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In 1986, the National Academies Press published a two-volume compendium entitled “Criminal Careers and ‘Career Criminals’” (Blumstein et al. 1986) that gave expression to the growing interest in both the field of criminology and among policy makers in the career criminal. Although there is no exact agreement on what a career criminal is, in the literature it has generally referred to persons who commit many crimes beginning at an early age and who persist in offending over the life course. Among other things, then, the career criminal is a habitual, persistent, or “chronic” criminal offender, committing criminal acts at every stage of the life course. Blumstein and colleagues’ report was not, however, the first instance of academic interest in the career criminal. From the 1930s to 1950s, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck assembled several large longitudinal data sets that tracked offending from a young age to adulthood. Most notably,...
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Paternoster, R. (2014). Career Criminals and Criminological Theory. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_89
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