Delinquent Recidivism

Abstract

In the previous chapter we discussed the probability of committing an offense, by type of offense, for each rank number of offense from the first offense of the career out to the fifteenth offense. We referred to this probability of committing a first, second, third, and so on out to the kth offense as a “static” probability, because in its computation the likelihood of each offense type was considered without regard to the type of prior offense or offenses. That is, we treated the current offense for statistical purposes as though it were independent of the previous of­fense type. Consequently, we were unable to make any probabilistic statements about the sequences of types of offenses. One very impor­tant finding, however, was clear: the probability of committing an of­fense, when classified by type, changed very little over offense number. The variation in the probability distributions was surprisingly small.