Past Offending Research Articles

Partial Identification and Robust Treatment Choice: An Application to Young Offenders

Abstract This paper applies recently developed methods to robust assessment of treatment outcomes and robust treatment choice based on nonexperimental data. The substantive question is whether young offenders should be assigned to residential or nonresidential treatment in order to prevent subsequent recidivism. A large data set on past offenders exists, but treatment assignment was by judges and not by experimenters, hence counterfactual outcomes are not identified unless one imposes strong assumptions. The analysis is carried out in two steps. First, I show how to compute identified bounds on expected outcomes under various assumptions that are too weak to restore conventional identification but may be accordingly credible. The bounds are estimated, and confidence regions that take current theoretical developments into account are computed. I then ask which treatment to assign to future offenders if the identity of the best treatment will not be learned from the data. This is a decision problem under am...

Illuminating the Labeling Impact of Incarceration: Life-Course Perspectives of Young Offenders’ Pathways in Comparison to Non-Offenders in Nineteenth-Century Northern Sweden

In history, little is known about what happened to past offenders upon release. The labeling theories propose that the label bore negative consequences for those defined as criminals. To find evidence of this, young offenders’ life courses after incarceration in a booming sawmill area in nineteenth-century northern Sweden are examined. Prison registers are investigated and linked to Swedish parish records digitized by the Demographic Data Base (DDB), Umea University. These historical sources allow for life-course perspectives that have been recently developed in modern criminology and other fields. Event-history analyses of a matched data set including non-criminals help to detect whether offenders suffered markedly from their criminal label, through examining four demographic events: relocation, marriage, career and death. Achieving this label had some negative impact on the pathways of individuals, but it was not equal to crisis and did not change the course of life dramatically. However, criminal men were less successful on the labor market and the few female offenders appear to be most vulnerable because this label meant they especially transgressed their gendered expectations. Nevertheless, finding that incarceration did not ruin the future prospects of young people challenges the stigma emphasized by some labeling concepts. It seems as if offenders confronted social exclusion to a limited extent and were governed by tolerant attitudes and a prosperous labor market.

The Use Of The Polygraph In The Community Supervision Of Sex Offenders

Encouraging disclosure of information is an essential task of probation intervention with sex offenders. Here, Daniel Wilcox, Dan Sosnowski and David Middleton argue that the polygraph, or lie detector, can help to achieve this aim, and play an important role in assessing risk, treating and managing sex offenders on probation or licence. They examine the use of the polygraph in the USA, and give some early reflections on the first UK polygraph trial, held in the West Midlands Probation Service area. The results suggest that workers were able to obtain more detailed information about index offences, further diclosures of past sexual offending, and more information about short-term risk and non-compliance with conditions of probation orders.

MULTIPLE ROUTES TO DELINQUENCY? A TEST OF DEVELOPMENTAL AND GENERAL THEORIES OF CRIME

General and developmental theories take very different approaches to the study of crime. General theories, like Gottfredson and Hirschi's recent theory of self‐control, assume that crime can be explained with reference to a single or very limited set of explanatory factors. In addition, some general theories, like Gottfredson and Hirschi's, adopt a very static approach to causality. They presume that prior offending has no causal effect on current offending once time‐stable criminal propensity is controlled, and they assume that the relationship between changes in life events and changes in offending are spurious. Recent developmental theories, like those proposed by Moffitt and Patterson, stand in stark contrast to Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory. These developmental theories are far more complex because they relax the assumption of general causality and adopt a more dynamic position about the relationship between changes in life circumstances and changes in crime. In this article we examine whether the added complexity of a developmental theory of crime is preferable to the more parsimonious general/static theory of Gottfredson and Hirschi. We find that the evidence is not faithful to either a pure static/general model or a pure developmental model of crime. Our findings appeal to a theoretical middle ground that assumes that pathways to crime are more similar than different and that allows for a causal effect of past offending and life experiences on future criminality. When viewed in the context of previous studies that have assessed offending over the life course, our results suggest that further theoretical development can profit from studying issues of measurement and sample composition.

SPECIALIZATION IN VIOLENCE: EVIDENCE OF A CRIMINAL SUBGROUP*

This study examines the criminal arrest records of a Danish birth cohort of 28,884 men to test the hypothesis that specialization exists for violent offending. Property offending is included for comparison. Specialization in violence is found to exist for offenders with more than three arrests, and specialization in property offending, for offenders with fewer than four arrests. Knowledge of past violent offending is discussed as a potentially valuable part of the predictive equation of future violence.

The Historian’s Role in the Making of Public Policy

Some eight or nine years ago, David Nixon—a political scientist from Penn State University—was struck by the open dumping of industrial wastes into Pittsburgh’s rivers. Research on the topic indicated that under terms of the River and Harbor Refuse Act of 1899, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintained responsibility for issuing permits to private concerns for the discharge of wastes into the nation’s waterways. The Act had also been successfully employed by the Justice Department in prosecuting a handful of past offenders. When the Corps’ district office in Pittsburgh denied any knowledge about such permits, David and a biologist friend began taking water samples from the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. Subsequent chemical analyses of more than 400 samples verified the polluted condition of the stream caused by certain industrial sources. Upon taking his evidence to the district U.S. Attorney’s office, David Nixon persuaded Richard Thornburgh to file charges which were upheld by the federal district court in 1971—although final resolution would not come until years later. The suit eventually involved the Pennsylvania Chemical Corporation, U.S. Steel, Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, and Jones & Laughlin Steel, but David Nixon’s goal was to induce the government to enforce clear violations of existing law. In that regard, President Richard Nixon revived enforcement of the 1899 Refuse Act by Executive Order in December, 1971, and the “permit program” became the basis of enforcement for compliance with the Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. For more than 20 years prior to 1971, federal efforts to abate water pollution struggled to find some means to enforce compliance and in the process expended well over a billion dollars, without any apparent knowledge of the 1899 law.