Accessing Information on Criminal Activity of Individuals

Abstract

There is no consensus on a single definition of a criminal career. Depending on the type and methodology of the research and the method of selecting participants, researchers formulate their proposals for such a definition or—without focusing on defining a criminal career—draw attention to a range of parameters of criminal activity of individuals.1 In such a case, a criminal career is rather an analytical perspective on the delinquency of particular people, assuming that they may or may not be criminally active (or carry out illegal activities that are not crimes2) at different stages of life and that, in addition, the nature and intensity of their offences may change over time (Soothill, Fitzpatrick, and Francis 2013, 15–16). Whether we choose to use the term criminal career or employ a more descriptive name for the issue, such as multiple offending, criminal activity over the course of a lifetime, criminal trajectory, or an individual's criminal history, the challenges of studying the phenomenon of multiple involvement in crime, so named or otherwise, are the same. It is mainly a matter of accessing information about the role of delinquent behaviour over as long a period of an individual's life as possible and then competently interpreting the information gathered. The purpose of this chapter3 is to outline these challenges from the perspective of our own research on multiple offenders conducted by the Department of Criminology of the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (ILS PAS).