The Long View of Crime: A Synthesis of Longitudinal Research
Criminology has long been concerned with many questions that are inherently longitudinal. What is the developmental life-course of criminal behavior? Is there one general offending pattern or multiple offending patterns? Which early risk factors, if any,
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Akiva M. Liberman Editor
The Long View of Crime: A Synthesis of Longitudinal Research
Foreword by Daniel S. Nagin
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Editor Akiva M. Liberman National Institute of Justice Washington, D.C
ISBN: 978-1-4419-5752-8
e-ISBN: 978-0-387-71165-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007938686 c 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com
Foreword
The Long View: A Synthesis of Recent Longitudinal Studies of Crime and Delinquency is an impressive volume. Akiva Liberman is to be commended for enticing an impressive group of scholars to contribute to the volume and the authors themselves deserve praise for the quality of their contributions. The contributions cover diverse topics—the effect of gangs on violence, the relationship between work and crime, the effect of early childhood on the development of delinquency and so. Across chapters, however, I was struck by a number of shared characteristics. One was the recentness of the findings that were reported on. An example is the informative chapter on work and crime by Chris Uggen and Sara Wakefield. Table 1 of this chapter lists thirty-five papers using longitudinal data that address the work-crime nexus. The median date of publication is 2000. Figure 1 is a histogram of their date of publication. The histogram suggests an exponential growth in publication rate. I did not attempt a similar analysis of publication dates of papers reviewed in the other chapters but the date distribution seemed to mirror the pattern in Uggen and Wakefield. What then explains the exponential growth in longitudinally-based analyses of crime and delinquency? I attribute it to a concomitant growth in data availability, access to and appreciation of statistical methodologies for analyzing longitudinal data, and awareness of the value of longitudinal data compared to cross-sectional data in making causal inferences. As a rule, appendices are not very interesting which usually explains why they are appendices. The appendix to this volume, however, is an exception, at least for people such as myself who like data. The appendix lists more than sixty longitudinal data sets that were used by one or more of the studies reviewed in any one of the chapters. I was surprised that the number was so high; I hadn’t fully appreciate
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