Résumé·s
Research shows that co-offending has contradictory effects on rates of re-arrest. On
the one hand, group offending may be riskier: for example, co-offenders might be targeted by
police or might snitch to protect themselves. Criminal networks may also have indirect effects:
offenders embedded in criminal networks commit more offenses and thus should have a higher
risk of being arrested at some point. On the other hand, networks generate steady criminal
opportunities with relatively low risk of arrest and high monetary benefits (e.g., drug trafficking).
Few authors have empirically explored the relation between co-offending and re-arrest. This
paper does so, using data from seven years of arrest records in the province of Quebec (Canada).
The analysis is designed to explore why some offenders are re-arrested after an initial arrest while
others are not. It focuses on the factors involved in re-arrest, considering two distinct levels of
measures of co-offending. The first level of analysis takes into account a situational measure that
indicates whether a given offense was committed by co-offenders (group offense). The second
level is used to examine whether being part of a criminal network influences re-arrest. For
offenders embedded in such networks, two network features (degree centrality and clustering
coefficient) show that the global position of individuals within the Quebec arrest network are
analyzed. Our results suggest that co-offending is a crucial factor that should be taken into
account when looking at the odds of being caught again. The use of generalized linear mixed
model brings interesting nuances about the impact of co-offending. The paper adds to the recently
growing literature on the link between networks and criminal careers.