BRIEF REPORT Criminal Records of Homicide Offenders

HOMICIDE IS A SERIOUS PUBLIC health problem in the United States, with 17 638 victims in 2002. Programs to prevent homicide can be distinguished by whether they are addressed to the general public or are targeted toward individuals who are considered high risk because of their previous criminal involvement. For example, federal gun laws incorporate both approaches; there are general provisions, such as the near prohibition on the private possession of fully automatic weapons, and targeted provisions, such as the ban on possession of any firearm by convicted felons and domestic violence offenders. Similarly, the criminal law poses a general threat of punishment to any adult contemplating criminal violence but targets individuals with convictions for more severe sentences. Other criminal justice interventions are highly targeted, affecting only individuals who are actually arrested or convicted: mandated drug programs and other rehabilitation-oriented programs, incarceration, parole and probation supervision, and so forth. Although the criminology literature includes a number of studies of the criminal histories of select groups of homicide offenders, previous studies have typically dealt with special subsets of homicide offenders, provided few specifics on criminal record, and lacked comparable information for the general population. As a result, this literature offers little guidance on the relative scope of targeted vs general prevention strategies in addressing the homicide problem. Specifically, how much would the homicide rate be reduced by a hypothetical intervention that eliminated the excess risk of homicide offending among people with a criminal record, defined, for example, by felony conviction within the previous decade? To answer this question, we conducted a case-control study comparing the prevalence of criminal histories among homicide offenders to the prevalence of criminal histories among the general population.