Delinquency Careers: Innocents, Desisters, and Persisters

Abstract

The Philadelphia birth cohort study's finding that 6 percent of the boys born in Philadelphia in 1945 experienced 52 percent of the cohort's arrests stimulated a variety of research and policy initiatives including, recently, those relating to selective incapacitation. Results from three other longitudinal delinquency studies-from London; Racine, Wisconsin; and Marion County, Oregon-parallel those of the Philadelphia study. A high percentage, typically at least one-third, of cohort members are arrested or convicted. Of these, many have only one or a small number of official contacts with the criminal justice system. A small percentage have six or more contacts, and for these the probability of subsequent recidivism, after any contact, is approximately 80 percent. The prospective identification of these chronic offenders could have significant crime reduction impact. Most incapacitation research has, however, involved retrospective, not prospective, identification of chronic offenders and has been characterized by high false positive rates. The London study, by contrast, identified seven variables that are apparent by age ten (such as IQ, family background factors, and behavior problems in school) and that may permit prospective identification of a substantial number of chronic offenders. The prediction results closely match the results of predictions based on a theoretical model that uses aggregate recidivism data to partition a cohort into three groups: innocents, who have no offending record, desisters, who have a low recidivism probability, and persisters, who have a high recidivism probability. The results suggest the possibility of early discrimination between more and less serious offenders and also support the view that the rise in recidivism probability with increasing involvement in crime results from a changing mix of desisters and persisters among the offenders.