Using linked Magistrates and Crown Court data to explore defendant appearance(s) over time: specialisation, escalation or de-escalation?

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A defendant enters the court room at the magistrates' or Crown Courts, will they be back some time in future? Will the next time be for a more serious crime? By following defendants in the time after they leave the court from one case, we will discover the rate that defendants return to the courts in a new case. The research will use the exciting new linked administrative datasets, available from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) for the first time, which will enable us to connect cases for a single defendant and follow the cases as they move from the magistrates' to the Crown Courts.The criminal career of the returning defendants will follow one of three trajectories. The defendant may return to the courts for the same offense in both the index case and the repeat case, exhibiting the notion of specialisation, where a criminal will commit the same type offense in their criminal career (Paternoster et al. 1998; A. Piquero et al. 1999). Secondly, the defendant may return to the courts for an offense that is more or less serious than in the previous case, exhibiting a trajectory of escalation or de-escalation respectively (Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1996).Through the application of methods from survival and recurrent event analysis. The project will first investigate the risk that defendants will return to the courts. Then this will extend to determine the risk for the separate events whereby a defendant returns for the same type of offence, or for a different offence in a case that is more or less serious, reflecting the trajectories in the defendants' criminal career. In conjunction, the influence of the defendants characteristics, such as age and gender, and characteristics from the index case, such as plea and outcome, will be controlled for and determined.In understanding the risk that a defendant will return to the courts, public services such as the police, probation and prison services can make informed and evidence based decisions in regards to monitoring and crime prevention. This an outcome that has already been seen following the publication of 'Vulnerable births mothers and recurrent care proceedings: Final summary report' (Broadhurst et al. 2017), which demonstrated the potential of these methods to fundamentally change the outlook of preventative services. Through the application of these methods, adapting them to the criminal justice service and taking them further will produce similar insights within the magistrates' and Crown Courts.