The Later Stages of Ordinary Property Offender Careers

Abstract

Few sociologists have studied the later stages of careers in deviance and criminality. This paper describes how 36 ordinary property offenders, released from confinement from four months to 28 years earlier, changed their perspectives toward life and criminal behavior as they got older. Changes in criminal behavior resulted from two types of occurrences in the men's lives: temporal and interpersonal. Some of the age-related changes differ little from those experienced by non-offenders. Consequently, the findings challenge critical assumptions about offenders employed by proponents of the death penalty and other repressive crime control measures.