Identifying Criminal Career Patterns of Sex Offenders

*Dalibor Dolezal and Ena Jovanovic*

### **Abstract**

Intense social and political changes in the past decades led to changes in crime rates and the way the public perceives crime. Although there is a concern about crime in general, there seem to be some types of offences that cause more distress to the general public than others, for example, sexual offences. They seem to receive significant amounts of public condemnation and represent the focus of many punitive policies. In order to understand criminality as an individual and a social problem, researchers began to study crime through the concept of criminal career. One of the ways of getting insight into this type of offenders is by exploring their criminal career referring to a longitudinal series of offences committed by a person which has a noticeable series of offences. The study of the criminal career of sexual offenders has the potential to bring new information to experts and legislators, contribute to a greater understanding of the continuity of transgression from adolescence to adulthood and ensure better knowledge of the occurrence of sexual misconduct, how it begins, how it develops over time and how it ends.

**Keywords:** criminal careers, offending, offending patterns, sex offenders, rape, child sexual abuse

#### **1. Introduction**

In a never-ending pursuit to understand individual criminality and how various social factors encourage or inhibit criminal activity, criminologists developed the concept of criminal careers [1, 2]. This concept emerged from the work of Alfred Blumstein [3], who aimed to quantify offending and improve the way criminology and other behavioural and social sciences make prediction and test empirical data. Using data from previous research, Blumstein et al. developed a concept of "criminal career" in order to develop a framework through which effective crime control policies could be developed [4]. Their understanding of the concept developed from indicating individual offending frequency (λ) calculated by determining the average number of crimes committed per year by active offenders (true frequency) measuring the individual arrest frequency (the average number of arrests per year of active offenders; measured frequency – the μ). They determined that λ and μ were linked by q, a probability of arrest following a crime (μ = λ ∗q) (μ = λ ∗q) [4].

At the same time, in the 1980s, the US showed an intense social and political focus on high crime rates and crime control. Due to the rise in violent crime, the US Government started a task force on violent crime which proposed increasing the federal role in the prosecution of violent crime, and other far-reaching changes in federal law including abolishing parole, expanding prisons, and restrictions

on sentencing discretion [5]. To oppose these retributive measures, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences organised a Panel in 1986, chaired by Alfred Blumstein, that focused on sharing knowledge and finding alternatives to this "tough on crime" policy [6].

The main focus of the Panel was to develop research on criminal careers, defined as "longitudinal sequence of offences committed by an individual" [3] and to distinguish "criminal careers" from a 'career criminal', i.e. "an extreme group of offenders who commit serious crimes at high rates over an extended period". A criminal career is often considered a total number of crimes with regard to the duration of offending while career criminals term refers to persistent offenders. In other words, anyone can have a criminal career while only those with the highest frequency of offending can be described as career criminals [7]. The Panel was particularly interested in whether information about an individual's criminal career (e.g. instant offence type, a record of prior offences, including any juvenile record, drug use) could help in determining criminal sanctions. Researchers on the Panel discussed the methodological, operational, and ethical challenges involved in using predictions about criminal careers in criminal justice decision making [5].

Central to the criminal career paradigm is that it recognises that individuals begin their criminal activity at some age, constitute a number of criminal offences, commit different types of criminal offences, and then desist or terminate offending. As a result, the approach to studying criminality through the concept of criminal careers emphasises the need to obtain data on why and when perpetrators start committing crimes, why they continue to offend, what is their frequency of offending, do they escalate and specialise in offending, and why and when they cease to offend [7].

Criminal career research has a somewhat complex organisation. It can be presented in several organising concepts that could be compared to a puzzle or branches on a tree [8]. At the beginning of the criminal career research, most researchers agreed that every criminal career has a beginning ("onset" or "initiation"), duration and end ("dropout", "desistance" or "termination") [9]. Additionally, criminal career concept is researched through four key dimensions participation in offending, the individual offending frequency, the seriousness of the offences, and career length. These dimensions let to a set of related constructs and questions for researchers to explore [10]. The division into these features helps to understand, describe, and contextualise the offender's criminal activity at a certain point in time [2].

Despite limitations and challenges, criminal career research shifted the focus from general to selective incapacitation strategies, trying to achieve the maximum possible crime reduction for the lowest possible cost [6]. Since its introduction to the criminological theoretical world, a significant amount of empirical, theoretical and policy-oriented research has been published [6] introducing new ways of looking at the crime phenomena such as age-crime curves [8], offending patterns, researching within-individual differences and differences between individuals [2, 6, 8]. Most importantly, investment in longitudinal research since the 1980s has contributed to creation of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (DLC) in the 1990s [4]. Essentially, DLC is concerned with the development of offending, risk and protective factors and the effects of life events on the development of an individual by documenting and explaining within individual changes in offending throughout life [4, 8]. Although DLC theories resulted from research on criminal careers, criminal career was never established as a theory, rather as one of the paradigms of DLC.

Most of the criminal career research is focused on in-depth research of the criminological problems closely connected to onset, duration, and desistance from offending. In other words, criminal career research gravitated towards answering

some important questions about general offending. However, little scholarly attention was given to sexual offences. Therefore, the field of sexual violence represent an important gateway to new insights and has much to offer to area of criminal career and life-course perspective.
