Careers Of Offenders Research Articles

An Examination of Correctional Staff Support and Perceptions of Post-Release Success Among Australian Juvenile Detainees

ABSTRACT Much research exists on the role of correctional staff on the carceral experience, but less work examines how staff influence post-release behavior among those previously incarcerated and how personal characteristics might be related to correctional staff attitudes and actions. This includes, for example, individuals’ perceptions of success upon release. The current study uses a sample of 427 detained juvenile males derived from the Australian Institute of Criminology’s Drug Use Careers of Offenders (DUCO) study to assess the relationship between individuals’ perceptions about the willingness of correctional staff to help them and their perceived likelihood of success upon release. Results indicate that most Australian juvenile detainees felt optimistic about their prospects for success upon release and that staff were interested in trying to help them. However, no relationship was found between the two variables of interest. Instead, time served was most significantly related to one’s perceptions of success upon release. These findings are discussed through the juxtaposition between Australian and American criminal justice systems and offer several implications for carceral policy.

Risk Factors of Early Adolescence in the Criminal Career of Polish Offenders in the Light of Life Course Theory.

Life course theory (LCT) diagnoses childhood and adolescent factors that determine an individual’s involvement in crime in the future. Farrington lists eight key correlates identified by empirical analyses of criminal careers. In this paper, we seek to discuss the inconsistencies with LCT that we observed in our three empirical studies of the criminal careers of Polish offenders. During 12 years of qualitative research, we conducted direct observations and in-depth interviews in juvenile correction institutions (21) and prisons (8) across the country. We gained access to incarcerated (102) and released (30) juvenile offenders, as well as to incarcerated (68) and released (28) adult offenders. We also conducted in-depth interviews (92) with experts working with young and adult offenders. We similarly accessed some offenders’ criminal records and psychological opinions. Our study revealed the strong presence of family and neighborhood influences on early criminality. Contrary to LCT assumptions, state-dependent institutions (military, work, family) were not strong enough determinants of delinquency. Polish offenders generally experience criminal onset later than LCT-oriented criminologists indicate. Based on our data, we also agree with the thesis that the onset of crime should be discussed as different age-related periods rather than just a general onset.

Age-Graded Transitions and Turning Points in Polish Offenders' Criminal Careers from the Standpoint of Life Course Theory.

Both juvenile and adult criminal careers show regularities in the origins of delinquency, the dynamics of the criminal pathway, and the turning points that lead to desistance/persistence in crime. Research shows that family, education, and friendship environments contribute significantly to the individual choices that create criminal biographies. Our aim was to apply core aspects of life course theory (LCT): trajectory, the aged-graded process, transitions, institutions, and ultimately how desistance/persistence factor into explaining the criminal careers of Polish offenders. The research is based on in-depth interviews (130) carried out with both offenders (90) and experts (40). The offenders were divided into two groups: 30 were juveniles, and 60 were adults of whom half were sentenced for the first time (30) and half were recidivists (30) located in correctional institutions or released. The experts group (40) includes psychologists, educators, social rehabilitators, and prison and juvenile detention personnel working with offenders. We used triangulation of researcher, data, and methodology. Our data revealed that similar biographical experiences characterized by an early socialization, family and friends-based circles laid the groundwork for their entry and continued participation in criminal activity. Juvenile and adult first-time sentenced offenders led criminal careers significantly different from those of recidivists, who faced problems with social adaptation caused by lack of family and institutional support.

Employment and crime: A longitudinal follow-up of organized crime offenders

Employment is considered to help offenders desist from crime. Studies focusing on organized crime offenders, however, have suggested that employment may promote rather than inhibit crime for these offenders, but lacked quantitative individual-level data to confirm this finding. Using a large sample of organized crime offenders ( N = 1921) and longitudinal individual data on offending, employment, income and financial support, the current study aims to clarify the role of employment in the offending careers of these offenders. Fixed effects models show the effects of employment, self-employment and employment on the payroll. For organized crime offenders, being employed is associated with a 10 percent increase in offending and having their own business is associated with a 23 percent increase in offending. For organized crime offenders in leadership positions, employment is associated with a 47 percent increase in offending and owning a business is associated with a 68 percent increase in offending.

The Federal Judiciary’s Role in Drug Law Reform in an Era of Congressional Dysfunction

While state drug law reform is moving apace, federal drug law reform has moved much more slowly. Many, including the Judicial Conference of the United States and the United States Sentencing Commission, have urged Congress to enact substantive federal drug law reform for years. But Congress has not acted. As a result, the federal system continues to single out drug offenses for harsh treatment at the bail stage and the sentencing stage—the front end and back end of the federal mass incarceration crisis. In this paper, we argue that federal judges have a critical role to play in future federal drug law reform in light of Congress’ long-standing failures to meaningfully change the laws. At the front end, judges should encourage the release of more people on bail by closely scrutinizing prosecutors’ motions for temporary detention and giving little weight to the Bail Reform Act’s presumption of detention. Data shows that the statutory drug presumption is overbroad and does a poor job of determining who is a risk of flight or a danger to the community. At the back end, judges should issue categorical policy disagreements with the drug sentencing guidelines and the career offender sentencing guideline using the Supreme Court’s blueprint in Kimbrough v. United States. Judges should issue sentences below these guidelines because they are not based on empirical evidence, over-punish drug offenses, and result in racial disparities. At both ends, judges should rest their decisions on the evidence that the drug presumption, the drug sentencing guidelines, and the career offender sentencing guideline are flawed. While judicial action is not a cure for Congressional inaction, it would send a clear message from one co-equal branch of government to another that substantive reform is urgently needed.

STUDI FENOMENOLOGIS TERHADAP PERAN ETIKA DALAM PENDIDIKAN PERPAJAKAN

Ethics, has a very important role in all aspects including the aspect of taxation Education. The existence of ethics is absolutely necessary within the framework of a healthy mindset and full balance so that the education process running for this not only focus on improving the capabilities, expertise and intellectual, but also pay attention to morality that comes to fruition ethics in the construction of education completely. This study aims to assess the understanding of the students in terms of knowledge about the role of ethics in education tax.The extent to which their understanding in terms of ethics and critical payloads contained in it. Phenomenology is used as an analytical tool understanding of the role of ethics in education tax. These findings indicate that students understanding the role of ethics that is so important in the educational process of taxation and will be used as stock ethics profession as a career offender taxes. significantly still needed effort for understanding the role of ethics in education taxation can achieve balance by integrating a variety of clever angles and interests as a whole.

The folly of counting bodies: Using regression to transgress the state of serial murder classification systems

This commentary addresses misconceptions present in Too Few Victims: Finding the Optimal Minimum Victim Threshold for Defining Serial Murder and seeks to limit the damaging effect that the authors' recommendation of reverting the victim threshold will have on researchers, practitioners and law enforcement. To classify serial homicide offenders by a metric such as deadliness unnecessarily segments a population of offenders that share similar pathologies. Upper level statistics that neglect to account for the narrative factors responsible for the offender's homicidality cannot elucidate the true differences between the groups of serial murderers identified by the authors. In analyzing an offender's number of kills and motive the authors ignore the relationship between victim and attacker and the time period between murders. The authors discount thousands of serial homicide offenders due to the absence of information on formative events and disregard intent and markers associated with serial homicide, all to manufacture an inflection point and command the future direction of serial homicide offender research and apprehension efforts. This will curtail the foray of new researchers into an area rife with potential discoveries while also restricting efforts by law enforcement organizations to form task forces to intervene earlier in an offender's career.

Women’s Pathways to Crime: A Heuristic Typology of Offenders

The current study proposes a heuristic model for classification of female offenders into groups based on key variables relevant to women’s backgrounds and programming needs. We utilize a mixed-methods approach with a sample of 60 women incarcerated in a maximum-security prison. We develop qualitative, person-centered groupings of female offenders, and then use quantitative analyses to provide more detailed data on each group. Findings demonstrate five distinct groupings: aggressive career offenders, women who killed or assaulted persons in retaliation or self-defense, women who maltreated children, substance-dependent women experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV), and social capital offenders. These findings lend support to prior research on pathways and typologies of women’s offending, and decision rules effectively “triage” cases according to most pressing needs. The model offers unique utility for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers working with women in the criminal legal system.

Adulthood-limited offending: How much is there to explain?

PurposeThe current study explores male and female adult-onset offending careers in a Swedish population-based longitudinal dataset comprising five successive birth cohorts which are followed prospectively on the basis of detailed conviction data to age 50. MethodsAdult-onset offenders are compared to juvenile-onset offenders on a number of criminal career measures. Growth curve analysis is employed to visualize average trajectories for convictions during adulthood. ResultsThe study found that 22% of convicted males and 38% of convicted females were convicted for the first time for offenses committed between ages 25 and 50. The adult-onset males contributed 19% of all male adulthood convictions and 16% of male violent convictions in adulthood. The adult-onset females contributed 47% of all female adulthood convictions and 48% of female violent convictions in adulthood. While the adolescent-onset trajectories displayed generally decreasing trends for offending in adulthood, adult-onset females displayed increasing trends in relation to trajectories of violence and drug/alcohol-related offending as they approached middle adulthood. ConclusionsThere is a need for developmental and life-course theories of crime to be explicit in explaining adult-onset offending, particularly in relation to gender disparities.

Criminal Career Dimensions of Juvenile- and Adult-Onset Offenders

PurposeEarlier studies tried to predict and explain adult-onset offending, most often by comparing risk factors for juvenile and adult onset of criminal behavior. Little is known, however, about how criminal careers of adult-onset offenders develop. The aim of this study is to describe and compare juvenile- and adult-onset criminal careers of both men and women in terms of frequency, intensity, duration, recidivism, crime mix, seriousness, and specialization.MethodsUsing a sample of 43,338 offenders who all had a criminal record in 2013, criminal careers are reconstructed retrospectively up to age 12 and prospectively up to the 1st of July, 2014. Male and female juvenile- and adult-onset offenders are identified and compared on the abovementioned parameters of their criminal careers.ResultsCompared to all other groups, female adult-onset offenders commit fewer crimes, offend at a lower rate, desist from crime earlier, have lower recidivism risks at least up to the tenth crime, commit different types of offenses, commit more minor and less serious crimes, and are more specialized in the types of crime they commit. Male juvenile-onset offenders have the most serious career in terms of these career dimensions.ConclusionsCriminal careers of adult-onset offenders, both men and women, develop differently on all dimensions. Implications for life-course criminological theories and prevention strategies are discussed.

Disentangling Operationalizations of Persistent Offending

ObjectiveNumerous operationalizations of persistent offending have been used in the extant research with the assumption that these findings are generalizable. We tested this assumption by comparing the criminal careers of persistent offenders identified by different methods. MethodWe examined 38 operationalizations of persistent offending and the groups they identified. Criminal careers were measured using official conviction data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (n=411). ResultsThe groups of persistent offenders differed in prevalence rates (ranging from 1.24% to 29.53% of the sample), average age of onset (from 10.86 to 26.07years), average criminal career duration (from 16.96 to 39.86years), average convictions (from 4.03 to 23.33, λ ranged from 0.3 to 1.17 convictions per year), and offender overlap (from 0% to 100%, ORs ranged from 0.34 to 787.5). Persistent offenders identified by the Group Based Trajectory Model were least likely to be identified by any other operationalization. ConclusionDifferent operationalizations generally identified qualitatively different offenders as persistent, suggesting that the findings on persistent offending in the literature may not be generalizable across studies. However, our analyses are limited to the CSDD, and so further research is needed.

Adverse Childhood Experiences and Criminal Extremity: New Evidence for Sexual Homicide.

Adverse childhood experiences are associated with a wide range of behavioral, health, and psychiatric deficits and have recently been used to study the development of serious offending careers. Unfortunately, this research paradigm has largely ignored forensic populations. This study utilized the adverse childhood experiences framework to examine the associations between exposure to violence, victimization, and total adverse childhood experiences on sexual homicide using a sample of 616 incarcerated adult male sexual offenders from Canada 85 of whom committed sexual homicide. Epidemiological tables of odds revealed that a gradient of adverse childhood experiences was associated with sexual homicide, but that the most significant risks were for offenders who had the most extensive abuse histories. In adjusted models, exposure to violence, victimization, and total adverse childhood experiences increased the odds of sexual homicide by 334%, 249%, and 546%, respectively. These effects intensified in models adjusted for childhood enuresis, cruelty to animals, parental abandonment, deviant sexual behaviors, poor self-image, and sexual problems to 559%, 326%, and 849%, respectively. The adverse childhood experiences framework is a systematic way to organize the criminogenic developmental sequela in sexual homicide.

Developmental trajectories of offenders convicted of fraud: A follow-up to age 50 in a Dutch conviction cohort.

This study describes the criminal careers of offenders convicted of fraud, distinguishing different career dimensions such as intermittency, versatility and specialization. Results indicate that most fraud offenders are versatile in the sense that they also have significant criminal records for other serious offending (that is, not fraud). At the same time they are also specialized in fraud. When we examine developmental trajectories of serious offending and next explore patterns of fraud for the groups identified, we find that offenders in our sample represent a heterogeneous group and that the classic divide between typical financial (for example, white-collar) offenders and common criminals does not apply to the majority of our sample.

Criminal Careers and Cognitive Scripts: An Investigation into Criminal Versatility

"Criminal careers" denotes ways in which offenders develop specialisms and versatility, but studies linking delinquency to social skills deficits have not attempted to explore cognitive, internalised processes by which such "careers" might be chosen. This study investigated criminal minds via script theory: "internal" scripts are used to guide behaviour, "situational" scripts are knowledge of everyday events, and "personal" scripts are a sequence of actions towards a desired goal. This research investigated whether criminal career offenders develop situational scripts for offending and whether such situational scripts express an internalised identity, which manifests as a personal script. Thematic analysis of data derived from "criminal career offenders" supports the notion of criminal situational scripts, with emergent themes considered evidence of personal scripts.

Young People’s Offending Careers and Criminal Justice Contact: A Case for Social Justice

This article draws on an analysis of young people’s offending careers. The research was initiated against a backdrop of changing discourse around youth justice in Ireland with a shift towards prevention of offending and diversion from the criminal justice system. Locating crime and criminal justice contact within a biographical context indicated that participants’ offending, and lives generally, was bound up in marginalized transitions to adulthood, and embedded within social and economic environments characterized by high deprivation. The findings support a further shift in focus towards addressing social injustice as a necessary prerequisite to tackle the origins of youth offending.

An Examination of Escalation in Burglaries Committed by Sexual Offenders.

Research in the field of sexual aggression often assumes escalation in the criminal careers of sexual offenders. Sexual offenders are thought to begin their criminal careers with non-contact sexual offenses or non-sexual offenses and then escalate to more serious crimes, specifically sexual violence. The commission of one crime in particular--burglary--has been found to be a predictor of future violence in sexual offenders. The present study investigated the nature and extent of escalation in the criminal histories of 161 sex offenders who committed at least two burglaries. Six types of escalations were considered: type of burglary, occupancy, violence, weapon, frequency, and the victim-offender relationship. Escalators and non-escalators were compared, differences between the groups were reviewed, and the cumulative effect of various forms of escalation was analyzed. Results indicated that escalators and non-escalators could be differentiated on a number of important dimensions that might assist in the earlier detection of subsequently more dangerous offenders.

Race, Ethnicity, Threat, and the Designation of Career Offenders

Florida statutes allow for the application of enhanced sentences to defendants designated as “Career Offenders.” The application of these laws is discretionary and as such, prosecutors seek the designation for a fraction of the defendants who qualify. Utilizing Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling, this paper examines whether individual attributes, such as race and ethnicity, impact an individual's likelihood of receiving the Career Offender designation for 13,704 males sentenced to prison between 2002 and 2004. The second-level analysis incorporates county characteristics into the equation and tests whether these predictors have either a direct or a cross-level effect on the relationship. The broad theoretical framework that guides the present research is grounded in the social threat and social control perspective, which argues that minorities on both the individual and aggregate levels may be perceived as threatening in ways that can mobilize or enhance social controls.

Vocational Interventions with Offenders

Vocational interventions for criminal justice populations have existed for years in various forms, but have traditionally not used an interdisciplinary approach and have shown significant limitations in effectiveness. This article informs scholars and practitioners of interdisciplinary research on vocational interventions and how knowledge from criminal justice literature and career theory can be combined so that relevant and effective theory-based vocational interventions for offenders and ex-offenders can be developed. Such an integrative approach would address the limitations of existing approaches and would foster the development of vocational interventions that go beyond what is offered currently. A model summarizing this integrative approach is provided. This article concludes by presenting understudied areas in offender career development, such as offenders’ willingness to work, illegal employment as a form of work, and the implications of a criminal record on career development. Continued research in these areas can promote effective rehabilitative efforts that meet the vocational needs of this marginalized population.

The Curious Case of George

This research is a case study of a “semiretired” career criminal. The subject, George, an 82-year-old career offender admits to over 200 arrests and numerous convictions between age 16 and the present. He has served over 20 years in state and federal prisons for racketeering, arson, burglary, and other serious offenses. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with George regularly over a 6-month period. Despite his openness regarding his criminal career and attachment to the criminal subculture in which he flourished, he readily made use of techniques of neutralization and despite his reputation as a local criminal godfather, considers himself a good person. George was unusual in that he was proud of his criminal reputation but also thought of himself and wished to be perceived by others as a good person. The use of neutralizations allowed him to maintain these two diametrically opposed perceptions of self. The authors conclude that due to over 60 years of cognitive distortions through the use of techniques of neutralizations, the subject has compartmentalized his diametrically opposed perceptions of self to the point where he believes them both. The authors borrow the term doublethink from George Orwell’s book, 1984, to describe this phenomenon.

Explaining Criminal Careers: Implications for Justice Policy

1. Criminal Career Research, Mathematical Models, and Testing Quantitative Predictions from Theories 2. An Analysis of the Offenders Index 3. The Theory and a Simple Model 4. Criminal Careers of Serious, Less Serious, and Trivial Offenders 5. Is Age the Primary Influence on Offending? 6. Characteristics of Individuals 7. Applications for Managing the Criminal Justice System 8. Criminal Policy Implications 9. Summary and Conclusions Appendix: Mathematical Notes