Co-offending in Canada, England and the United States: a cross-national comparison

Abstract

This article compares the characteristics of police-reported co-offending groups and solo offenders in Canada, England and the United States. Comparative analysis of crime in these three countries is fostered by the relative similarity of their substantive criminal codes (all originating in English common law), their approaches to law enforcement, and their crime recording procedures. The data include over 100,000 incidents cleared by a large UK police force, 2.5 million incidents in Canada, and 1.3 million incidents in 36 states in the United States, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Comparative analyses include the prevalence of co-offending, the size and composition of co-offending groups, and key correlates of group crime, such as offence type and the age and sex of participants. Substantial similarities are observed across the three data sets, although there are also intriguing differences. These findings are discussed in relation to ongoing attempts to draw general conclusions regarding the nature and extent of group crime and co-offending networks.

Keywords:

• co-offending
• cross-national
• comparative

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Fourth Annual Illicit Networks Workshop, Vancouver, October 1–2, 2012. Preparation of this article was supported by research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Danish Council for Independent Research. We gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of Julie McAuley, Anthony Matarazzo, and Marian Radulescu of the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada, in accessing the Canadian UCR data, and to the English police for access to the UK data. The opinions expressed in this article do not represent the opinions of Statistics Canada or other criminal justice agencies. We thank the referees and editor for helpful comments on an earlier draft, which we believe have resulted in a substantially improved article.

Notes

1. LaFree, “Expanding Criminology's Domain.”

2. See, e.g., reviews in Neapolitan, Cross-national Crime and Stamatel, “Contributions of Cross-national Research.”

3. Sarnecki, Delinquent Networks.

4. Andresen and Felson, “Impact of Co-offending,” “Co-offending and the Diversification”; Carrington, “Group Crime in Canada,” “Co-offending and the Development.”

5. Sarnecki, Delinquent Networks.

6. Reiss and Farrington, “Advancing Knowledge”; van Mastrigt and Farrington “Co-offending, Age, Gender”, “Prevalence and Characteristics.”

7. Bernasco, “Co-offending and the Choice”; Hakkert, “Group Delinquency.”

8. McCord and Conway, “Patterns of Juvenile Delinquency”; McGloin and Piquero, “I Wasn't Alone”; Stolzenberg and D'Alessio, “Co-offending and the Age-crime Curve”; Warr, “Organization and Instigation.”

9. Cf. Frank and Carrington, “Estimation of Offending and Co-Offending”; van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

10. Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, “Uniform Crime Reporting Survey”; Taylor-Butts and Bressan, “Youth Crime in Canada.”

11. Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, “Uniform Crime Reporting Manual,” 17.

12. These data were originally made available for the purposes of the second author's PhD research; the region remains unnamed at the request of the granting police force. This predominantly white, working class county has a population of nearly 1.3 million, spread across three large towns, a major industrial city, and the rural areas between.

13. For a full list of notifiable offence categories, see Nicholas et al., Crime in England and Wales.

14. All but the most serious traffic violations (e.g. dangerous driving causing death) are excluded. A number of Home Office offence groupings are modified or excluded from this analysis to maximise comparability with the United States and Canada. Most notably, ‘other’ offences are restricted as above to bribery, pornography, prostitution and weapons.

15. For further details, see van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

16. National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, National Incident-Based Reporting System.

17. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime in the United States.”

18. Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, “National Incident-Based Reporting System.”

19. United States Department of Justice, “National Incident-Based Reporting System.”

20. Becker and McCorkel (“Gender of Criminal Opportunity”) analysed co-offending using NIBRS data for 2002–2008, using data on offenders, rather than arrestees, and the incidents in which they were involved. Presumably because of this, they found a higher prevalence of co-offending: 17.6% of incidents and 34.0% of participations versus 13.9% of incidents and 27.2% of participations found in our study (see Table 1).

21. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, “National Incident-Based Reporting System.”

22. See Carrington, “Co-offending”, for a review.

23. Andresen and Felson, “Co-offending and the Diversification”; Stolzenberg and D'Alessio, “Co-offending and the Age-crime Curve”; van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

24. Shaw and McKay, Social Factors.

25. van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

26. The lower prevalence of co-offending reported for England may be due to the fact that the data come from a relatively urbanised region; whereas the data for Canada are national in scope, and the US data are quasi-national. Research in the United States on a relationship between the prevalence of co-offending and urbanisation has produced conflicting results. Felson (“The Process of Co-offending”) reports that co-offending increases with urbanisation; D'Alessio and Stolzenberg (“Do Cities Influence Co-offending?”) find that co-offending decreases with urbanisation. We thank an anonymous referee for drawing our attention to this issue.

27. van Mastrigt, “Co-offending and Offender Attributes”; van Mastrigt and Carrington, “Sex and Age Homophily”; Weerman, “Co-offending as Social Exchange.”

28. The U.S. population ratio was estimated from Howden and Meyer, “Age and Sex Composition: 2010”; for Canada it was calculated from data provided to the authors by Statistics Canada; for the region of England it was calculated from regional UK Census data for 2001.

29. van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

30. van Mastrigt, “Co-offending and Offender Attributes”; Carrington, “Co-offending.”

31. van Mastrigt, “Co-offending and Offender Attributes.”

32. Andresen and Felson, “The Impact of Co-offending”; Stolzenberg and D'Alessio, “Co-offending and the Age-crime Curve.”

33. Weerman, “Co-offending as Social Exchange.”

34. Carrington, “Co-offending.”

35. Detailed regression results are available from the authors. The effect estimates from an ordinary logistic regression model with country-specific interaction terms would be confounded by unobserved heterogeneity (also known as ‘heterogeneity shrinkage’; Allison, “Comparing Logit and Probit Coefficients”; Mood, “Logistic Regression”). We thank an anonymous referee for pointing out this issue and for suggesting the random slopes model. The use of standard errors, significance tests, etc., with population data such as these is controversial. The statistical tests should be interpreted in terms of the question, “Could an estimate of this size have occurred by chance rather than reflecting a systematic relationship?” rather than “Could this (nonzero) estimate be the result of random sampling error?”

36. Very similar effect estimates were obtained with unweighted data, but the adjusted prevalence estimates were somewhat different, reflecting the much greater numbers of observations for Canada, and also for the United Sates, relative to the English data.

37. See Stolzenberg and D'Alessio, “Co-offending and the Age-crime Curve.”

38. Carrington “Group Crime in Canada”; Felson, “The Process of Co-offending”; van Mastrigt, “Co-offending and Offender Attributes.”

39. Weerman, “Co-offending as Social Exchange.”

40. van Mastrigt and Carrington, “Sex and Age Homophily.”

41. Weerman, “Theories of Co-offending.”

42. Felson, “Process of Co-offending”; D'Alessio and Stolzenberg, “Do Cities Influence Co-offending?”.

43. Frank and Carrington, “Estimation of Offending and Co-Offending.”