Criminal Career Research: A Review of Recent Evidence

A criminal career may consist of a single, undiscovered, venial lapse or a high level of sustained involvement in serious crime. Modern criminal career research derives largely from policy concerns about the likely crime preventive effects of incapacitative sanctions. Consequently, criminal career research tends to be more concerned with sustained than with venial criminal careers. If a small number of individuals commits a disproportionate number of serious criminal acts and if they can be identified and confined early in their careers, the argument goes, significant numbers of serious criminal offenses could be prevented. The leading criminal career research, much of it unpublished, has produced useful results, but cannot give much guidance on sanctions use to policy makers. Less than 15 percent of the general population will be arrested for commission of a felony and about one-half of these will never be arrested for another. Very roughly, only 5 percent of the population will demonstrate the beginnings of a sustained criminal career, but once three contacts with the police have been recorded, the probability of another will be very high. Criminal careers preponderantly begin early in life, commonly between the ages of fourteen and seventeen and often for expressive reasons. Serious criminal careers are often continued for instrumental reasons. Repetitive offenders tend not to specialize narrowly; the mix of offenses may shift from one stage of a sustained criminal career to the next, often increasing in seriousness, but not as a consistent rule. Offense rates depend on the offender's age, his criminal record, and the offense type committed. Arrest, conviction, and incarceration rates increase as the career advances, unlike offense rates, which tend to decline. Continuing criminal careers are not necessarily marked by a growth in sophistication and income or of geographic range. Although it is clear that a small portion of the universe of known offenders commits a disproportionate number of offenses, the data accumulated to date on criminal careers do not permit us, with acceptable confidence, to identify career criminals prospectively or to predict the crime reduction effects of alternative sentencing policies.