Scaling Behaviour in the Number of Criminal Acts Committed by Individuals

Abstract

We find subtle deviations from power law behaviour in the number of crimes committed by individuals, analysing the two main criminology databases which track this behaviour, the Pittsburgh Young Offenders survey and the Cambridge UK Study in Delinquent Development. The description of the data when the number of boys committing or reporting zero crimes are excluded is different from that when they are included. The crucial step in the criminal progress of an individual appears to be committing the first act. Once this is done, the number of criminal acts committed by an individual can take place on all scales.

17 pages 1 figure

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• The Web of Human Sexual Contacts
• Truncation of power law behavior in "scale-free" network models due to information filtering
• Power Law Distribution of the Duration and Magnitude of Recessions in Capitalist Economies : Breakdown of Scaling
• Power Law Distribution of the Frequency of Demises of U.S Firms

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Scaling laws in the dynamics of crime growth rate