Week #13 - Criminal Career Paradigm and Policy

Question 1

What are the policy implications of CCR?

Answer 1

o Four implications of criminal career research: the role of criminal career research in policy and individual decision making, individual prediction of offending frequencies (k, lambda), sentence duration, and research on career length and desistance and its relation to intelligent sentencing policy

Question 2

Explain the Role of Criminal Career Research in Policy and Individual Decision Making

Answer 2

1. General Policy Guidance
   • By identifying career lengths, especially residual career lengths, policy makers can better target incarceration on offenders whose expected remaining careers are longest.
   • The more hard-core committed offenders with the longest remaining careers are identifiable only after an offender has remained active for several years
2. Identification of Serious Career Criminals
   • Predictive classifications, however, have been fraught with problems including a high false positive rate

Question 3

Explain CCR in relation to the individual prediction of lambda?

Answer 3

o Concerns related to the false positive prediction problem in identifying high lambda individuals

Question 4

Explain CCR in relation to Sentence duration?

Answer 4

o Information about crime rates and career lengths is particularly use- ful for incapacitation and incarceration decisions and policies
o Many current sentencing policies are based on the assumption that high-rate offenders will con- tinue committing crimes at high rates and for lengthy periods
o Much debate regarding sentence length has centered on three- strikes policies.
o Such policies will be effective only to the extent that they incarcerate offenders during the early stages of their criminal careers when they are committing crimes at a high rate and not when they are older and winding down their criminal careers.

Question 5

Evaluate 3 strikes laws?

Answer 5

o These policies severely limit judges’ discretion because they prescribe a mandatory prison sentence of (typically) twenty-five years to life.
o The incapacitation effectiveness of three-strikes laws, however, depends on the duration of criminal careers.
o To the extent that sentencing decisions incarcerate individuals with short residual career lengths, a three-strikes law will waste incarceration resources
o No decline in the crimes committed by those targeted by the new law. In particular, the lower crime rates in 1994 and 1995 (just immediately after the three-strikes law went into effect) were evenly spread among targeted and non-targeted populations, suggesting that the decline in crime observed after the law went into effect was not the direct result of the law

Question 6

Explain CCR in relation to career length and desistance?

Answer 6

o Sentencing practices involving lengthy sentence durations assume that affected offenders will continue to commit crime at a high rate and for a long period.
o To the extent that this is the case, incapacitation policies will avert crimes and thwart continued careers.
o However, to the extent that offenders retire before the expiration of a lengthy sentence, shorter career durations will reduce the effects of lengthy sentences