Middle-class Offenders as Employees – Assessing the Risk:A 35-year Follow-up

A 35-year follow-up of a series of 317 middle-class offenders in England and Wales suggests that the dangers of employing offenders may be more limited than expected. Although 40% were subsequently convicted, only 8% were subsequently convicted of offenses that directly and adversely affected an employer. This work should challenge the “exaggerated fears” of employers. Interestingly, variables which normally predict subsequent criminal activity made no impact in trying to predict offenses against an employer

Developing Measures of Severity and Frequency of Reconviction

This report examines the scope for focusing on the seriousness and frequency of recidivism and presents methodology for determining how to measure offence seriousness, and how to measure frequency of offending. It also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of combining these two measures into a combined seriousness/frequency score. However, one needs to recognise that the task of providing alternative measures of recidivism is not simply a technical exercise, for there are both philosophical and practical issues to confront. Hence, while the main body of the report focuses largely on the feasibility of producing the alternative measures and provides some solid evidence of developing these approaches (sections 3-5), the philosophical issues – which embrace definitional, conceptual and moral concerns – are not overlooked (see section 2). Furthermore, some of the practical issues of introducing these measures are recognised in the final section (section 6). First, however, what are the stated aims and objectives of the work

Changing patterns of offending over 30 years

The focus of this contribution is on the changing patterns of offending among young people (aged 16–20 years) over time. Using six ‘birth cohorts’ aged 16–20 in the late 1960s, early 1970s, late 1970s, early 1980s, late 1980s, early 1990s and late 1990s, the study shows that crime participation – in terms of the proportions ever convicted – declined for both males and females. There has also been an overall shift from more ‘specialist’ criminal behaviour to more ‘versatile’ behaviour. While the gap between male and female offending is narrowing, the differences remain large. Although fewer young people are coming before the courts, the changing case mix has probably influenced the perception that offending is getting worse. As those committing ‘lesser’ offences are being dealt with by other means, there are higher proportions of young people coming before the courts who exhibit greater versatility and more violence

Using the UK general offender database as a means to measure and analyse Organised Crime.

Purpose Organised Crime is notoriously difficult to define and measure, resulting in limited empirical evidence to inform policy makers and practitioners. This study explores the feasibility of identifying a greater number of organized crime offenders, currently captured (but invisible), within an existing national general crime database. Methodology All 2.1 million recorded offenders, captured over a four year period on the UK Police National Computer (PNC), were filtered across three criteria associated with organized crime (co-offending, commission of specific offences, three years imprisonment or more). The 4109 ‘organized crime’ offenders, identified by the process, were compared with ‘general’ and ‘serious’ offender control groups across a variety of personal and demographic variables. Findings Organized crime prosecutions are not random but concentrate in specific geographic areas and constitute 0.2% of the offender population. Offenders can be differentiated from general crime offenders on such measures as: criminal onset age, offence type and criminal recidivism. Research implications Using an offence based methodology, rather than relying on offenders identified through police proactive investigations, can provide empirical information from existing data sets, across a diverse range of legislative areas and cultures. This allows academics to enhance their analysis of organized crime, generating richer evidence on which policy makers and practitioners can more effectively deliver preventative and disruptive tactics. Originality This is the first time an ‘offence based’ methodology has been used in differentiating organised crime from other offenders in a general crime database

The Risk of Escalation in Serious Crime for Kidnap Offenders: A Modelling Approach

Kidnapping is a rare offence and is also rarely considered by researchers. We extracted from the England and Wales Offenders Index all 7587 offenders (93% males and 7% females) convicted of kidnapping from 1979 to 2001. We examined the time from the first conviction for kidnapping to some specific subsequent serious crimes: a subsequent kidnap, murder, manslaughter, and rape of a female. Two survival analysis procedures - the Kaplan-Meier estimates as a nonparametric procedure, and the Cox proportional hazards model as a semi-parametric model - were used. Thus, one can estimate that 5 out of every 100 kidnap offenders convicted of kidnapping will be reconvicted for this offence. In contrast, one in every 100 kidnap offenders will be convicted of homicide after 20 years and close to 2 out of every 100 will be convicted of rape of a female in 20 years. The number of previous conviction is a significant risk factor for each of these serious reconvictions. Kidnappers are over 30 times more likely than males in the general population to be convicted of homicide and four times more likely than sex offenders. There should be, therefore, more focus on kidnappers as a potentially dangerous set of offenders

Participation in crime among children and young adults: Changes over time

This study focuses on crime participation – that is, the numbers and proportion of the population in England and Wales who are convicted of a crime between the ages of 10-25. Data on over 47,000 male and 10,000 female offenders for six specific birth cohorts (those born in 1953, 1958, 1963, 1968, 1973 and 1978) was extracted from the Offenders Index. We related convictions in three age groups (10-15, 16-20, 21-25) to population estimates for these age groups. Striking differences in the participation rates over time were observed for both males and females. There is a remarkable decline among the 10-15 age group for more recent cohorts which echoes the increasing use of court diversionary procedures in this age group. There is no corresponding increase in participation for the later age groups. These figures suggest that efforts in the 1980s and early 1990s to divert offenders away from court convictions have been successful, and that such diversionary schemes need to be encouraged

Changing crime-mix patterns of offending over the life course:a comparative study in England & Wales and the Netherlands.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of England and Wales and the Netherlands through examining criminal lifestyles through conviction data and how they change with age. The analysis has used latent Markov modelling to jointly estimate the crime mix patterns (different offenders have different selections of offences) and the transition probabilities (offenders move from one pattern to another or desist as they age). We discuss issues relating to comparing the two datasets, including definitions of offences in the two jurisdictions and the year of birth distribution of the two samples. We investigate whether some crime mix patterns are more specialized than others in terms of their long term patterns, and whether offenders belonging to some crime patterns are likely to desist earlier than others

‘A victim, and that’s all’: the construction of Meredith Kercher in the British national newspapers

What journalistic techniques are employed to construct a newsworthy female murder victim in the age of social media? Focusing on Meredith Kercher’s murder, this article examines how Kercher’s victim persona was fashioned by the British national press before the arrests of Amanda Knox and two others. Contrary to prevailing perspectives, we argue that the newsworthy murder victim is not necessarily an ideal victim. Murder victim status in a news story is a multi-facetted construction, contingent on whatever will magnify newsworthiness. The Kercher case is the first example of British journalists using the murder victim’s Facebook content as the primary news resource, adding “authenticity” to the text and images used, since it originated from the victim herself. The research findings illustrate how Kercher was sexualized through the application of misogynist victim-blaming templates used in the reporting of sex crimes. It was the degradation of her ideal victim status that drove the initial newsworthiness of the murder story