Stability of Individual Arrest Rates

Abstract

As discussed in the Introduction, the assumption of stability in criminal behavior is central both to current arguments in favor of selective incapacitation policies and to existing methods for estimating their probable benefits. The idea that certain offenders will commit crimes at very high rates whenever they are free to do so (not incarcerated) spawned the belief that scarce public resources could be most effectively applied to ensuring that those offenders remain behind bars longer than others. The assumption here is that the propensity to commit crimes is an enduring characteristic of the individual and that the propensity will express itself in terms of stable rates of criminal behavior under varying social and environmental conditions as long as the offender is active in crime (throughout his “career”). This assumption suggests that longer sentences for high-rate offenders (who, because of their high criminality, deserve longer sentences anyway) will have the most crime-reduction benefit in the future. While some instability in offense behavior would not reduce the potency of such an argument, considerable instability would suggest a more tenuous link between past and future behavior, reducing the likely payoff for incapacitating known high-rate offenders. Reduced certainty in the stability of offense behavior would also cast some doubt on the currently popular conception of criminal careers as stable patterns of criminal behavior.