Citation

Nagin DS, Odgers CL. J. Quant. Criminol. 2010; 26(4): 445-453.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10940-010-9113-7

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Nearly two decades have passed since the publication of "Age, Criminal Careers, and Population Heterogeneity: Specification and Estimation of a Nonparametric Mixed Poisson Model" by Nagin and Land (1993). In that article Nagin and Land laid out a statistical method that has come to be called group-based trajectory modeling. The principle objective of the paper was to address issues related to the "hot topic" of the time--the criminal career debate--not to lay out a new statistical methodology. As described in the paper's abstract, these issues were: "First, is the life course of individual offending patterns marked by distinctive periods of quiescence? Second, at the level of the individual, do offending rates vary systematically with age? In particular, is the age-crime curve single peaked or flat? Third, are chronic offenders different from less active offenders? Do offenders themselves differ in systematic ways?"Figure 1 reports Nagin's (2005) updated version of the trajectories repor...

Language: en