RT Article
T1 A longitudinal study of escalation in crime seriousness
JF Journal of quantitative criminology
VO 27
IS 2
SP 175
OP 196
A1 Liu, Jiayi
LA English
YR 2011
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1413278965
AB Escalation in crime seriousness over the criminal lifecourse continues to be an important issue to study in criminal careers. Quantitative research in this area has not yet been well developed owing to the difficulty of measuring crime seriousness and the complexity of escalation trajectories. In this paper we suggest that there are two types of escalation process—escalation associated with experience of the criminal justice process, and escalation associated with age and maturation. Using the 1953 birth cohort from the England and Wales Offenders Index followed up to 1999, and a recently developed seriousness scale of offenses, we constructed the individual sequences of seriousness scores from conviction to conviction. These individual sequences were then analyzed using a variety of longitudinal mixed models, with age, number of conviction occasions, sex and number of offenses used as covariates. The results suggest that ageing is associated with de-escalation whereas the number of conviction occasions are associated with escalation, with the two processes pulling in different directions. This conceptual framework helps to disentangle previously contradictory results in the escalation literature.
K1 Mixed effects models
K1 Longitudinal data analysis
K1 Aggravation
K1 Escalation
K1 Kriminelle Karriere
K1 Eskalation
K1 Längsschnittanalyse
K1 Methodenfragen
DO 10.1007/s10940-010-9102-x