Alex R. Piquero – författare

This second edition book advances knowledge about criminal careers throughout life. It presents new results from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD), which is a unique longitudinal study of the development of offending from age 10 to age 61. Previous results obtained in the CSDD are reviewed, and then new findings from official criminal records up to age 61 are presented: on offending at different ages, continuity in offending, ages of onset, and criminal career duration. The number of offenders and offenses between ages 50 and 61 is noteworthy. The book then presents results on self-reported offending in different age ranges up to 48: on prevalence, frequency, continuity, and comparisons with official records that suggest that official records only capture the tip of the iceberg of offending. It then analyzes different trajectories of official offending up to age 61 and shows to what extent they could be predicted by childhood risk factors. New results from the CSDD in the last 10 years are then presented, followed by a discussion of the relevance of all the findings for criminological theories and public policies such as early intervention. This book should be of great interest not only to academics but also to policy makers and practitioners who are concerned with crime.  

Offending from Childhood to Late Middle Age is a timely volume by leading researchers in Life Course Criminology, which reports new findings from The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, a prospective longitudinal survey of 411 South London males first studied at age 8 in 1961. The main aim of the study is to advance knowledge about criminal careers up to age 56.

At the time of these most recent findings, forty-two percent of the males were convicted, with an average ten-year conviction career. Only seven percent of the males accounted for half of all convictions. Almost all of the males (93 percent) reported committing an offense in four age ranges, compared with 29 percent who were convicted at these ages. There were on average of 39 self-reported offenses per conviction. Group-based trajectory analyses indicated that, while there were distinct groups of offenders who followed different age-crime trajectories between ages 10 and 56, five groups best characterized the criminal careers of the men, with two groups, high adolescence peak and high rate chronic, exhibiting the most offending. Also, the offending trajectories were predicted by individual and environmental childhood risk factors, with the most chronic offenders (to age 56) having the most extreme scores on childhood risk. Based on these results, risk assessment instruments  could be developed and risk-focused prevention could be implemented in early childhood, including parent training, pre-school intellectual enrichment programs and home visiting programs, in order to prevent chronic styles of offending from being initiated.

This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, especially those with an interest in life course criminology and crime prevention, while also being of use as a research framework for other studies.​ It will also be of interest to researchers in sociology, psychology, and other social sciences,as well as policy makers and practitioners.

“This is a ‘must read’ for anyone seeking to understand the development and course of crime from childhood through adulthood.  Comparative analyses of officially recorded and self-reported offending and analyses of the predictive power of childhood risks to distinguish offending trajectories are important contributions of this new milestone in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development.”

J. David Hawkins, Ph.D., Endowed Professor of Prevention, Social Development Research Group, School of Social Work, University of Washington

“For more than four decades the Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development has been a guiding light for research on what has come to be called developmental criminology. This latest installment is still another demonstration of the importance of this seminal study.”Daniel S. Nagin, Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University

This Brief examines criminal careers by providing the most extensive and comprehensive investigation to date on the official offending, self-reported offending, and trajectories of offending of the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS) participants.  The PYS is a longitudinal study, which was initiated in 1987, and involves repeated follow-ups on several community cohorts (starting in grades 1, 4, and 7) of inner-city boys in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  This Brief covers the Youngest and Oldest PYS cohorts (which had the most follow-up and most data available) from ages 10-30. It provides the most complete descriptive analyses of the criminal careers of these males to date.  

The three cohorts are commonly referred to as the Youngest, Middle, and Oldest cohorts, respectively.  Consistent with several prior publications with the PYS data (Loeber et al., 2008), this book focuses only on data from the Youngest and Oldest cohorts as these cohorts were followedup the most frequently and have the longest time window of data available. 

It will be of interest to researchers in Criminology and Criminal Justice, as well as related fields like Sociology, Developmental Psychology, Social Policy, and Education.