ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the criminal trajectories of offenders whose life paths have been studied since the 2000s. It covers more than 1,800 people of different ages from the millennial generation. They began committing crimes in the late 1990s and in 2000 as juveniles. Each of their stories begins as a case in a juvenile court. Further research showed that some of them had continued to commit crimes in adulthood. Others, according to the ‘aging out’ concept, had grown out of criminal activity or discontinued their life of crime.
Based on the data about the crimes committed by the perpetrators in adulthood and using latent class growth analysis method, the researchers defined six different crime trajectories: non-offenders and adolescence-peaked high, adolescence-peaked low, late-peaked, persistent, and intermittent offenders. The analysis of these six different types of trajectories includes such variables as the age of onset of a criminal career, duration of that career, and number of crimes committed in every year. For this purpose, several data sources were used: the National Criminal Register provides information on the dates of convictions for specific acts and thus allows the analysis of criminal trajectories; information was also acquired from the files of the courts.
