Abstract
Through a novel data set comprising the criminal records of 11,138 convicted mafia offenders, we compute criminal career parameters and trajectories through group-based trajectory modeling. Mafia offenders report prolific and persistent careers (16.1 crimes over 16.5 years on average), with five distinct trajectories (low frequency, high frequency, early starter, moderate persistence, high persistence). While showing some similarities with general offenders, the trajectories of mafia offenders also exhibit significant differences, with several groups offending well into their middle and late adulthood, notwithstanding intense criminal justice sanctions. These patterns suggest that several mafia offenders are life-course persisters and career criminals and that the involvement in the mafias is a negative turning point extending the criminal careers beyond those observed in general offenders.
Highlights
Despite the growing relevance that life-course and developmental criminology has acquired since the publication of the seminal report by the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 (Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher, 1986), most empirical research has focused on general samples during the childhood and early adulthood, with few notable exceptions (Blokland & Nieuwbeerta, 2005; Laub & Sampson, 2003)
To set up the correct group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM) model, we have first iterated the model starting from a minimum of one to a maximum of eight trajectories to select the optimal number of groups that maximized the Bayesian information criterion (BIC), the standard measure to identify the best model (Nagin, 2005)
The means of most parameters were statistically different for most pairs of trajectories, except for both escalation types and specialization
Summary
Despite the growing relevance that life-course and developmental criminology has acquired since the publication of the seminal report by the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 (Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher, 1986), most empirical research has focused on general samples during the childhood and early adulthood, with few notable exceptions (Blokland & Nieuwbeerta, 2005; Laub & Sampson, 2003). This research suggested that such offenders may follow patterns partially different than the general population, for example, that lateonset offenders made up to 60% of the sample (Van Koppen, De Poot, Kleemans, & Nieuwbeerta, 2010), or that the offending frequency remained stable into the 30s (Morgan, Brown, & Fuller, 2018) These results question whether the general findings of the life-course framework apply to organized crime offenders, often characterized by having persistent, prolific, and violent criminal careers. Organized crime offenders reported significant differences from general offending samples: Several individuals showed persistent and prolific criminal careers extending well into adulthood, and in some cases beyond age 50, notwithstanding the increased likelihood of long imprisonment terms due to the intense law enforcement response put in place by the Italian State These patterns suggest that involvement into the mafias may be considered a negative turning point in the life of individuals with significant impact on their offending career (Laub & Sampson, 1993). We were unable to reconstruct their imprisonment history, it is likely that the strong institutional reactions against the mafias have substantially affected the offending patterns, forcing some sort of desistance in trajectories, which may have otherwise extended for an even longer period
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