5.4 CURRENT DEFINITIONS AND OPERATIONALISATIONS OF PERSISTENT OFFENDING
Without an agreed definition of persistent offending, it is difficult to compare the findings of current research. Some of the difficulty in reaching agreement is that many conceptual questions regarding the phenomena remain unanswered. As it is, there is no consensus regarding whether persistent offenders require an early onset of offending, must offend frequently, or have long criminal careers. Historically, the lack of sufficient guidance has led researchers to rely on their discretion when identifying persistent offending. As a result, numerous operationalisations of persistence have arisen.
To demonstrate this point, we searched the existing research literature for definitions and operationalisations of persistent offending. We based our search on two criteria. First, we only examined definitions and operationalisations that were specifically designed to identify persistent offenders and their synonyms (life-course persistent offenders, career criminals, chronic offenders, and habitual offenders). Second, we only sought operationalisations that included measures of offending (as opposed to the broader construct of antisocial behavior), such as convictions, court appearances, and arrests. We found seven definitions of persistent
offending and one statistical model that is equivalent to a definition. Persistent offenders have also been identified by 38 different operationalisations. These operationalisations can be divided into three conceptual groups based on one of three dimensions of the criminal career: duration, onset, and frequency. Table 1 summarises the results of our search. For comparison purposes, where available, we also included the prevalence rates, mean offence frequency, mean criminal career durations, and mean onset ages for the offenders identified by these operationalisations in the research literature.
Definitions that measure persistent offending by the duration of the criminal career include “offending before and during adulthood” (Farrington et al. 2009), and “offending across multiple stages of the life-course” (Sampson and Laub 2009). These definitions have been operationalised as “offending before and after the age of 21” (Pulkkinen et al. 2009), and “offending every decade from the age of 10 to 60” (Sampson and Laub, 2003). Persistence has also been defined through onset age, and has been operationalised as “committing three offences before the age of 14” (Hagell and Newburn, 1994), and “at least one offence committed between 10-12 and 12-14 years of age” (Hay and Forrest 2009)”. Furthermore, persistence, as measured through offence frequency, include definitions such as “the most frequent offenders” (Piquero et al. 2007), and “chronic offenders” (McGloin and Stickle 2011), and has been operationalised as “the ten percent most frequent offenders” (Piquero et al. 2007), and “those who have committed five or more offences” (McGloin and Stickle 2011).
Nagin’s (1999) Group-Based Trajectory Model (GBTM) is another common method for identifying persistent offenders. Despite the critiques and limitations of the method (see: Nagin and Tremblay (2005), Piquero (2007), and Skardhamer (2010)), the use of the GBTM in criminology has proliferated in recent times. This method uses a semi-parametric approach that places individuals into distinct developmental trajectories based on posterior probabilities
(Nagin 1999). One must keep in mind that these groups are not literal entities, but convenient approximations (Nagin and Tremblay 2005). Individual trajectories of offending often differ vastly from the aggregate group-based trajectories (Piquero 2007; Skardhamer 2010). Furthermore, the names and meanings given to these trajectories are determined by the researcher’s discretion and interpretation, and what would be considered a ‘persistent trajectory’ in one study may not be considered so in another. Nonetheless, trajectories with the longest active duration of offending tend to be labelled persistent (or chronic). How accurately these trajectories capture persistent offenders, relative to other identification methods, remains to be seen.
Table 10. Definitions and operationalisations of persistent offending cited in the literature and their available criminal career statistics.
DEFINITION OPERATIONALISATION DIMENSION OF THE
CRIMINAL CAREER AVERAGE FINDINGS PREVALENCE MEAN OFFENCE FREQUENCY MEAN DURATION (YEARS) ONSET (YEARS) Exceeds the average duration of a criminal career in a population-based sample
1. Criminal career at least 1SD longer than the mean criminal career in a population-based sample
Duration 8.7% (Whitten, McGee,
& Homel, 2017) - - -
Offending before and during adulthood
2. At least one offence before
and after 21 years of age Duration
17.3% (Farrington et al. 2009) 9.4% (Bergman and Andershed 2009) 29%(Pulkkinen et al, 2009) 8.1 (Farrington et al. 2009) 7.8(Bergman and Andershed 2009) 18.4 (Farrington et al. 2009) 15.7 (Farrington et al. 2009)
3. At least one offence before
and after 18 years of age Onset
26.6% (Remschmidt and Walter 2010)
20.4% (Carrington, Matarazzo, and DeSouza 2005)
7% (Piquero et al. 2002) 31.2% (Brennan, Grekin, and Mednick 1999)
8.1 (Carrington et al.
2005) - -
and after 20 years of age Estrada 2009) 2009)
5. First offence up to age 20 and then at least another offense at age 30+ Duration 2.8-13.5 %(Jolliffe et al. 2017a;2017b) 8.8-21.2(Jolliffe et al. 2017a;2017b) 16.7-29.9(Jolliffe et al. 2017a;2017b) 13-15.4 (Jolliffe et al. 2017a;2017b)
6. First offence up to age 20 and then at least another offense at age 40+
Duration 9.4% (Jolliffe et al. 2017a; 2017b)) 10.1(Jolliffe et al., 2017a; 2017b) 33.2(Jolliffe et al., 2017a; 2017b) 14.5(Jolliffe et al., 2017a; 2017b)
7. Registered offence before age 18, and another offence committed from 18 to 32
Duration 4.2% (Werner & Smith
1992) - - -
8. Registered offence from age 13 to 19 and again from 20 to 31
Duration 11% (Nillson & Estrada 2009)
9. Official police contact up to age 17, and again from 18 to 25
Duration 1.6% (LeBlanc & Freschette 1989)
10. Official police contact up to age 17, and again from 18 to 22
Duration
10.9% (Denno 1990) 3.7% (Carrington et al. 2005)
11. Official offence up to age 17 and again from 18 to 30
Duration 18.3% (Wolfgang et al. 1987)
12. First offence up to age 16 and then at least another offense at age 40+
Duration 6.9(Jolliffe et al., 2017) 12.2(Jolliffe et al., 2017) 35.4(Jolliffe et al., 2017)
14.4(Jolliffe et al., 2017)
13. First offence up to age 16 and then at least another offense at age 30+
Duration 9.3(Jolliffe et al., 2017) 11.5(Jolliffe et al., 2017) 30.9(Jolliffe et al., 2017)
14.3(Jolliffe et al., 2017)
14. Offend before age 18, arrested after age 24, and commit 19 or more offences
Frequency 19%(Brent et al. 2000) 27.7 (Brent et al. 2000) - 15.1 (Brent et al. 2000)
15. Offend before age 15, and offend once after age 17
Onset 4% (Piquero et al. 2002)
16. Offend before age 15, and offend at least twice after age 17
Onset
3%(Piquero et al. 2002) 25.3%(Turner, Hartman, and Bishop 2007)
- - -
17. Offend at least once at or before the age of 12, and again at or after the age of 18
Onset 2.4% (Bellair et al.
2014) - - ≤12 (Bellair, et al. 2014) Offending at multiple stages of the life-course
18. Offend at least once from
8-18, 19-31, and 32+ Duration -
40(Laub and Sampson
2003) - -
19. Offend at least once from 7-16, 17-24, 25-31, 32-
Duration 10%(Samposn and Laub
39, 40-49, and 50-59
20. Offend at least once before 15 years, 15 to 18 years, 18 to 21 years, and 21 to 30 years
Duration 6.2% (Kratzer and Hodgins 1999)
36.8 (Kratzer and
Hodgins 1999) - -
Early onset offenders
21. Offend at least once
between 10-12 and 12-14 Onset - - -
≤12 (Hay & Forrest 2009)
22. Three offences before the age of 14 (Hagell & Newburn, 1994)
Onset - - - -
23. At least two offences
before the age of 16 Onset -
17.7(Lobley, Smith, &
Haines 2012) - -
24. At least two convictions, one of which occurred before the age of 16 and resulted in incarceration or probation
Onset 14% (Decker and Salert 1986)
3.6-6 (Decker and
Salert 1986) - -
25. Offend at least twice
before the age of 18 Onset
19.9% (Stouthamer-
Loeber, et al. 2004) - - -
Frequent offenders
26. 10% most frequent
offenders Frequency
10%(Hagel and Newburn
1994) - - 15.9 (Piquero et al. 2007) 27. 5% most frequent offenders Frequency 5%
(Piquero and Lawton 2000; Piquero et al. 2007)
28. 5 or more offences
committed in 6 months Frequency - 18.2 (Hill et al. 2007) - -
29. Four or more convictions
resulting in incarceration Frequency -
9.8-10.1(Sigler and
Culliver 1990) - -
Resistance to increasing formal social control.
30. Repeat youth offenders Frequency - - - -
Chronic offenders
31. Five or more offences Frequency
22.8% (Kempf-Leonard et al. 2001) 33% (McGloin and Stickle 2011) 6.8% (Zara and Farrington 2016)
14 (McGloin and Stickle 2011) 10.5 (Zara and Farrington 2016) 19.2 (Zara and Farrington 2016) 14 (Zara and Farrington 2016)
32. Ten or more offences Frequency - - 21.37 (Zara and
Farrington 2016) -
33. 15 offences by the age of
25 Frequency
9%(McGloin and Stickle 2011)
29 (McGloin and Stickle
2011) - -
34. Youths under the age of 18 with 4 or more court referrals
Frequency 15.4% Jackowski, and Greenwald (Baglivio, 2014)
- - 12 (Baglivio, et al.
2014)
35. Youths aged between 12 to 15 who were arrested 15 times within an 18 month period
Note: Studies vary in sample sizes, populations, length of follow-ups, and measurements of offending. Dimensions of the criminal career were categorised as followed: Onset: Persistence identified before the age of 21. Duration: The identification of persistent offending requires offending across multiple life phases. Frequency: The identification of persistent offending explicitly requires a specific amount of offences to be committed.
36. Commit half of all
offences Frequency 7% (Farrington et al. 2006) ≤10 (Farrington et al. 2006) 19 (Farrington et al. 2006) 14(Farrington et al. 2006) Group-Based Trajectory Model
37. Very low rate chronic /
Low persister Frequency/onset /duration 11.3% (Piquero et al. 2007) 32% (Day et al. 2012) 4.9 (Piquero et al. 2007) 9.7 (Day et al. 2012) 14.5(Piquero et al. 2007 11.1 (Day et al. 2012) 17.2 (Piquero et al. 2007) 15.8 (Day et al. 2012)
38. High rate chronic / Moderate early persister / Moderate late persister / Chronic offenders / High rate persister Frequency/onset /duration 2.5% (Piquero et al. 2007) 1.6% (Blokland, et al. 2005) 5.7% (Fergusson and Horwood 2002). 19% (Day et al 2012) 19 (Piquero,et al. 2007) 141(Fergusson and Horwood 2002). 27.3-52.1 (Day et al. 2012) 22.3 (Piquero et al. 2007) 14.7-16.6 (Day et al. 2012) 13 (Piquero et al. 2007) 15.3 (Day et al. 2012)