Friends with(out) benefits: co-offending and re-arrest

Abstract

Research shows that co-offending has contradictory effects on rates of re-arrest. On the one hand, group offending may be riskier: for example, co-offenders might be targeted by police or might snitch to protect themselves. Criminal networks may also have indirect effects: offenders embedded in criminal networks commit more offences and thus should have a higher risk of being arrested at some point. On the other hand, networks generate steady criminal opportunities with relatively low risk of arrest and high monetary benefits (e.g. drug trafficking). Few authors have empirically explored the relation between co-offending and re-arrest. This article does so using data from seven years of arrest records in the province of Quebec, Canada. The analysis is designed to explore why some offenders are re-arrested after an initial arrest while others are not. It focuses on the factors involved in re-arrest, considering two distinct levels of measures of co-offending. The first level of analysis takes into account a situational measure that indicates whether a given offence was committed by co-offenders (group offence). The second level is used to examine whether being part of a criminal network influences re-arrest. For offenders embedded in such networks, two network features (degree centrality and clustering coefficient) show that the global position of individuals within the Quebec arrest network are analysed. Our results suggest that co-offending is a crucial factor that should be taken into account when looking at the odds of being caught again. The use of generalised linear mixed model brings interesting nuances about the impact of co-offending. The article adds to the recently growing literature on the link between networks and criminal careers.

Keywords:

• co-offending patterns
• criminal networks
• re-arrest
• criminal career
• offence participation

Acknowledgements

The authors also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of Global Crime and its Editor-in-Chief for their comments on the preliminary version of this article.

Notes

1. Bushway et al., “Assessing Stability and Change”; Farrington, “Developmental and Life-Course Criminology”; Nagin and Paternoster, “Participation in Delinquency”; Nagin and Paternoster, “Population Heterogeneity”; and Paternoster et al., “Generality, Continuity and Change.”

2. Piquero et al., “The Criminal Career Paradigm.”

3. Smith et al., “Delinquent Career-Lines.”

4. Piquero et al., Criminal Career Research; and Piquero et al., “The Criminal Career Paradigm.”

5. Piquero et al., “The Criminal Career Paradigm.”

6. Andresen and Felson, “The Impact of Co-Offending”; and Morselli, Contacts, Opportunities, and Criminal Enterprise.

7. Bouchard and Nguyen, “Who You Know”; Bouchard and Ouellet, “Survival Analysis of Failure”; and Morselli et al., “Mentors and Criminal Achievement.”

8. Sutherland, Principles of Criminology; and Warr and Stafford, “Influence of Delinquent Peers.”

9. Piquero et al., “The Criminal Career Paradigm.”

10. Van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

11. Carrington, “Group Crime in Canada”; Hodgson, “Co-offending in UK”; and Van Mastrigt, Relationships with Age, Gender and Crime Type.

12. Research shows, for example, that co-offending is more frequent in adolescence than adulthood (see Carrington, “Group Crime in Canada”; Carrington, “Development of the Delinquent Career”; McGloin and Piquero, “I Wasn't Alone”; Piquero et al., Criminal Career Research; Reiss and Farrington, “Advancing Knowledge About Co-offending”; Van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender”; Warr, Companions in Crime; Warr, “Age, Peers, and Delinquency” and that co-offending can be related to an offender's gender (see Carrington, “Group Crime in Canada”; Hodgson, “Co-offending in UK”; Van Mastrigt, Co-offending; and Daly, Delinquent Networks in Philadelphia).

13. Reiss and Farrington, “Advancing Knowledge About Co-offending.”

14. D'Alessio and Stolzenberg, “Do Cities Influence Co-offending?”; Hodgson, “Co-offending in UK”; Van Mastrigt, Co-offending; and Van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

15. Carrington, “Group Crime in Canada”; Carrington, “Development of the Delinquent Career”; Conway and McCord, “Co-offending and Violent Crime”; Hodgson, “Co-offending in UK”; McCord and Conway, “Patterns of Juvenile Delinquency”; McCord and Conway, Patterns of Juvenile Crime; Piquero et al., Criminal Career Research; Reiss, “Co-offending and Criminal Careers”; Reiss, Crime and Justice; Reiss and Farrington, “Advancing Knowledge About Co-offending”; Van Mastrigt, Co-offending; and Van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

16. D'Alessio and Stolzenberg, “Do Cities Influence Co-offending?”; and Hindelang, “With a Little Help.”

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

18. Carrington, “Development of the Delinquent Career”; Frank and Carrington, “Estimation of Offending and Co-offending”; Sarnecki, Delinquent Networks; Van Mastrigt, Co-offending; and Van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

19. Piquero et al., “The Criminal Career Paradigm”; and Piquero et al., Criminal Career Research.

20. McGloin and Piquero. “I wasn't alone.”

21. Reiss and Farrington, “Advancing Knowledge About Co-offending.”

22. McGloin and Piquero. “I wasn't alone.” See also Warr, Companions in Crime.

23. Carrington, “Development of the Delinquent Career,” 301–335; and Reiss, “Co-offending and Criminal Careers.”

24. Warr, Companions in Crime.

25. 13.6% of arrests concerned more than one infraction.

26. Several types of offences were excluded: for example, discharging a firearm with intent, impaired or reckless driving, and failure to comply with probation or bail conditions.

27. Van Mastrigt and Farrington, “Co-offending, Age, Gender.”

28. Carrington, “Development of the Delinquent Career”; and Frank and Carrington, “Estimation of Offending and Co-offending.”

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

30. D'Alessio and Stolzenberg, “Do Cities Influence Co-offending?”; Hodgson, “Co-offending in UK”; and Van Mastrigt, Co-offending.

31. To correct the asymmetry of this distribution, Statistics Canada categorisation was used.

32. Felson, “The Process of Co-offending.”

33. The Montreal population (n = 1,620,693) is three times larger than that of any other city in our sample (Statistics Canada, 2008).

34. Hodgson, “Co-offending in UK”; Van Mastrigt, Co-offending; and Carrington, “Group Crime in Canada.”

35. Laub et al., “Trajectories of Change.”

36. Van Der Leeden, “Multilevel Analysis.”

37. Hirschi and Gottfredson, “The Explanation of Crime.”

38. Blumstein et al.,

39. D'Alessio and Stolzenberg, “Do Cities Influence Co-offending?”

40. Felson, “The Process of Co-offending,” 153.

41. See, for example, Benda et al., “Recidivism”; Huebner et al., “Gangs, Guns, and Drugs”; Langan and Levin, Recidivism of Prisoners; Lattimore et al., “Predicting Rearrest for Violence”; Lussier and Davies, “A Person-Oriented Perspective”; Proulx et al., “Recidivism Risk Assessment”; Stoolmiller and Blechman, “Substance Use”; and Trulson et al., “Re-arrest Frequency.”

42. Pratt et al., “Empirical Status of Deterrence Theory.”

43. Carrington, “Development of the Delinquent Career,” 301–335.

44. See Skogan, “Validity of Official Crime Statistics.”

45. Shover and Thompson, “Crime Desistance.”

46. Gallupe et al., “Good Change”

47. Farrington et al., Cross-National Studies; Blumstein et al., Criminal Careers, 60; and Bouchard and Tremblay, “Risks of Arrest.”

48. Gallupe et al., “Good Change”

49. Morselli et al., “Mentors and Criminal Achievement.”

50. Hochstetler, “Sprees and Runs”; Morselli and Tremblay, “Délinquance, Performance et Capital Social”; and Tremblay, “Searching for Suitable Co-offenders.”

51. Bouchard and Ouellet, “Survival Analysis of Failure.”