An Investigation into the Fundamental Regularities of Co-Offending for Violent and Property Crime Classifications

Abstract

Co-offending research has generated two fundamental regularities. First, co-offending is most prevalent during youth and then decreases as offenders age. Second, the average number of offenders per criminal incident is also highest in youth and decreases as offenders age. These regularities, and co-offending in general, are often explained with reference to a developmental approach: youth spend more time in groups than adults for their activities and crime is simply one of those activities. We investigate these empirical regularities by single years of age, 12–29, with a detailed crime classification in a large sample from British Columbia. These empirical regularities prove to be far from monolithic, being less notable as offenders age for several violent crime classifications.