Journal ArticleDOI
Stability and change in criminal behaviour up to age 30
Hekan Stattin,David Magnusson +1 more
TLDR
In this article, the issue of stability and change in criminal behaviour was investigated using data for registered crime obtained in a Swedish prospective, longitudinal research project, and the relevance of early onset of criminality for criminal behaviour in the long term is discussed.Abstract:
The issue of stability and change in criminal behaviour was investigated using data for registered crime obtained in a Swedish prospective, longitudinal research project. Criminal activity among 709 males was investigated for three time periods: childhood (up to age 14), adolescence (from age 15 to age 20), and early adulthood (age 21-30). The Spearman correlation coefficient, reflecting the stability of registered criminal activity, was 0.40 between childhood and adolescence, 0.34 between childhood and early adulthood, and 0.38 between adolescence and early adulthood. Little specialization of criminal activity over time was revealed. Rather, a diversified crime pattern in early adulthood tended to be preceded by a spread of offences over different types of crime in adolescence. The small group of subjects who had committed offences below age 15, during adolescence, and also in early adulthood were responsible for most of the crime recorded for the total research population. These persistent offenders constituted 5.4 per cent of the total number of subjects, were recorded to have 41 per cent of all registered convictions, and participated in 62 per cent of all the registered crime occasions. Their over-representation with regard to offences committed was relatively uniform across different types of crime, both in adolescence and in early adulthood. Overall, acquiring a record for early delinquency was quite strongly prognostic of future crime. More than three out of four of the subjects who appeared on the police registers before the age of criminal responsibility also showed up there later. The relevance of early onset of criminality for criminal behaviour in the long term is discussed.read more
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Understanding Desistance from Crime
John H. Laub,Robert J. Sampson +1 more
TL;DR: The study of desistance from crime is hampered by definitional, measurement, and theoretical incoherence as mentioned in this paper, and a unifying framework can distinguish termination of offending from the process of desistanc...
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The Development of Offending and Antisocial Behaviour from Childhood: Key Findings from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development
TL;DR: Early prevention experiments are needed to reduce delinquency, targeting low attainment, poor parenting, impulsivity and poverty.
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The sociobiology of sociopathy: An integrated evolutionary model
TL;DR: In this article, the authors integrate the proximate, developmental models with the ultimate, evolutionary ones, suggesting that two developmentally different etiologies of sociopathy emerge from two different evolutionary mechanisms.
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The Criminal Career Paradigm
TL;DR: A variety of theoretical, empirical, and policy issues have surfaced. as mentioned in this paper identified important methodological issues, including the relationship between past and future criminal activity, and potential explanations for this relationship: state dependence and persistent heterogeneity.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Twelfth Jack Tizard Memorial Lecture. The development of offending and antisocial behaviour from childhood: key findings from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development.
TL;DR: The most important childhood (age 8-10) predictors of delinquency were antisocial child behaviour, impulsivity, low intelligence and attainment, family criminality, poverty and poor parental child-rearing behaviour as mentioned in this paper.