Abstract
This study examines the latent structure of offending persistence from late adolescence through early adulthood. Self-reported involvement in drug crimes, person crimes, and property crimes between the ages of 17 and 21 years were analyzed in 1,160 male members of the Pathways to Desistance study (Mulvey, 2012). Scores on the three indicators were subjected to longitudinal (by summing across the five time periods) and cross-sectional (by testing each individual time period) taxometric analysis. Outcomes obtained using the mean above minus below a cut (MAMBAC), maximum covariance (MAXCOV), and latent mode factor analysis (L-Mode) taxometric procedures revealed consistent support for continuous latent structure in both the longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses. It would appear that continued criminal involvement beyond adolescence is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon and that it may be more productive to order individuals along a persistence-desistance continuum than assign them to mutually exclusive categories, trajectories, or typologies.
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