Advancing Knowledge about Co-Offending: Results from a Prospective Longitudinal Survey of London Males

Abstract

Perhaps the most frequently documented conclusion about delinquent behavior is that most offenses are committed with others rather than by persons acting alone.Breckenridge and Abbott 1 were perhaps the first to observe that not only are most delinquent offenses committed with others, but that even most youths who routinely offend alone are influenced by others.Because of this article's behavioral perspective, we refer to persons who act together in a crime as co-offenders and to their committing that crime as cooffending. 2Co-offending is a universal pattern in all major forms of delinquency and characterizes offending patterns in countries with widely different cultural traditions such as Argentina, 3 Japan, 4 and India. 5 Offending with others often is characterized as group offending, implying either that members act together as a unit or that individual offending is organized by group affiliation.When peer

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Affiliated Institutions

• University of Cambridge GB
• Institute of Criminology SI
• Yale University US

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