Alex R Piquero

• The University of Texas at Dallas

Background Many studies have found that a small group of chronic offenders is responsible for the majority of crimes and tend to be particularly violent. However, there is a major lack of evidence on chronic offending in low‐ and middle‐income countries; understanding these patterns is especially important in settings with very high levels of serio...

In “Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World” (2023), Megan Stevenson makes a claim that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have not had a significant effect in criminal justice settings. She then draws the conclusion that the gold standard for research designs, RCTs, are inherently incapable of doing so, demonstrating that the social...

The current paper explores the theoretical and empirical capacity of developmental and life-course criminology (DLC) to further our understanding of non-lethal intimate partner violence (IPV) and femicide. Drawing on Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory and Moffitt’s dual taxonomy, the paper delves into empirical research that has identified and ex...

Understanding offending patterns over the life-course has been a key feature of criminological thought and scholarship since the discipline’s inception. Recent research has brought forth new thinking into how social-historical conditions may influence correlates of crime as well as offending patterns across different eras. Missing from this line of...

Objectives Examine how crimes against person (CAP) calls are spatially patterned around the Spurs’ arena and city. Using data from 2019–2021, we investigate the geospatial clustering of CAP calls when fans are and are not present. Methods CAP calls are separated by Spurs game day or not, home or away games, and before or during COVID-19. ArcGIS Pr...

Research Question Is violent crime victimization among US minority groups higher than for White Americans in general, or is there a distinct failure of equal protection by race with respect to firearm homicide? Data This analysis examines per capita rates of violent victimization for Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites as reported in recent years in the...

In this book, eminent scholars from varied disciplines detail how developmental science and the law shape one another across the lifespan. The chapters address fundamental questions about how human development influences laws and practices in the legal system and how the law and its practices influence development. The chapters also reveal how the...

Objectives: Accumulating research finds that immigrants are less likely to offend compared to their native-born counterparts in the United States. Less understood are the factors that help account for this disparity in offending. Because there are reasons to believe that immigrants weigh the costs and benefits of crime differently than their U.S.-b...

Objectives Evaluate the effects that Prudential Center events had on crime in downtown Newark from 2007 to 2015 in terms of incident counts and spatial characteristics. Methods We evaluate the effects of events held at the Prudential Center on crime counts via negative binomial regression. Through the Fasano-Franceschini test, we assess whether cr...

Whether the imposition of monetary sanctions is related to juvenile recidivism is explored overall and across race and ethnicity. Leveraging a statewide sample, logistic regression was used to predict fees and restitution assignment based on youth/case characteristics, hierarchical linear and logistic random-effects regression examined the associat...

Official criminal records are one of the most well-known sources of crime data. Accordingly, this chapter reviews the process whereby the criminal record searches were conducted in order to construct the life-course conviction records among the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) males from ages 10 to 61. This rich offending informatio...

The main aim of this chapter is to summarize recent results of the CSDD from 2013 to 2023, based on analyses of the G2 males. Brief summaries of some of the main findings can be found in Farrington (The Cambridge study in delinquent development. In: Eaves D, Webster CD, Haque Q, Eaves-Thalken J (eds) Risk rules: a practical guide to structured prof...

The study of criminal careers has been the focus of a long line of research dating back to the early nineteenth century. Despite this rich history, it is only more recently that life-course research has begun efforts to unpack the complexity of criminal career dimensions. This approach has yielded important research findings with relevant policy im...

Other than official data, self-report data is the second-most utilized source for information on offending. Recognizing the inherent limitations of official and self-report data in terms of sources for crime measurement, this chapter provides an in-depth exploration into the prevalence and frequency of offending among the CSDD males with a specific...

Life-course research has benefited recently from the development and application of advanced statistical methods, most notably group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM). These methods have allowed life-course researchers to assess taxonomies of offending and identify distinct offender trajectories. Guided by this methodological framework, this chapter...

The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) represents one of the longest and most comprehensive prospective longitudinal studies in the world focusing on offending, risk factors, and life events. This chapter, based on the corresponding chapter in the previous edition (Farrington DP, Piquero, AR, Jennings WG, Offending from childhood to l...

This chapter lists the references for the 120 publications from the CSDD in 2013–2023. The key findings are summarized in Chap. 6.

The assumptions underlying classical deterrence remain an underpinning of most legal systems. Although empirical research on deterrence is extensive, less investigated are the conditions under which deterrence is more or less likely to occur. The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of sanction severity and certainty on intentions to illeg...

The influence of sporting events on crime is an important but under-researched area in criminology. Although this literature is growing, it mostly focuses on whether crime changes in the city/area where a sporting event is taking place. Thus, it is unclear whether crime in a different city/state can be affected by airing a sporting event on televis...

A large body of criminological research often focuses on risk factors that propel individuals toward criminal activity rather than those that act as protective factors to reduce criminal involvement. In this study, we focus on a potentially important protective factor, empathy, which has long been considered an individual characteristic related to...

To curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, most cities and states implemented COVID-19 public health restrictions that became enforceable offenses. Unfortunately, concerns about unequitable enforcement arose among minority and impoverished communities. The current study uses official data from San Antonio, Texas to investigate the relationship be...

Objectives Past research has investigated factors that condition the association between self-control and antisocial behavior. Absent from consideration has been the possible moderating effect of alcohol intoxication. Methods Using a placebo-controlled experimental design, we explore whether alcohol intoxication moderates the association between s...

Average life expectancies have lengthened across human history. As a result, there is an increased need to care for a greater number of individuals experiencing common age-related declines in health. This has helped to spur a rapidly increasing focus on understanding “health span”, the portion of the life-course spent functionally healthy. Yet to p...

A consistent finding in criminology is that crime occurs and is concentrated at micro places within cities. To date, most efforts that revealed crime at micro places were completed for developed world settings. Here we draw on newspaper data to examine whether the law of crime concentration is relevant to the developing world city of Georgetown, Gu...

Prison-based programs have been shown to reduce recidivism and aid successful reentry. Participation in prison programs has also been linked to reduced misconduct within prisons. And yet, programs are not always readily available and, even when they are available, some inmates may not be motivated or interested in participating in them. Using data...

The recent high-profile cases of hate crimes in the U.S., especially those targeting Asian Americans, have raised concerns about their risk of victimization. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, intimations—and even accusations—that the novel coronavirus is an “Asian” or “Chinese” virus have been linked to anti-Asian American hate crime, p...

Objectives: Before the Fall 2020 semester, college presidents and the NCAA made decisions about playing college football. The current study aims to examine the association between college football games and COVID-19 infections at universities. Participants: More than 1,800 college campuses nationwide from The New York Times database on COVID-19...

In early 2020, the world faced a rapid, life-changing, public health crisis in the form of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The pandemic and its associated social-distancing measures collided with a period of social unrest following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and persisted for nearly two years following its em...

Purpose This paper provides a historical review of developmental and life-course criminology. Methods It uses a narrative and historical approach. Results Several turning points are identified that have shaped the study of developmental and life-course criminology. Conclusions Developmental and life-course criminology is criminology. Directions...

After the novel coronavirus began spreading across the U.S., many state and local governments imposed COVID-19 restrictions in an attempt to slow the spread. These COVID-19 mitigation techniques had a large impact on policing, as they created a new crime category for police to enforce, COVID-19 public health violations. The current study aims to ad...

Objectives The objective of this study is to test whether recorded rates of violent crime declined in the context of social distancing regulations in Queensland, Australia.MethodsARIMA modeling was used to compute 6-month-ahead forecasts of rates for common assault, serious assault, sexual offenses, and breaches of domestic violence orders. These f...

Objectives We assess the proposed mechanisms outlined in Agnew’s General Theory of Crime and Delinquency about gender differences in crime and deviance (gender differences are due to differences between males and females in their standing on the life domains or differences in the effect of the life domains on the phenomenon among males and females)...

Despite the expanding research base around sporting events and crime, little is known about the impact of mega-sporting events, such as the Olympics, on crime. In this article, we seek to expand upon the small literature around mega-sporting events by examining police-recorded crime data for the period before, during, and after the Beijing 2008, Lo...

Background Formula 1 is the world’s fastest auto racing circuit and one that is among the most-watched of all televised sports. With its international flair and glamor and the glitz it brings to viewers and spectators, it is no surprise that fans, commentators, and media covering the races enjoy ranking the most successful teams and especially the...

There is a dearth of research examining criminal victimization among tourists and travelers. Additionally, with the exception of the routine activities framework, none of the leading criminological perspectives have been applied to study tourism victimization. In this paper, we apply a dominant criminological perspective, self-control theory, and a...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1007/s11292-021-09486-7.].

We investigated the relationship between COVID-19 stay-at-home regulations and property and violent crime indexes in Dallas, TX during the first 6 months of 2020. We tested for changes in property and violent crime trends using four key "intervention" dates: the stay-at-home order issued by Judge Clay Jenkins (March 24), the start of Governor Abbot...

Adolescents are at a relatively high risk of victimization. Within criminology, victimization has been largely attributed to risky behaviors and low self-control. Yet, these factors explain only a modest amount of victimization, suggesting that other theoretical predictors may offer additional insight. One factor that may predict victimization, as...

The current study castssome of the first light into the initial impacts of the largest global health crisis in a generation on family and domestic violence, the long-term repercussions of which may take decades to unpack. Statewide trends in juvenile arrests for domestic violence (DV)-related offending are examined, taking into account school closu...

The health crisis that began in early 2020 has generated a large amount of interest in the effect of COVID-19 on public health. The majority of this work has centered around trying to better understand how the virus spreads, where it spreads, who is at risk and when, in order to provide evidence-based guidance to the public, and stop the pandemic....

This study uses official data from Guatemala’s Departamento de Atencion a la Victima (Victim Attention Department), a specialized unit in Guatemala’s National Civil Police, to assess the long-term impacts of a government mandated lockdown and reopening on domestic violence. It also considers how the lockdown and reopening impacted domestic violence...

An estimated 26 million American citizens per year have been victims of an identity-based crime. This study contributes to the scholarship on identity-based crime by examining serious identity-based crime victimization and the services available to help victims. This study investigated the interaction between victimized individuals and organization...

The purpose of this study is to examine differences in patterns of criminal arrests between US citizens and foreign citizens among a sample of individuals incarcerated for homicide in Texas. Data for this project come from administrative records of inmates incarcerated in Texas for homicide. Drawing from the criminal careers literature, official ar...

This review aims to synthesize the evaluation evidence for parent‐engagement programs that focus on reducing juvenile truancy as the primary outcome. Delinquent behavior will be assessed as a secondary outcome when included. This objective is guided by the following research questions: (1) what is the effectiveness of parent‐engagement programs for...

The global health crisis that started early in 2020 has triggered a surge of interest in the effect (if any) of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) on patterns of domestic violence. The first systematic review and meta-analysis examining domestic violence during the pandemic revealed quite a lot of diversity in the approaches used to measure potential e...

COVID-19 health restrictions not only affected crime rates but also created a new and temporary type of crime, COVID-19 public health violations. Unfortunately, this new crime type has not yet been empirically scrutinized. The current study is the first to explore these COVID-19 public health violations by using a dataset created by the City of San...

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by heightened attraction to rewards and risk-taking propensities. Dual-systems models portray the adolescent brain in terms of a maturational mismatch whereby brain systems involved in sensitivity to incentives become potentiated before impulse-control systems have matured. That perspective implie...

Correctional staff play a major role in the incarceration experience for millions of U.S. adults each year. While much research has addressed misconduct perpetrated by incarcerated persons, less has systematically addressed rule-violating behavior by correctional staff and how such conduct is perceived by formerly incarcerated individuals. Using qu...

Objectives This study uses two cluster detection techniques to identify clusters of violent crime during the 3 months of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in Miami-Dade County compared to that during an equivalent period in 2018 and 2019. Methods Violent crime data from the Miami-Dade Central Records Bureau were analyzed. The Local Indicators of Spatial...

This research addressed whether perceptions of antisocial peers play a role in shaping individual perceptions of the legitimacy of school authority figures in young people. Using data from a sample of 102 young people from Brisbane, Australia, who participated in the Ability School Engagement Program, we examined whether associating with peers who...

The global health crisis that started early in 2020 has triggered a surge of interest in the effect (if any) of COVID-19 on patterns of domestic violence. The first systematic review and meta-analysis examining domestic violence during the pandemic revealed quite a lot of diversity in the approaches used to measure potential effects. Drawing on the...

The immigration-crime nexus has been the subject of much empirical attention and research findings consistently indicate that neighborhoods with large immigrant populations exhibit comparatively lower crime rates. However, it is still imperative to explain how these effects take place in different contexts of structural circumstances of communities...

An estimated 26 million American citizens per year have been victims of an identity-based crime. This study contributes to the scholarship on financial crimes facilitated through identity-based criminal activity by examining the views on technological approaches to the prevention of identity theft among 50 professionals working in the identity-base...

Psychopathy has been an important topic of study in psychology and increasingly in criminology. The adverse, antisocial behavior of psychopaths has been studied for quite some time, yet there remains less work on how psychopaths may (or may not) succeed in other life domains, including in particular employment. On this score, the literature provide...

Although neurodisability features significantly across child welfare and youth justice cohorts, little research investigates neurodisability among crossover children with dual systems involvement. This study examined differences in childhood adversity, child protection involvement, and offending among crossover children by neurodisability status. D...

Confronted by rapidly growing infection rates, hospitalizations and deaths, governments around the world have introduced stringent containment measures to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. This public health response has had an unprecedented impact on people’s daily lives which, unsurprisingly, has also had widely observed implications in terms o...

Objectives We examine whether violent, property, or sex trafficking–related crime increased during the 2018 Formula 1 United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas. Methods Ordinary least squares regression models, time series trend analysis, and forecasted prediction intervals based on autoregressive integrated moving average models are used to analy...

Purpose: The aim of this review was to estimate the effect of COVID-19-related restrictions (i.e., stay at home orders, lockdown orders) on reported incidents of domestic violence. Methods A systematic review of articles was conducted in various databases and a meta-analysis was also performed. The search was carried out based on conventional scien...

There is a dearth of empirical studies examining sexual harassment within the accounting industry and that which does exist tends to focus exclusively on female victims. Employing six individual-level characteristics and five organizational-level characteristics, this study examines the prevalence and nature of workplace sexual harassment among a s...

Women’s struggle for equal legal rights, which is a critical component of their own economic growth, has always been a pressing social and human rights issue. While gains have been made for some women, important variability remains not only within nations but also across nations. How this accessibility manifests itself in social outcomes however, h...

Early exposure to violence (ETV) has been repeatedly linked to violence in intimate relationships later in life. However, this association has rarely been explored among young men involved in the justice system, a group that is of significant policy concern. Methods. Drawing from four waves of data collected from 808 young men with histories of ser...

As a candidate and as president, Donald Trump heightened the salience of immigration, portraying those crossing the nation’s Southern border as “bad hombres” and advocating building a wall blocking their access to the United States from Mexico. Based on a 2019 MTurk study of 465 White adults, the current study found that a clear majority of respond...

Recent studies exploiting city-level time series have shown that, around the world, several crimes declined after COVID-19 containment policies have been put in place. Using data at the community-level in Chicago, this work aims to advance our understanding on how public interventions affected criminal activities at a finer spatial scale. The analy...

Recent studies exploiting city-level time series have shown that, around the world, several crimes declined after COVID-19 containment policies have been put in place. Using data at the community-level in Chicago, this work aims to advance our understanding on how public interventions affected criminal activities at a finer spatial scale. The analy...

A large body of literature has examined the impact of staff behavior in correctional settings on offenders’ likelihood of recidivism. However, gaps remain with respect to how staff behavior is related to other indicators of post-release success, including an individual’s perception of success upon release. In this study, we examine how correctional...

Peer victimization patterns from elementary school transitioning into late middle school have not been assessed in detail. Even less work has considered how these patterns differ across family context and then are linked to delinquency in adolescence. This study used longitudinal data (n = 2,892) from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study...

Police use of force is one of the most critical issues in policing with research consistently finding that the best predictor of force is suspect resistance. Yet, resistance itself is relatively rarely researched. This study drew from the Drug Use Monitoring in Australian (DUMA) program – Australia’s longest running cross-sectional survey of offend...

Researchers have long known that self-control, or impulse control, is important for a variety of life outcomes, including health, education, and behavior. In criminology, the most popular perspective on self-control argues that it is a multidimensional trait that is relatively stable after about age 8. Some work, however, has shown that in fact, se...

This introduction discusses the global impact of Covid-19 on corrections.

Peer victimization patterns from elementary school transitioning into late middle school have not been assessed in detail. Even less work has considered how these patterns differ across family context and then are linked to delinquency in adolescence. This study used longitudinal data (n = 2,892) from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study...

Identity theft is a pervasive and expensive problem. Not only does the crime incur a significant financial and mental cost on the victim, but also exhibits a financial toll on the organizations that are swept up in the crime. Yet, while there is some research on the offender part of the identity theft problem, much less research has been devoted to...

Low empathy has been implicated in antisocial, aggressive, and criminal behavior, especially among adolescents. Less understood is the extent to which empathy is amenable to treatment, and whether an improvement in empathy can mitigate the deleterious effects of known risk factors, such as childhood maltreatment. A sample of 11,000 serious juvenile...

Research addressing the purported relationship between immigration and crime remains popular, but some gaps remain under-explored. One important gap involves disentangling differences in crime and punishment by immigrant status, as measured across different definitions of immigration status and in relation to U.S. natives, at the individual level....

Research Summary Partnerships are an integral part of the working life of police, yet not a lot is known about how such partnerships work to deter and control crime problems. This article explores the impact of a Third Party Policing Partnership involving police and schools coming together to engage with parents to address their child's truancy and...

Prior research on cybercrime victimization has generally emphasized the linkage between the frequency or actual length of time individuals spend online engaging in certain activities and the risk of being victimized in cyberspace but has paid much less attention to what persons actually share or post online that increases the risk of online victimi...

A large body of research demonstrates the toll stress takes on police. However, with recent high-profile force incidents that have fueled distrust of police especially within minority communities, there is reason to expect that minority officers experience stress differently than their white counterparts. Within the context of Agnew’s (1992) Genera...

Annually, over half a million prisoners are released back into the community. It is important to identify and implement evidence-based strategies within prisons to aid in inmates’ re-entry. An impressive knowledge base exists describing the effectiveness of these strategies, but much less is known about the barriers that impede participation in muc...

Abstract COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the lives of persons around the world and social scientists are just beginning to understand its consequences on human behavior. One policy that public health officials put in place to help stop the spread of the virus were stay-at-home/shelter-in-place lockdown-style orders. While designed to protect people f...

Past research has revealed a link between family economic hardship and children's bullying involvement, yet research has not examined the kinds of factors that may mediate this relationship. Our study used data from the National Survey of Children's Health and consisted of a sample of 15,797 children from 12 to 17 years of age who lived with their...

Although much has been written about identity-based crimes, much less is known about victim services for identity-based crimes. This paper uses in-depth interview data collected from individuals who have both experienced a serious identity-based crime in the past 2 years and used services from the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, an organi...

Despite early theorists suggesting that psychopathic traits are associated with higher intelligence, meta-analytic work has found that global psychopathy scores are actually negatively related to intelligence, albeit weakly. Furthermore, it was reported in the same meta-analytic work that the various dimensions of psychopathy were differentially re...

Purpose Though prior research has established the separate effects of romantic relationships and immigrant status on offending, few studies have combined these areas to assess how immigrant status may condition the effect of romantic relationships on crime. Further, fewer studies strive to uncover the potential mechanisms of the relationship effect...

Research finds a lack of sleep during adolescence is associated with a variety of negative outcomes and suggests that early school start times contribute to this problem. Criminologists have largely overlooked the relevance of school start times for adolescent delinquency and substance use, precluding multi-disciplinary collaborations between crimi...

Mass incarceration has led to an increased reliance on private prisons. Yet, there is little evidence regarding the extent to which public safety and misconduct patterns differ across private versus public prisons. Combining data from prisoners in the State of Texas within a counterfactual research design, the current study examines differences in...