal analyses. The authors, realizing a lack of knowledge about career criminals, focus on social opportunity structure, the social ties that provide access to profitable criminal opportunities, as a prime factor in organized crime and can explain what fosters career criminals. The authors contend that analyzing the social opportunity structure is better suited to the study of “life-course” criminology than traditional longitudinal dataset analysis in that it allows for the identification of late-starters, who are brought into organized crime through social ties, legitimate activities, and life events, and who are often missed in traditional methodologies. Footnotes, tables, acknowledgements, references, and author biography