Rate of Offending in Juvenile Careers: Findings of Constancy and Change in Lambda

• NCJ Number: 124038
• Journal: Criminology Volume: 28 Issue: 1 Dated: (February 1990) Pages: 97-109
• Author(s): R Loeber; H N Snyder
• Date Published: 1990
• Length: 13 pages
• Grant Number(s): 85-JN-CX-0012
• Sponsoring Agency: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP)
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study examines changes in the rate of offending in a sample of 8,834 males whose official juvenile law-violating careers included 26,650 offense episodes between ages 8 and 17.

Abstract

The rate of offending of active offenders (i.e., lambda) varied substantially as a function of age, increasing monotonically with age. Lambda, however, was not related to the age at first offense. In fact, the average lambda was amazingly constant at each individual age level regardless of the age at which offending began or desisted. Results are discussed in the light of age-crime curves known from other data sets and from the perspective of developmental changes in the rate of offending as youths grow older. 4 tables, 1 figure, 16 references. (Author abstract)