Co-Offender Ties and the Criminal Career: The Implications of Group Membership for Persistence and Desistance

• In Event: The Structure and Character of Offender Ties

Abstract

Many offenses are committed by multiple offenders. The challenge in studying group crime is to consider the larger group context of offending, beyond the individuals who commit the immediate offense. The objectives of the current study are threefold: to provide estimates of (1) the effects of connections among offenders on the length of group offending careers and the stability of offending groups, (2) the length of individual offending careers in a group context, and (3) the relationship between arrest and the individual offender’s positioning within a group for the offending patterns of connected co-offenders. An offender network is constructed from an affiliation network framework and social network analysis is applied to estimate subgroups and characteristics of subgroups. From there, we propose unique measures of group longevity and stability for examining group offending, aggregating individual offense characteristics to the subgroup-level. We then examine the impact of group membership on individual-level offending. Finally, group positioning is examined in a multi-level framework to examine the effects of offender betweenness centrality and arrest on group-level offending patterns.

Authors

• Robert Hutchison, Pennsylvania State University

• Brendan Lantz, Pennsylvania State University