Abstract
One of the best known and most important results obtained by Wolfgang, Figlio, and Sellin (1972) in the Philadelphia cohort study of 10,000 males born in 1945 was that 6 percent of the sample (or 18 percent of all offenders) were responsible for 52 percent of all recorded juvenile offenses. These 6 percent, termed the “chronic” offenders, had each been arrested at least five times. Other researchers in different locations also have found that a small proportion of all the people commit a large proportion of all the offenses. In Racine, Wisconsin, Shannon (1978) found that 7 percent of a cohort of 1300 children born in 1942 were responsible for 51 percent of all the police contacts up to age 32 and that 7 percent of a cohort of 2100 children born in 1949 were responsible for 52 percent of all the police contacts up to age 25. In a national sample of males born in 1953 in England and Wales, 5.5 percent had six or more convictions (18 percent of the offenders) and were responsible for as many as 70 percent of all convictions up to age 28 (Home Office, 1985).
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Farrington, D.P. (1987). Early Precursors of Frequent Offending. In: Wilson, J.Q., Loury, G.C. (eds) Families, Schools, and Delinquency Prevention. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-7029-5_2
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