Development of Serious Criminal Careers

• NCJ Number: 94459
• Author(s): L W Shahnon
• Date Published: Unknown
• Length: 354 pages
• Grant Number(s): 82-JN-AX-0004
• Sponsoring Agency: US Securities and Exchange Cmssn
• Corporate Author: University of Iowa
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/; NCJRS Photocopy Services
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study analyzed data from three birth cohorts (1942, 1949, and 1955) in Racine, Wis., and 65 selected neighborhoods to assess the impact of the neighborhood milieu on the generation of delinquency, continuities in delinquency and crime, and official responses to crime.

Abstract

Two previous research projects based on official records and interviews with the three cohorts concluded that the areas in which juveniles were socialized played an important role in how the justice system responded to their behavior and how the juveniles in turn either desisted or continued to commit offenses. In this project, the 65 neighborhoods were categorized according to delinquency and crime-producing characteristics, in-area offense rates, by-residence offense rates, juvenile delinquency rates, and adult crime rates. Individual careers for the cohorts' juvenile and adult periods were characterized in several ways, as was the relationship between earlier and later behavior. Relationships of these variables were analyzed within different types of neighborhood milieus. The results showed that significant milieu effects impacted serious delinquent and criminal careers and the severity of sanctions administered to cohort members, but they accounted for a relatively small amount of the variance in consistency and continuity in individual criminal careers. Specifically, measures of the seriousness of official criminal records, self-reported seriousness, and disproportional intervention were far higher in the inner city and interstitial neighborhoods than in others, but consistency and continuity in these measures had considerably less relationship to milieu differences. While consistency and continuity were present in inner city neighborhoods, they were found in some other neighborhoods with quite different characteristics. When other factors known to influence delinquency were incorporated into the analysis, much more variance was explained. The report reviews the earlier Racine studies, explains this project's complex methodology, and discusses the implications of the findings for delinquency prevention. Tables are included. (Executive summary modified)