An Exploration of Persistence and Desistance in Offending: Accumulating Disadvantage?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research has consistently noted that a small group of offenders is responsible for a large proportion of all offenses and the bulk of serious and violent crimes. The investigation into factors that influence offending over the life course is noted to be especially important for this group of offenders, often labelled as life-course persistent or high-risk offenders, because of the risk they present to public safety. Yet, much of the research that considers factors related to offending patterns over the life course employs samples comprised of adolescents and young adults. To address this limitation, the current study examines elements of offending trajectories among a population of offenders from a large municipality in Alberta who have committed numerous violent offenses and have criminal careers of up to 55 years in length (N=411). These offenders ranged in age between 26 and 89 years. Quantitative and qualitative analytic strategies are used to first investigate the direct and indirect effects of the accumulation of multiple adversities in childhood on two key dimensions of a criminal career: career length and frequency of offending. A second component of the analysis considers an under-developed part of the process of desistance, intermittency in offending, or “crime-free gaps”. Given the role that bonds to institutions of informal social control are noted to play in exiting from a life of crime, I examine the effect of social bonds in adulthood on the time between offenses. Results indicate that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are directly related to criminal career length and indirectly related to frequency of offending through attachment to employment in adulthood; further, that social bonds to the institutions of work and marriage lengthen the gaps between offenses, thereby reducing the risk of reoffending over time. The qualitative analyses highlighted the importance of considering the variation over time in the presence and absence of bonds for both persistence and intermittency in offending. The theoretical and policy implications of the results are discussed, along with directions for future research in this area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".