ABSTRACT
The early work of Healy and Bronner was among the first systematic investigations of aggregate career patterns of individuals who experienced police, court, and correctional stages. With reference to specialization, they reported that continued offending or desistance from crime rarely had any relation to the type of offense committed. By using stochastic techniques with longitudinal data to age 18 for a large cohort population, the 1945 Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study was better able than its predecessors to address the issue of specialization. Juvenile delinquency is defined as an official police contact before age 18. This comprehensive delinquency measure includes both criminal and status offenses. The typology adopted for examination of delinquency career specialization includes five mutually exclusive offense categories: personal offenses in which the potential for inflicting injury is apparent, robbery, property offenses, status offenses, and "other" offenses.
