SPECIALIZATION IN JUVENILE CAREERS - MARKOV RESULTS FOR A CALIFORNIA COHORT

In this paper, we examine the arrest careers through September 1985 of a highly active cohort of youth paroled by the California Youth Autho rity in the early 1980s. Our results are in some ways similar to and i n other ways different from those reported by other researchers. We fi nd that while adjacent transition matrices appear constant, the same c annot be said for nonadjacent matrices. We reject the first-order Mark ov hypothesis and find support for specialization in the statistical s ignificance of the forward specialization coefficients. Our results al so suggest that, in addition to transitions to the same type of offens e, an oscillating pattern of offending is common for our subjects. We also compare the transition matrices of three racial/ethnic and four r egional groups. These results indicate differences in the patterns of offending by the racial/ethnic groups in our sample and similar offens e-transition behavior in three of the four regions that differs signif icantly from that of the fourth region.