This research blends 2 traditions of theorizing on the causes of crime, one focused on the role of individual differences and the other focused on structural and contextual variables. Two related studies examined the relations among impulsivity, neighborhood context, and juvenile offending. The first, cross-sectional study uses a large sample of 13-year-old inner-city boys, whereas the second, longitudinal study offers a conceptual replication using 17-year-old inner-city boys who are a subset of the original sample. Across both studies, results indicate that the effects of impulsivity on juvenile offending are stronger in poorer neighborhoods. Furthermore, nonimpulsive boys in poor neighborhoods were at no greater risk for delinquency than nonimpulsive boys in better-off neighborhoods. In this article, we bring together two major traditions of theorizing about the causes of antisocial behavior. The first tradition, with strong links to psychology and psychiatry, seeks to explain crime by using the individual characteristics of offenders. Theories in this tradition suggest that individuals commit crimes because they possess certain psychological qualities that make them more liable to commit crime. Such accounts are identifiable as early as the turn of the 19th century, when psychiatrists described pyromania and kleptomania as distorted personality constellations (Binder, 1987). Modern theorists have linked criminal offending to

Risk and promotive effects were investigated as predictors of persistent serious delinquency in male participants of the Pittsburgh Youth Study (R. Loeber, D. P. Farrington, M. Stouthamer-Loeber, & W. B. van Kammen, 1998), living in different neighborhoods. Participants were studied over ages 13-19 years for the oldest sample and 7-13 years for the youngest sample. Risk and promotive effects were studied in 6 domains: child behavior, child attitudes, school and leisure activities, peer behaviors, family functioning, and demographics. Regression models improved when promotive effects were included with risk effects in predicting persistent serious delinquency. Disadvantaged neighborhoods, compared with better neighborhoods, had a higher prevalence of risk effects and a lower prevalence of promotive effects. However, predictive relations between risk and promotive effects and persistent serious delinquency were linear and similar across neighborhood socioeconomic status.

This paper presents a study of the relationship between type of neighborhood socioeconomic context, individual characteristics (individuals are classified by a set of selected key measures of individual dispositions and social situation) and serious male juvenile offending (prevalence and early and late onsets) in the city of Pittsburgh. The analytical strategy may best be described as holistic and epidemiological. The key research question is whether onset and prevalence of juvenile serious offending is invariant by neighborhood socioeconomic context when controlling for individual sets of risk and protective characteristics. The results do not support the notion that neighborhood socioeconomic context has any greater direct impact on the early onset of serious offending. However, neighborhood socioeconomic context appears to have a direct impact on the late onset of offending for those juveniles who score high on protective factors, or who have a balanced mix of risk and protective factors. No support was found for the notion that individual risk characteristics and neighborhood risk are additive. Children and adolescents with high scores on risk characteristics offend in serious crime at a similar high rate regardless of the socioeconomic context of their neighborhood.

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In this paper we will test one of the key assumptions of Situational Action Theory: that individuals’ (law-relevant) morality is more fundamental to their crime involvement than their ability to exercise self-control. We specifically hypothesize that, for individuals with a strong morality, their capability to exercise self-control plays less of a role in their crime involvement than it does for individuals with a weak morality, whose capability to exercise self-control may substantially influence their engagement in crime. To test this hypothesis we use data from the Peterborough Youth Study (PYS), a cross-sectional survey of 1957 adolescents aged 14—15 from the UK city of Peterborough. The findings support the main hypothesis: young people with a strong (law-relevant) morality do not engage in crime, regardless of their ability to exercise self-control. However, among those with a weaker (law-relevant) morality, their ability to exercise self-control is an important factor in their crime involvement.

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