Who Makes the FBI’s Weekly Top Ten of Serious Offenders? Gender and Age Differences

• In Event: Gendered Processes of Criminalization

Abstract

We extend the scarce research on gender and age differences on “really” serious forms of crime as enumerated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in weekly (Friday) press releases in which the FBI identified ten criminal cases as denoting the week’s most serious or newsworthy. Press release also described the criminal case (e.g., offense type; illicit proceeds) and identified the offenders involved including their gender, age, and nature of involvement or role in the crime. We extracted information from the press releases and from added secondary sources to examine gender and age effects on serious criminal offending including prevalence, the nature of their involvement (most cases involved multiple offenders/conspiracies), and illicit profit or gain. Findings revealed large gender differences in prevalence and type of involvement, along with spread-out age distributions among both male and female offenders. Implications for research and theory on the age- and gender-crime relation(s) more broadly are discussed within.

Authors

• Darrell Steffensmeier, Pennsylvania State University

• Jonathan Uhl, Carlow University