Pathways and Crime Prevention

Alan France, Ross Homel

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843922025
• eBook ISBN: 9781134019465
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is concerned with the development of prevention policies and approaches that involve intervention 'early' in the lives of children, young people and their families, and explores new evidence that has been emerging from longitudinal and developmental prevention research. It addresses a number of key challenges, arguing that by broadening the research questions and exploring contributions from a wider range of disciplines our understanding of both the pathways into and out of crime and the type of interventions that might work will be greatly enhanced.

Part I

Understanding pathways into and out of crime

Introduction

Alan France and Ross Homel

All the authors in this section have a common interest in pathways research and in its implications for prevention policy and practice, but there are widely divergent interpretations of what a ‘pathway’ is and differing views on the kind of theoretical lens through which the concept should be viewed. Probably all authors, regardless of their theoretical stance, would agree with Jeanette Lawrence when she states in Chapter 2 (p. 30): ‘The pathway is a useful metaphor for prevention strategists, because it assists social scientists to organise information about individual lives into coherent and interpretable patterns.’ However, not all would accept the term ‘developmental pathway’ despite the non-deterministic, whole-of-life and socially embedded notion of pathways that Lawrence (consistent with thinking in contemporary developmental psychology) outlines in her chapter. Indeed the terms ‘development’ and ‘developmental’ are highly controversial in some quarters (e.g. Hil 1999).

Perhaps Sampson and Laub (2005a) in their recent critique of the developmental criminology paradigm best express the main concerns of the critics. Their paper is published in special volume 602 of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, November 2005, which consists entirely of papers presenting different sides of the debate on how we should think about and do research on ‘development’ in criminology. Sampson and Laub question the notion of developmentally distinct groups that have unique causes, a central feature of the famous typology introduced by Terrie Moffitt (1993) that distinguishes life-course persistent from adolescent-limited offenders. As they state in a related paper, developmental accounts tend to assume ‘pre-programming’ that leads to a view of the life course as ‘an unwinding, an unfolding, or an unrolling of what is fundamentally “already there”’ (Sampson and Laub 2005b: 178). Sampson and Laub acknowledge that some developmentalists emphasise social interactions, but they argue that developmental models nevertheless remain limited because they accord insufficient weight to human agency and to ‘random developmental noise’, as well as to the turning points embedded in institutional transitions that so characterised the pathways of the sample of Glueck men that they studied (Sampson and Laub 1993).

A number of the chapters in this book add to the North American debate, first by addressing the relationship between individual pathways and social context or social structure. Jacqueline Goodnow explores the ‘available paths/routes/opportunities/maps’ that help structure and influence pathways into and out of crime, a theme that we also develop in our chapter by distinguishing societal access routes from individual developmental pathways. We argue for greater awareness of social structure, political action and localised cultural influence, while Jacqueline highlights additional ways of theorising context as ‘activities/routines/cultural practices’. Jeanette Lawrence, on the other hand, argues for recognition of a life-course perspective that explores the intra-individual and inter-individual aspects of ‘experience’ as critical to understanding the different pathways into and out of crime.

A second way the present set of chapters contributes to current debates relates to the relationship between risk factors and offending. Pathways research and developmental criminology in particular have, over the previous 20 years, been much influenced by the risk-factor paradigm (Farrington 1994). Three chapters directly challenge the dominance of this approach, raising questions about the ways it has come to construct the ‘problem’ in particular ways that limit our thinking. Kaye Haw, for example, is interested in how the concept of ‘risk factor’ has become a ‘generative metaphor’ which has lifted the concept to mythological status in the UK, especially among policy- makers and practitioners with power to intervene in the lives of children.

Robert MacDonald and Hazel Kemshall and her colleagues take a different approach. MacDonald draws upon data from his qualitative longitudinal study in the UK to show how risk-factor analysis has been unable to explain the complexity of pathways for young people with difficult lives. He argues, similar to Sampson and Laub, that even though many young people may well have signs of risk, the future is far less predictable than claimed in the risk-factor model. As he says, ‘stuff happens, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse and sometimes with unclear, equivocal outcomes’ (p. 123), leaving the question of predictability uncertain. Hazel Kemshall and her colleagues explore the conceptualisation of risk in late modern society, arguing that the dominance of ‘artefact’ approaches to risk analysis is limited and that social constructionist approaches have much to offer in trying to make sense of how young people defined as ‘at risk’ become involved in offending.

Don Weatherburn and Bronwyn Lind engage with the North American debate in an entirely different way, by taking the fight directly onto territory carved out by Robert Sampson in an influential series of papers on the concept of collective efficacy (e.g. Sampson 2004; Sampson et al. 1997). Weatherburn and Lind argue in contrast to Sampson that the crucial link between structural factors like poverty and crime is the capacity of parents to parent effectively, and not the collective efficacy of residents in an area to intervene to maintain order. If this argument is correct then neighbourhood-level interventions should be accorded a lower priority than approaches that strengthen families and support parents. The policy choice is a real one but as the authors emphasise, it needs to be informed by research that more rigorously compares the explanatory power of both proposed pathways.

Methods

The methods we use as scholars to do pathways or prevention research are a core theme of this book. In many respects the debates in the special volume of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences revolve around issues of method, particularly the appropriateness of the search for typologies of offender trajectories using the semi-parametric group-based methods developed by Nagin (1999). While not always focused on statistical methods, the chapters in this book also aim to provide alternative perspectives on how we might explore pathways.

Kemshall and her colleagues, drawing upon a wide range of work within the ESRC research network, argue for a synthesis of epistemological positions within social science. They suggest that such a synthesis should be based on the recognition of the importance of using diverse methods to investigate the complex social processes underpinning pathways. They summarise the results of three research projects that explored the influence of some classic risk factors from a strong constructionist position (school exclusion), a moderate constructionist position (social capital and risk-taking), and a weak constructionist position (substance use). The issue for these authors is one of ‘fit’ across differing levels of analysis rather than ‘grand explanatory theory’ (p. 105).

We also argue in our own chapter for a form of methodological pluralism, one that values and centralises the voice of young people. Previous research in this field has paid limited attention to what the young themselves have to say about pathways, and such a research strategy could provide valuable insights into the access routes they perceive as available to them as well as the barriers to moving forward in their lives. Rob MacDonald goes further in arguing for the return to ethnography as a tool for achieving a more qualitative, biographical and historically informed understanding of the diversity of social processes that influence the choices young people make. He emphasises, for example, the value of interviewees’ retrospective biographical accounts in exploring the impact of events on transitions, as well as the crucial importance of understanding risks presented by the historical and spatial contexts, such as the historically unprecedented influx of cheap heroin in the mid-1990s.

Jacqueline Homel's study of bullying at school and in post-school settings, especially the workplace, illustrates the value of listening to the voices of young people and the value of the biographical and qualitative approach to pathways research advocated by MacDonald. Using extensive qualitative data from focus groups with young adults, Jacqueline explores at some depth the relationships between different forms of bullying at different ages, and the complex nature of the interactions between developmental transitions and social settings (school, home, workplace and the larger economic and political contexts). She also highlights some specific methodological problems that arise when measuring social contexts and when comparing behaviours in different settings at different life phases.

Implications for prevention

Across these first seven chapters there are a range of implications for prevention work. Don Weatherburn and Bronwyn Lind explore the links between poverty and violence, illustrating the potential of pathways research to influence prevention practice by, in this case, contrasting a ‘collective efficacy pathway’ with a ‘family support pathway’. Other chapters in this part of the book have equally important implications for prevention thinking. We have already noted that the ideas Jacqueline Goodnow proposes for describing social contexts have important preventive implications by drawing attention to when in the life course we might intervene and how we might adopt preventive strategies to make access routes available for disadvantaged young people and keep them open.

Jeanette Lawrence's theoretical analysis of developmental pathways similarly links development with prevention by taking as a starting point observations and analyses of typical and atypical patterns of experience in people's lives. While accepting the main elements of Sampson and Laub's (2005a) critique of developmental criminology, she recommends that prevention planning be based on the kind of fine-grained analysis of trajectories carried out by Nagin and Tremblay (2005), with careful attention to the distinctive strategies required for dealing with beginnings, middles and ends of patterns.

From a different perspective, an implication of the work of Hazel Kemshall and her colleagues in exploring at some depth the meaning of school exclusion to the young people involved could be to question the preventive benefits of a simple-minded programme that focused on exclusion without attending both to how schools construct the phenomenon of ‘exclusion’ and to the mismatch between students’ needs and the school experience.

Paul Mazerolle and Jacqueline Homel use contrasting methodologies to explore continuities in victimisation across the life course, thus adding to the more common emphasis on continuities in offending. Paul and his colleagues from the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission explore continuities in sexual victimisation from childhood to adulthood in a sample of offenders, finding both high levels of victimisation and high levels of continuity. Their multivariate analyses of risk factors include a range of personal, lifestyle and relationship variables. Their results favour a ‘heterogeneity model’ over a ‘state dependent or experiential model’, which means that stable characteristics of individuals or their environments are more important in promoting continuity than more ephemeral lifestyle-related contingencies. Long-term developmental rather than situational prevention approaches therefore seem to be called for.

Jacqueline Homel's study of bullying is relevant to both victimisation and offending in a range of contexts across childhood and early adulthood. On the basis of her research Jacqueline proposes a number of specific prevention strategies, including timing interventions to take maximum advantage of the potential of life transitions (such as leaving school) to also be turning points for victims or offenders, and focusing prevention programmes on the norms that operate in workplaces and other settings, not just on individual bullies and victims.

It is clear from these examples that pathways research has plenty to say about prevention. What is needed now is a new generation of preventive initiatives using innovative methodologies that explicitly build on previously unexplored insights from pathways studies.

References

Farrington, D.P. (1994) ‘Early developmental prevention of juvenile delinquency’, Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 4: 209–27.

Hil, R. (1999) ‘Beating the developmental path: Critical notes on the “Pathways to Prevention Report”’, Youth Studies Australia, 18(4): 49–50.

Moffitt, T. (1993) ‘Adolescent-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy’, Psychological Review, 100: 674–701.

Nagin, D.S. (1999) ‘Analyzing developmental trajectories: Semi-parametric, group-based approach’, Psychological Methods, 4: 39–177.

Nagin, D.S. and Tremblay, R.E. (2005) ‘Developmental trajectory groups: Fact or a useful statistical fiction?’, Criminology, 43: 873–904.

Sampson, R. (2004) ‘Neighborhood and community: Collective efficacy and community action’, New Economy, 11: 106–13.

Sampson, R.J. and Laub, J.H. (1993) Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sampson, R.J. and Laub, J.H. (2005a) ‘A life-course view of the development of crime’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 602: 12–45.

Sampson, R.J. and Laub, J.H. (2005b) ‘A General Age-graded Theory of Crime: Lessons Learned and the Future of Life-course Criminology’, in David P. Farrington (ed.), Integrated Developmental and Life-course Theories of Offending. Advances in Criminological Theory, Vol. 14. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 165–181.

Sampson, R., Raudenbush, S. and Earls, F. (1997) ‘Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy,’ Science, 277: 918–24.

Chapter 1

Societal access routes and developmental pathways: Putting social structure and young people's voice i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: Pathways and crime prevention: a difficult marriage?
• Part 1: Understanding pathways into and out of crime
• Part 2: Prevention theory, policy and practice
• Index