Delinquent Careers A Test of the Career Escalation Model

ABSTRACT In the treatment of status offenders, the espousal of a medical therapeutic model has led to the development of diversion programs designed to offset a progressive career escalation from petty to serious delinquent acts. Using the offense histories of 1200 juveniles, transition probabilities were created to test for offense specialization and offense escalation. Controlling for age, sex, and race or ethnicity, the career transition configurations were reflective of homogeneous, number‐independent Markov processes. The implications of these findings run counter to many popular assumptions of delinquency causation and treatment and challenge the basic tenets of many status offender programs.