Identifying Patterns and Pathways of Offending Behaviour
| Author | Rachel Fligelstone,Brian Francis,Keith Soothill |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370804038707 |
| Published date | 01 January 2004 |
| Date | 01 January 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Identifying Patterns and Pathways of
Offending Behaviour
A New Approach to Typologies of Crime
Brian Francis
Centre for Applied Statistics, Fylde College, Lancaster University, UK
Keith Soothill
Department of Applied Social Science, Cartmel College, Lancaster
University, UK
Rachel Fligelstone
Centre for Applied Statistics, Fylde College, Lancaster University, UK
ABSTRACT
This study presents a new approach to developing a typology of criminal activity.
The distinguishing feature of the analysis is that it concentrates on determining
types of activity rather than the amounts of activity over the life course. The
methodology involves investigating criminal activity in a succession of five-year
periods rather than the conventional approach of summarizing a ‘lifetime’ of
crime. This provides scope for assessing changes and pathways of criminal activity
as offenders grow older, and gives new insight into the concepts of specialization
and versatility. The Home Office Offenders Index birth cohort for 1953 provided
official conviction histories up to 1993 (age 40), and latent class analysis identified
a fixed number of types of criminal behaviour separately for males and females.
The patterns of offending varied markedly between males and females. Male
offending (with nine identified types) showed greater diversity than female
offending (with three identified types). For the males, each type of offending had
a distinct age profile, but this was not evident with the females. A new definition
of offending specialization is given, and is shown to increase for males as
offenders grow older. A case study on one of the male offending types illustrates
the potential for identifying pathways of crime.
KEY WORDS
Typologies / Criminal Trajectories / Clusters / Latent Class Analysis / Pathways /
Specialization.
Volume 1 (1): 47–87: 1477-3708
DOI: 10.1177/1477370804038707
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA, and New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com
Introduction
Criminologists have devoted a great deal of time and attention to crime
over the life course through the investigation of criminal trajectories. Much
of this work concentrates on the totality of offending (either of all crime or
of violent/non-violent crime), and there has been a curious recent neglect of
a related area – an understanding of the more detailed patterns of offending
behaviour. This is disappointing, because important issues remain un-
examined. Examining the types of offences committed is useful both for
prediction and risk studies and for gaining a greater understanding of
offending and its causes.
There are two main issues. The first of these concerns the extent to
which particular offences pre-date other types of offences – especially
relevant in relation to the more serious offences. An example of this is
whether first-time murderers exhibit a different history of prior offending
compared with other offenders. Although this is an important topic, and one
we discuss briefly in the final section, it is not the focus of this article.
The second issue, and our topic of concern here, is how one might most
usefully describe an offender’s pattern of offending behaviour. In court reports,
of course, probation officers have substantial experience in doing this, setting
out in narrative form a description of a person’s offending behaviour.
However, this is of limited use in understanding the pattern of a person’s
behaviour compared with others. So, for example, if an offender has a
sequence of shoplifting offences interspersed with the occasional burglary
offence, how typical is this pattern of behaviour? Do patterns of criminal
behaviour vary between age groups? Is criminal behaviour that is fairly
common in young age groups common or unusual at older ages? The aims
of this article are to construct a more rigorous way of describing offending
patterns and to investigate changes in these patterns over age. This allows
us to revisit the concept of specialization and to investigate criminal pathways
for each of the offence types. Unlike much work in this area, this analysis
also examines offending patterns separately for males and females.
Typologies of offending
The classification of offenders into typologies has been common in crimi-
nology since the 1950s, although earlier work dates back to Lombroso and
Freud. The history of criminal typologies can be divided into two strands:
earlier work, which was concerned with contrasting forms of criminal
activity, and more recent work, which has tended to concentrate on
criminal trajectories and the amount of offending.
48 European Journal of Criminology
A succinct summary of early work on offender typologies was given
by Ferdinand (1966), who divided the then existing work into empirical
typologies, with types determined through an inductive process, and ideal
typologies, where types were derived from a theoretical structure. At that
time, psychological types of offender were particularly prevalent, with
typologies proposed by Alexander and Staub (1956), Freidlander (1947),
Sanford (1943) and Weinberg (1952) – the last suggesting types such as the
‘acting-out neurotic’ and the ‘self-centred over indulged person’. More
criminologically focused work was carried out in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Clinard and Quinney (1967) concentrated on patterns of criminal
behaviour and proposed eight types, with labels such as ‘public order
crime’, ‘political crime’ and ‘violent personal crime’. Gibbons (1965)
proposed 15 adult types of delinquent and 9 juvenile types, which he later
refined to 19 role careers (Gibbons 1972); such types included the ‘pro-
fessional fringe violator’.
Very little of this work has been based on quantitative data. An
exception is Roebuck (1963), who classified 1155 prison inmates on the
basis of arrest patterns. He identified four main types of career: the single
arrest pattern; the multiple pattern; the mixed pattern; and no pattern.
Within each type, he identified crime patterns, such as the single auto theft,
which was defined by an offender having three or more arrests for car theft.
In the 1980s, Chaiken and Chaiken (1982, 1984) classified close to 2200
prison inmates on their self-reported behaviour over the previous one-to-
two years on eight different categories of crime: assault, robbery, burglary,
drug deals, theft, auto theft, fraud and forgery, and credit card crime.
Subsequent analysis combined the last four categories, giving five categories
of crime. Summarizing each of these five crime categories as present or
absent in the immediate history of the inmate, there are 32 possible
combinations, of which, after some merging, Chaiken and Chaiken identi-
fied 10 types. The most common type was identified as ‘violent predators’,
who are defined to be involved in robbery, assault and drug dealing, and
who comprised 15 percent of the study sample.
The development of such criminal typologies has had dissenting
voices. One suggested that static typologies do not reflect the fact that
criminal activity appears to vary over time (Figlio 1981; Holland et al.
1981). In contrast, Gibbons (1975), an erstwhile exponent in the 1960s,
later suggested that, for most existing typologies, it was difficult to allocate
individuals unambiguously to types in a real-life setting. Within criminol-
ogy, the search for typologies has been replaced to some extent by the more
flexible language of ‘pathways’ (Sampson and Laub 1993). This language
suggests a variety of different pathways and hence recognizes that anyone
on one pathway can take another route on a different pathway. The whole
Francis, Soothill and Fligelstone Patterns of offending behaviour 49
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