The Life-Course of Serious and Violent Youth Grown Up

A Twenty-Year Longitudinal Study

Evan C. McCuish, Patrick Lussier, Raymond Corrado, Evan McCuish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032060811
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000430264
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Psychology

The Life-Course of Serious and Violent Youth Grown Up addresses significant gaps in the literature on youth involved in chronic, serious, and violent offending. Through longitudinal research and a long follow-up into adulthood, it challenges common perceptions about offending outcomes.

Using theoretically grounded, methodologically sophisticated and empirically driven research, this book culminates 20 years of data emerging from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study (ISVYOS). Initiated in 1998 to understand the origins of serious and violent youth offending, it follows 1,719 formerly incarcerated youth through adulthood and offers a contemporary perspective to questions about chronic offending in adolescence and social and offending outcomes in adulthood. The authors provide a theoretically framed examination of new findings from the ISVYOS regarding participants' justice system involvement, from onset to persistence to desistance. Most participants experienced continued involvement in the justice system in adulthood. However, contrary to past literature, ISVYOS findings challenge static descriptions of chronic offending and notions of the youth "super predator". ISVYOS findings also challenge assertions that experiences and risk factors in childhood and adolescence are not informative of adult justice system involvement. Together, the findings call for a more humanistic approach that recognizes that the complex lives of individuals formerly incarcerated in adolescence implies that desistance does not happen by default.

This book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers, and students of forensic psychology, developmental and life course criminology, youth justice, and violent crime.

Section II

Empirical answers to core DLC questions

In Chapter 1, we identified four pillars of the DLC paradigm: (1) criminal career research, (2) developmental criminology, (3) propensity theories, and (4) life-course criminology. This section focuses on the description and explanation of the justice system involvement of participants from the ISVYOS. Chapter 4 provides a description of different parameters of the criminal career across different stages of the life-course. Chapter 5 addresses questions about CPO by examining conviction trajectories across different developmental periods and risk factors in childhood/adolescence associated with CPO trajectories. Chapters 6–8 focus on the onset, persistence, and desistance criminal career parameters that have been the primary focus of developmental criminology, propensity theories, and life-course criminology, respectively. In sum, the purpose of this section is to address whether common knowledge and accepted conclusions about offending over the life-course are also true for youth who experienced incarceration as a result of involvement in serious and violent offending.

4 The justice system involvement of incarcerated youth: Old questions, new data

Introduction

Interest in criminal careers evolved from case studies from the 1930s that examined how individuals progressed to different types of offenses throughout the life-course (e.g., Shaw, 1930). This research emerged from the Chicago School and involved biographical descriptions of individuals who had a “career” in crime. Thus, this literature focused on the importance of mentorship and tutelage to the acquisition of skills facilitating the professionalization of crime perpetration (Sutherland, 1937). This sociobiographical approach (also see Chambliss, 1972; Maurer, 1940) generated interest in expanding the scope of criminal career studies to prospective longitudinal research using quantitative methods to examine individual-level patterns of offending. The Gluecks (1937) were among the first to use the term criminal careers to describe individual-level offending patterns in their longitudinal study of youth from the Boston, Massachusetts, area. Unlike the Chicago School’s sociobiographical approach to studying the professional career aspect of offending, the Gluecks were concerned with psychosocial factors that contributed to youth offending that persisted through adulthood.¹ It was about 40 years later that more precise definitions of criminal career parameters and hypotheses about their interconnectivity were made (Blumstein & Cohen, 1979). This research essentially moved away from the strict focus on “career criminals” and instead acknowledged the heterogeneity of offending patterns. The examination of the criminal career can apply to persons involved in a single offense or hundreds of offenses and has little to do with offending as an occupation.

The criminal career framework

Blumstein et al. (1982) defined the criminal career as the longitudinal sequence of an individual’s pattern of offending from first to last offense. This sequence includes four major dimensions: (1) participation, (2) frequency, (3) seriousness, and (4) length. Despite how others attempted to portray criminal career research (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1988), this framework did not consider that individuals involved in crime were career criminals destined for CPO. Rather, the different dimensions specified by the criminal career framework reflected the notion that there was variability in crime perpetration. In retrospect, the term “criminal career” was somewhat misleading. Unlike Sutherland’s work decades earlier, research on criminal careers did not refer to the idea of crime as a profession or a specialization, but simply that it had a beginning, a developmental course, and an end. The criminal career framework can help express the fact that most individuals’ involvement in crime represents a small portion of their life-course. Acknowledging differences in offending patterns is also one way of identifying who does not require formal intervention and who may benefit from assistance.

The first dimension, participation, distinguishes between those who do or do not engage in criminal behavior. It denotes the proportion of a sample that has perpetrated a crime, which is often referred to as prevalence. Within samples of justice-involved persons, where the prevalence of any offending is assumed to be 100%, participation in offending can be examined across different developmental stages to distinguish which age-stages are most or least likely to be associated with offending. The age of onset of offending is another parameter of this dimension and refers to the age at first offense. Developmental criminologists argued that an earlier age of onset was informative of severa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• SECTION I: Context
• SECTION II: Empirical answers to core DLC questions
• SECTION III: Reflections on the ISVYOS
• References
• Index