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	Criminal Career Paradigm	Recidivism Survival Analysis
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Survival analysis
Year of origin	1986	1988
Originator	Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, Jeffrey Roth & Christy Visher	David R. Cox (method); Peter Schmidt & Ann Dryden Witte (criminological application)
Type	Conceptual framework for decomposing offending over the life course	Time-to-event regression for reoffending
Seminal source	Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., Roth, J. A., & Visher, C. A. (Eds.). (1986). Criminal Careers and 'Career Criminals' (Vols. 1–2). National Academy Press. ISBN: 9780309036887	Cox, D. R. (1972). Regression models and life-tables. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 34(2), 187–202.
Aliases	Criminal Careers Framework, Career Criminal Paradigm, Offending Career Approach, Blumstein Criminal Career Model	Time-to-Recidivism Modeling, Recidivism Hazard Modeling, Failure-Time Analysis of Reoffending, Survival Analysis of Reoffending
Related	4	4
Summary	The criminal career paradigm is a framework for studying offending as a longitudinal sequence in an individual's life rather than as undifferentiated aggregate crime. Codified by Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, and Visher in the 1986 National Academy of Sciences report, it decomposes crime into distinct dimensions — whether someone offends (participation), how often active offenders offend (frequency, λ), and the onset, seriousness, and duration of the career — each potentially with different causes.	Recidivism survival analysis models the time from a release or index event until an individual reoffends, treating reoffending as a time-to-event ('failure') outcome with censoring for those not observed to fail. It applies survival methods — Kaplan-Meier curves, Cox proportional-hazards regression, and split-population models — to answer not just whether someone recidivates but how quickly and what raises or lowers that risk over time.