Escalation in criminal convictions: Measuring offence seriousness and identifying patterns

This talk examines the issue of escalation and de-escalation in offence seriousness over the criminal lifecourse, which is a relatively under-studied topic in criminal careers. There are various issues to confront; how to measure offence seriousness, how to determine desistance, and how to analyse the data statistically. We use a birth cohort of England and Wales males taken from the Offenders Index to address these issues, and apply a latent trajectory analysis to this data to determine whether there are different patterns of escalation and deescalation behaviour for this cohort.