Group Formation and the Criminal career
Research project on the formation of criminal networks.
The goal of this project is to obtain a deep and integral understanding of the formation of criminal networks, focusing on how criminals organize themselves and how this influences their criminal career over time. Combining inference on data from the US and Norway, the project will contribute to economics and criminology through three parts:
I. Understanding how co-offenders organize and form a group
II. Investigating how co-offending influences the criminal career
III. Mapping the criminal career trajectory by gender, income and age
II. Investigating how co-offending influences the criminal career
III. Mapping the criminal career trajectory by gender, income and age
This project will run until 2030 and it will be hosted at NHH Norwegian School of Economics. In the execution of this project we plan to use administrative person-level data. The data will be collected and made unidentifiable by Statistics Norway (SSB), so it would be impossible to match it to real persons. The privacy of sample individuals would not be breached, as the purpose of this project is to find information about the average person. Therefore, individual-level data is necessary only to determine what is the general behavior and the degree of variation in the decision to commit a crime. The data will be subset by gender, general income levels and age categories. These categories are broad enough, so that it would not be possible from average numbers to obtain the identity of a single individual.
The data would be accessed and analyzed by the project leader Associate Professor Evelina Gavrilova-Zoutman. In addition, the data would be analyzed by the project participants Professor Arnt Ove Hopland, a post-doc and a PhD student (names will be added upon hiring).
The data would be stored at a secure server at NHH, which requires two factor authentication for access. After the end of the project, the data would be deleted. The project is in the application stages for funding from the European Research Council and the Norwegian Research Council.
Data subjects will have the following rights in this project: transparency, access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, notification, and protest. These rights apply so long as the data subject can be identified in the collected data.
“The search for co-offenders does not appear to be simply a matter of bodily convergences but involves complicated mating processes by which potential co-offenders select themselves as mutually suitable or unsuitable for crime purposes”
(Tremblay, 1993, p. 33)