Crime Careers Research Articles

Community Careers in Crime

Urban ecologists have documented the stages through which residential communities in American metropolitan areas move as they undergo physical and social deterioration. Criminologists have documented the roles of deteriorated urban neighborhoods as areas of high rates of crime and delinquency. Less is known about how neighborhoods evolve into high-crime areas. Using a developmental model, this research investigated the twenty-year histories of Los Angeles County's highest-crime-rate neighborhoods in 1970. Three distinct stages were identified: emerging, transitional, and enduring. Use of cross-sectional and time-series analyses revealed that neighborhood deterioration precedes rising crime early in the cycle but that, as neighborhoods move into the later enduring stage, rising crime rates precede further neighborhood deterioration. Among the changes signaling neighborhood deterioration and rising crime rates were a shift from single- to multiple-family dwellings, a rise in residential mobility, unrelated ...

Housing Tenure and Residential Community Crime Careers in Britain

The notion of a "criminal career," though generally used in reference to individuals, can be applied also to residential communities. The key to understanding community criminal careers in Britain lies within the operation of the housing market. The urban geography of most large British cities has resulted from historical developments unique to housing tenure in Britain. The tenure picture is unlike that portrayed in the Chicago model of concentric ring development, and the distribution of British offender rates therefore does not correspond to expectations of the Chicago model. Bureaucratic mechanisms for allocating housing in the public rental sector have profound direct and indirect effects on offender distributions and community crime careers. These mechanisms may help to maintain the stability of offender rates in particular communities, exacerbate the rate, or reduce the rate by changing practices in a given public authority housing area. Private rental, although severely diminished in importance during the twentieth century, offers an alternative form of tenure to the more common owner occupation and public housing. Its location in decaying areas around city centers and its attraction to a transient clientele often result in high offender rates. Changes in the social composition of the area that were initiated by government changes in housing policy have made some areas into more desirable residential districts without causing dramatic declines in offender rates. The future of the main tenure forms-owner occupation and public housing-remains uncertain and complicated, so it is difficult to predict how offender rates will change. The decline of private rental areas will undoubtedly continue. Changes in the criminal career of one area will probably affect careers in other areas.

Becoming normal: Certification as a stage in exiting from crime

Certification is the final stage in exiting from a career in crime. This paper presents the major elements in the process of certification as revealed by an analysis of a set of life‐history interviews. This look at the process of certification uncovers that, like deviance, conventionality is a social phenomenon constructing from both social action and societal reaction.

Careers in Crime

Careers in Crime

Careers in Crime.

Careers in Crime.

Problems in Modeling and Measuring Recidivism

Despite the fundamental character of recidivism as a measure of correctional effectiveness, and its wide use in all aspects of the theory and operations of the crime control process, there is sur prising misconception regarding its use and measurement. This paper uses probabilistic models to examine two types of potential misconception. The first arises from alternative definitions of recidivism based on the stage in the criminal justice process at which recidivism is measured. The second arises from alternative methods of sampling criminal careers. The analysis helps to clarify possible interpretations of recidivism data, including those reported by the FBI under "Careers in Crime."

"Careers in Crime": The F.B.I. Story

Recent UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS of the F.B.I. have included a new section called "Careers in Crime." This article presents a crit ical analysis of the data presented in that section. The analysis con cludes that the data are presented in a tendentious manner designed to reflect the ideas about the nature of the crime problem held by director of the F.B.I., John Edgar Hoover. An attempt is made to provide the reader with a more balanced appraisal of the statistics in question and to indicate ways in which the available information could be presented in a more objective fashion.

The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville, Leicestershire, and their Associates in Crime, 1326–1347

On a date which cannot be exactly discovered in 1340 or early in 1341, a priest called Richard de Folville, who had long been notorious as a habitual criminal, took refuge from justice, with some of his followers, in the church of Teigh, Rutland, of which he had been rector for twenty years. After he had killed one of his pursuers, and wounded others, by arrows shot from within, he was at length dragged out and beheaded by Sir Robert de Colville, a keeper of the peace.2 In itself this sordid occurrence is of no special interest, but if we look into the long career of crime which ended thus, we may find that we have come upon something of wider significance. This Richard proves to have been one of six brothers who were all criminals, and their history has left a considerable mark in the records. Thanks to the work of a number of scholars in recent years, we now know a good deal about the apparatus of criminal jurisdiction in the earlier fourteenth century, but of what might be called the forces of disorder, indispensable though they were to the working of the system of justice, we are still very ignorant. ‘Who were the burglars, robbers, and murderers … the sleepers by day and wanderers by night? What was their political, social, and economic status?’ These questions, given here in the words of Professor Putnam, are the reason for devoting this paper to so narrow a subject as the history of one obscure midland family during the early years of Edward III.

The Dalton Brothers and Their Astounding Career of Crime

The Dalton Brothers and Their Astounding Career of Crime

Simms's Border Romances and Shakespeare

V R\8/X\312dealing with the last years of the American Revolution in South Carolina, and a group of border romances, was steeped J& in Shakespeare and greatly indebted to him.' His works contain many Shakespearian quotations and allusions. The violence, melodrama, strong imagination, and powerful emotion that permeate his works suggest the same qualities that are often found in Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists. Although recent discussions of Shakespeare's influence on Simms have been concerned mainly with the novels about the American Revolution,2 Simms's indebtedness to Shakespeare in a group of six novels known as border romances of the South-Guy Rivers, Richard Hurdis, Border Beagles, Charlemont, Beauchampe, and Confession-is greater than in the Revolutionary fiction. An examination of these border novels will reveal clearly the general and the specific types of influence that Shakespeare exerted on Simms as well as some of Simms's most interesting criticism of Shakespeare and his works. In Guy Rivers is seen the influence of Macbeth and Hamlet. Guy Rivers, the villain-hero, is ambitious, fierce-tempered, brutal, murderous, and highly imaginative. Obviously like Macbeth in several ways, he is, on the other hand, never the admirable person that Macbeth was prior to his murder of Duncan. He attempts to blame fate, his mother, Walter Munro (an older outlaw), and other persons for his career of crime. Speaking to Munro, Rivers says:

From the High Chair to the Underworld

Abstract The records of the New York City Police Department and the New York State Department of Correction would show that my career of crime began at fifteen when I was committed to the Elmira Reformatory for robbing a Tenth Avenue grocery store. These records are slightly inaccurate. My underworld career really began four years earlier, at the tender age of eleven, when I “turned off” a Ninth Avenue cigar store for a load of cigarettes and candy and an armful of Nick Carter and Old Sleuth magazines. I have indelible memories of that blood-and-thunder fiction which furnished me with patterns for my adolescent exploits. Moreover, it convinced me that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were sissies compared to Jesse James, “High Card Mike,” and the Younger Brothers. Safe cracking and train robbery, it also convinced me, was a better racket than statesmanship.

Retrospect of Criminal Anthropology

H. H. Holmes (or, to call him by his real name, Herman Webster Mudgett), a qualified practitioner of medicine, whose extraordinary career of crime attracted world-wide attention and has caused his name to be coupled with that of Wainewright, was during the last days before his execution carefully studied by Professor Arthur MacDonald and Dr. E. S. Talbot (MacDonald, “Criminological Studies,” Report of the Commissioner of Education, Washington, 1896; Talbot, “H. H. Holmes,” Journal of the American Medical Association, Aug. 1, 1896). The case is one of so much importance that it is worth while to summarise the reports of these two experienced investigators.