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Building on several recent papers that have brought the study of criminal career lengths back to the attention of criminologists, this study used a sample of serious offenders to examine the length of their official criminal career. This study not only examined overall career length, but it also examined the career length for five categories of offenses (serious, violent, serious violent, property, and drug), the residual career length as a function of age, and the correlates of the average career length. The data used consist of a random sample of 1,957 offenders released from the California Youth Authority in 1981-1982 who were followed into their 30s. The results of the study are interpreted in terms of their implications for theory, public policy, and future research needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proportional hazards models are powerful methods for the analysis of dynamic social processes and are widely used in sociology to estimate the effects of covariates on event timing (e.g., time to arrest, birth, marriage). The proper statistical modeling of failure time data is an important analytical issue in sociology, but to date the field has largely neglected the application of these models to multiple failure time data in which the conventional assumption of the independence of failure times is not tenable. This paper critically describes a class of models known as variance-corrected proportional hazards models that have been developed by statisticians to take into account a lack of independence among failure times. The purpose is to provide an exposition and comparison for sociologists of several such models and associated methods for handling multiple failure time data that can be readily estimated in commonly available statistical software packages. We pay special attention to the data requirements necessary for estimation of the models. The paper concludes with an illustrative application of the models to analyze the arrest patterns of a sample of California Youth Authority parolees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]