Blumstein A, Cohen J
Science. 1987 Aug 28;237(4818):985-91. doi: 10.1126/science.237.4818.985.
Most knowledge about crime and criminals derives from cross-sectional analyses that link crime rates in a community with a community's attributes. The criminal-career approach focuses on individual offenders and considers their crime-committing patterns as a longitudinal stochastic process. This approach, which invokes parameters characterizing participation rate, initiation rate, termination rate and the associated career length, and individual offending frequency, offers some important new insights. For example, annual offending frequency appears to be reasonably constant with age for those offenders who stay criminally active, termination rates are relatively low for active offenders in their 30s, and offending frequencies seem to be relatively insensitive to demographic attributes for active offenders. All these observations are opposite to those that would be derived from cross-sectional analysis.
大多数关于犯罪和罪犯的知识来自横断面分析，这种分析将社区的犯罪率与社区属性联系起来。犯罪生涯方法关注个体罪犯，并将他们的犯罪模式视为一个纵向随机过程。这种方法引入了表征参与率、起始率、终止率以及相关生涯长度的参数，还有个体犯罪频率，提供了一些重要的新见解。例如，对于那些持续犯罪的罪犯来说，年度犯罪频率似乎随年龄相当稳定，30多岁的活跃罪犯的终止率相对较低，而且活跃罪犯的犯罪频率似乎对人口属性相对不敏感。所有这些观察结果都与横断面分析得出的结果相反。
