The seminal work that established the contemporary understanding of career criminals was Delinquency in a Birth Cohort published by Wolfgang, Figlio, and Sellin in 1972. The study followed 9,945 males born in Philadelphia in 1945 and who lived in the city at least from ages ten to eighteen. They found that nearly two-thirds of the population never experienced a police contact and that 35 percent of the population had. Based on this, one can be comforted to know that most people in a population are law-abiding to the extent that the police never contact them for deviant behavior. For the minority of persons whom were actually contacted by police, the police contacts were rare occurrences occurring just once, twice, or three times. On the other hand, some youth experienced more frequent interaction with police. According to Wolfgang et al. (1972), persons with five or more police contacts were chronic or habitual offenders. Of the nearly 10,000 boys, only 627 members, just 6 percent of the population, qualified as habitual offenders. The chronic 6 percent, however, accounted for 52 percent of the delinquency in the entire cohort, 63 percent of all index offenses, 71 percent of the murders, 73 percent of the rapes, 82 percent of the robberies, and 69 percent of the aggravated assaults. Herein was the quantifiable evidence that a small minority of high-rate offenders known as career criminals were guilty of perpetrating the majority of all criminal acts in a population.
A second and improved study examined a cohort of 13,160 males and 14,000 females born in Philadelphia in 1958 (Tracy, Wolfgang, & Figlio, 1990). Overall, the 1958 cohort committed crime at higher rates than the 1945 cohort and demonstrated greater involvement in the most serious forms of crime, but roughly the same proportion of persons, 33 percent, experienced arrest prior to adulthood. Approximately 7 percent of the population members were habitual offenders, and they accounted for 61 percent of all delinquency, 60 percent of the murders, 75 percent of the rapes, 73 percent of the robberies, and 65 percent of the aggravated assaults. Across research designs, analytical methods, and data sources selected from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, criminologists have repeatedly affirmed the empirical regularity that a small subgroup of offenders, or career criminals, accounts for the bulk of delinquency occurring in a society (for reviews, see Blumstein et al., 1986, DeLisi, 2005, Moffitt et al., 2001, Piquero et al., 2003 and Weiner, 1989).
Curiously, the study of career criminals is largely independent of the study of psychopathy. Psychopathy is a clinical construct defined by a constellation of interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and behavioral characteristics that manifest in multifarious antisocial behaviors. Psychopaths are grandiose, emotionally cold, manipulative, callous, arrogant, dominant, irresponsible, short-tempered persons who tend to violate social norms and victimize others without guilt or anxiety. They are human predators without conscience (Blair et al., 2005, Cleckley, 1941, Hare, 1991, Hare, 1993 and Patrick, 2006). Furthermore, there appears to be strong empirical overlap between the constructs of career criminality and psychopathy. Consider this observation from Hare (1999, p. 186), “One of the interesting findings to emerge from this research is that in spite of their small numbers—perhaps 1 percent of the general population—psychopaths make up a significant portion of our prison populations and are responsible for a markedly disproportionate amount of serious crime and social distress.” This is essentially the same conclusion reached by criminologists that study habitual offenders.
For decades, the career criminal/criminal career and psychopathy literatures have existed in relative isolation from each other as if these constructs were ships passing in the night. If both literatures indicate that approximately 5 percent of the population is responsible for the majority of antisocial acts, to what degree are the literatures converging on the same phenomenon? The current study sought to provide a preliminary answer to this question using a large population of adjudicated and institutionalized juvenile delinquents. By examining the predictive validity between psychopathy and career criminality, the current authors attempted to bolster the empirical and conceptual bridge between these literatures that together focus on society's most violent and recalcitrant offenders. The following literature review focuses rather specifically on criminal career research that incorporated analyses or discussion of psychopathy and psychopathy research that examined the criminal careers of psychopaths.
