Individual Offense Rates: Methodological Issues

Abstract

So far, the discussion has focused on general patterns of criminal participation and of rates of arrest within a cohort of former serious juvenile offenders. In those analyses, rates were estimated using aggregated data on the number of arrests and the amount of street time during the follow-up period. In the following chapters, attention will turn to issues related to the criminal careers of individual offenders: their stability and predictiveness. To address these issues, individual-level data on the rates of arrest over portions of the follow-up period were used. Analyses focused on whether offense behavior tended to remain relatively stable over time and on the feasibility of identifying those offenders with the highest rates of arrest. Before presenting these findings, it is important to first gain an understanding of the limitations of official data for addressing these types of issues.