CO-OFFENDING AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DELINQUENT CAREER

This article examines the role of co-offending in the development of the delinquent career. Hypotheses derived from Reiss's (1986, 1988) taxonomic theory of co-offending are tested, using police-reported data on the delinquent careers and co-offending of 55,336 Canadian offenders. Support is found for a taxonomic theory and for age-related and functional theories of co-offending. The taxonomy consists of two types of offenders-high activity (3 percent) and low activity (97 percent) whose co-offending patterns differ during the teenage years but not during childhood. For low-activity offenders as teenagers, the proportion of co-offenses decreases with criminal experience. The rate of co-offending by high-activity offenders as teenagers is lower at onset than for low-activity offenders, and it varies little with criminal experience. For both offender types, the proportion of co-offenses decreases with age, is slightly less in males, and varies with the type of offense. For both offender types, the proportion of co-offenses in childhood offending is greater than in the teenage years and is unrelated to the offender's age or criminal experience.