The Effects of Neighborhood Context and Residential Mobility on Criminal Persistence and Desistance

This chapter describes the relevance of the neighborhood context in the explanation of persistence in and desistance from criminal offending, with a particular focus on the behavior of former prisoners. It first presents facts about the geographic distribution of returning prisoners. Next, the chapter draws upon extant research to examine in what ways the conditions of residential neighborhoods influence persistence and desistance among formerly incarcerated individuals. Similarly, this chapter draws upon theoretical perspectives and corresponding empirical evidence to examine how residential mobility might exert an impact on persistence and desistance. The distinction between these two subjects is that the former focuses on neighborhood effects whereas the latter focuses on individual-level mobility effects. Lastly, the chapter focuses on criminal justice policy and practice, including a discussion of the implications of the lessons learned from research on neighborhood effects and residential mobility for the re-entry and re-integration of formerly incarcerated individuals.

The Developmental Taxonomy

This chapter considers whether the peak in the age–crime curve is a function of active offenders committing more crime during adolescence or a function of more individuals actively offending in the peak years. It discusses the two main and most empirically tested typological groupings: the life-course persistent group and the adolescence limited group. The chapter then reviews the evidence on a theoretically interesting grouping: those who abstain from antisocial and offending behavior. It focuses on the debate regarding whether those who were originally thought to recover from early-onset antisocial behavior have childhood-limited antisocial behavior or exhibit low-level chronic antisocial behavior across the life course. Finally, the chapter discusses how the theory it introduces accounts for adult-onset offending and considers whether there are gender differences that need to be accounted for by the theory.

Family-Based Programs for Preventing Delinquency and Later Offending

This chapter reviews the leading family-based programs for preventing delinquency and later offending, focusing on the highest quality research studies as well as the most rigorous reviews of research that include only high-quality studies. It argues that by focusing on families we can go a long way toward improving the effectiveness of programs and policies to prevent delinquency and later criminal offending. As such, this chapter provides some background on family risk factors and family-based prevention programs. It then examines the research evidence on the leading family-based programs for preventing delinquency and later offending: parent education, parent management training, and family programs for system-involved youth. Finally, this chapter discusses some implications for research and policy.

Religion and the Military

This chapter provides an overview of the literature examining the role of religion and military service in the desistance process. It also identifies outstanding issues and directions for future research. It first presents an overview of research examining the role of religion in desistance and highlights measurement issues, potential intervening mechanisms, and a consideration of faith-based programs as criminal justice policy. Next, this chapter covers the relationship between military service and offending patterns, including period effects that explain variation in the relationship, selection effects, and the incorporation of military factors in criminal justice policy and programming. The chapter concludes by highlighting general conclusions from these two bodies of research and questions to be considered in future research.

Family Influences on Youth Offending

This chapter reviews the degree to which empirical evidence demonstrates that families influence youth delinquency. Because they are most likely to be emphasized in life-course theories, this chapter focuses on parenting practices such as parental warmth and involvement, supervision and discipline of children, and child maltreatment. It also summarizes literature examining the role of children's exposure to parental violence, family criminality, and young (teenage) parents in affecting delinquency. Because life-course theories are ideally tested using longitudinal data, which allow examination of, in this case, the impact of parenting practices on children's subsequent behaviors, this chapter focuses on evidence generated from prospective studies conducted in the United States and other countries. It also discusses findings from experimental studies designed to reduce youth substance use and delinquency by improving the family environment.

The Social Development Model

This chapter presents an overview of the social development model (SDM)—a general theory of human behavior that integrates research on risk and protective factors into a coherent model. The goal of this synthesis is to provide more explanatory power than its component theories. This chapter first specifies the model constructs and their hypothesized relationships to prosocial and antisocial behaviors. It then provides a synthesis of what has been learned from empirical tests of social development hypotheses for predicting pro- and antisocial behaviors. This chapter also highlights interventions derived from the SDM and summarizes their impact on pro- and antisocial behaviors. Finally, the chapter concludes by presenting future directions for SDM-based research.

The Interconnected Development of Personal Controls and Antisocial Behavior

This chapter describes a multidisciplinary, multilayered, and developmental theoretical journey inspired by Travis Hirschi’s book, Causes of Delinquency (1969). It first discusses the conceptual roots and meta-control theory that emerged from this journey. The chapter then presents a definitive statement of a systemic theory of the development of antisocial behavior—particularly the argument that the mechanisms and courses of the development of offending apply to all forms of antisocial behaviors. Next, the chapter specifies the content of an integrative personal control theory and the development of self-control and social control. It also reviews the mechanism of the developmental interaction between the self and social control systems based on the chaos-order perspective. Finally, this chapter discusses the importance of its personal control theory for criminology and sequels to this theoretical and empirical journey.

Co-offending

This chapter reviews existing theory and empirical evidence on changes in co-offending patterns over the life course, links these patterns to other key criminal career parameters, and highlights important areas for future research. In order to set the stage for the remainder of the chapter, the few theoretical insights that relate joint offending to the development of criminal careers are first reviewed. The chapter then focuses on the age–co-offending curve, outlining what is known about changes in both co-offending prevalence and form across the life course and considering implications for more general developmental and life-course discussions of age and offending. It next examines how co-offending is related to other features of the criminal career, including onset, specialization, seriousness, frequency, duration, persistence, and desistance. Finally, this chapter briefly outlines outstanding issues and next steps for advancing DLC theory and research on group crime.

Persistence and Desistance

This chapter examines persistence and desistance in criminal offending. Persistence in criminal offending may be observed when subjects are followed for a sufficiently long period and found to have maintained a certain level of offending. Desistance is discussed when offending declines to a zero or close-to-zero level, with other parameters also clearly defined. This chapter first discusses the challenges in the identification of persistent offenders. It then provides a review of evidence on the age–crime relationship and heterogeneous patterns of desistance. The controversy surrounding desistance as a process or a discrete point is also examined. The chapter also summarizes the theoretical underpinnings of desistance, before concluding with a discussion on the future of research on desistance.

Specialization and Versatility in Offending

This chapter is an overview of the specialization/versatility debate. It presents the key elements of this debate, from the theoretical to the methodological, with the aim of capturing the contested, evolving, and dynamic nature of this important topic. This chapter first discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the specialization/versatility debate. Next, the practical implications of this debate for policy and program development are considered. The chapter then gives an overview of key empirical findings. Challenges and confounds within existing research are afterward discussed. From here, the chapter presents different ways in which specialization/versatility is operationalized. Finally, this chapter examines a range of data and measurement issues.