Criminal Careers (Routledge Studies in Criminal Behaviour)

Criminal Careers follows the lives and criminal behaviours of 2,397 people in Poland who as juveniles committed a crime and received a form of punishment from the juvenile court between the late 1980s and the year 2000. Through combining quantitative and qualitative research, their criminal careers, the differences between men and women, risk factors, and reasons for nondesistance are analysed.

Uniquely, the authors have used an extensive database of former juveniles, in which as many as 40% were women. This book therefore makes a comparison between women and men in terms of their future life paths. Additionally, the researched group consisted of teenagers from two different periods: the 1980s (the transition generation) and 2000 (the millennial generation), which in the context of Central and Eastern European countries means that they entered adulthood in completely different realities. These differences are therefore also explored in depth within the book.

By focusing on Poland, the book provides a different perspective to criminal career research, which is generally limited to a few countries in Western Europe and the United States.

The book will be of great interest to academics and students who are developing their own research in the fields of criminal careers, juvenile delinquency, and antisocial behaviours by young people. It will also appeal to professionals, including juvenile judges, probation officers, staff in correctional facilities and social rehabilitation institutions, social workers and employees of nonprofit organisations that support juveniles, people in crisis, and prisoners or exprisoners.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Witold Klaus is a Professor at the Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (Head of the Department of Criminology and of the Migration Law Research Centre) and Research Fellow in the Centre of Migration Research at the University of Warsaw. He is a Lawyer, Criminologist, Migration Researcher, and NGO activist. He is a former Executive Secretary of the Polish Society of Criminology (2008-2018) and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the oldest Polish criminological journal, Archiwum Kryminologii [Archives of Criminology]. He held scholarships from the British Academy (UK), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law (Germany), and the US government. His main areas of academic interest include refugee and immigrant rights, deportation studies, crimmigration, victimology, and victimisation of underserved groups in society. He is a member of the European Society of Criminology, where he coleads the Working Group of Immigration, Crime, and Citizenship.

Irena Rzeplińska is a Criminologist and Lawyer. She is a Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS). She is an author of research on deviance, recidivists, self-report surveys, crime, and historical and contemporary crime policy. She is an author of the first criminological research and the first monograph on the crime of foreigners in Poland. Furthermore, in the last decade, she conducted research on youth crime with a focus on the past and present as well as life-course research of young criminals. She was the Principle Investigator of the project titled 'The Mechanisms Behind the Formation and Development of Criminal Careers', financed by the Polish National Science Centre. Her latest publications concern criminality at the time of COVID-19 in Poland as well as the death of the right to asylum in Poland (in the wake of the situation on the Polish-Belarusian border). Between 2004 and 2016, she was Vice-Director in the Institute of Law Studies of the PAS. Currently, she is Chair of the Editorial Committee of the oldest criminological journal in Poland–Archiwum Kryminologii [Archives of Criminology]– and President of the Polish Society of Criminology. She is a member of the Presidency of the Committee of Legal Sciences of the PAS.

Dagmara Woźniakowska-Fajst is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Policy at the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences and Resocialisation at the University of Warsaw and an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. She holds the position of Secretary of the Board of the Polish Society of Criminology and is a member of the European Society of Criminology and the Association for Legal Intervention. Her main areas of academic interest include victimology, deviant behaviours of juveniles and women, stalking, media coverage of crime, crimes perpetrated by foreigners, and judicial policy. Currently, she leads a project on juvenile delinquency and antisocial behaviours in contemporary Poland (funded by the National Science Centre, Poland).