Adolescent Delinquency and Antisocial Tendencies as Precursors to Adult Violent Offending

Abstract

Studies on adult sex and violent offenders have found high rates of adolescent delinquency, while early delinquency has been shown to be significantly associated with adult offending. The examined subsample (n = 123) of a longitudinal prospective study (n = 6,315) includes all men who at the age of 19 had an entry in the criminal records. During the observation period of 34 years, 68.3% of the sample had been reconvicted as adults, 23.6% for violent or sex offenses. The odds of adult sex or violent offending were 2.8 times higher for those who had committed a violent offense in adolescence and 1.05 times higher for any offense committed before the age of 19. The characteristics of criminal history showed the highest discriminative values (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.61-0.65). The most important finding of this study was that characteristics of adolescent delinquency predicted adult violent or sex offending, whereas socioeconomic and psychiatric characteristics did not.

Does Violence in Adolescence Differentially Predict Offending Patterns in Early Adulthood?

“…This group only made up around 5% of the sample, but respondents in this group engaged in high levels of violence from adolescence into early adulthood. Similarly, results from a study of Swiss males found that a higher number of violent offenses in adolescence was predictive of violent recidivism in adulthood (Laubacher et al, 2014).…”

“…Support for the idea that early violence can result in chronic offending is found in research assessing longitudinal patterns of violent behavior into adulthood (Elliott, 1994;Laubacher et al, 2014;Loeber et al, 2008;Nash & Kim, 2005). In one study, Loeber et al (2008) used data from the youngest and oldest cohorts of the Pittsburgh Youth Study to assess offending specialization.…”

“…Overall, there is mixed support for whether an onset of violent offending in midadolescence is able to explain continuous offending behavior in adulthood. Some studies have shown that violent offending in adolescence might be an indicator of either heterogeneous patterns of offending (Elliott et al, 1986;Farrington, 1989;Fontaine et al, 2014) or chronic offending (Elliott, 1994;Laubacher et al, 2014;Nash & Kim, 2005;Svensson, 2002), throughout the life course. In contrast, more recent research has shown that early violence may be a poor predictor of particular criminal career patterns and/or dimensions (DeLisi et al, 2015;Harris, 2013;Mazerolle et al, 2010;McGrath, 2015).…”

The Role of Trait Anger in the Relation Between Juvenile Delinquency and Intimate Partner Violence in Adulthood

“…In addition, all forms of IPV were significantly positively interrelated. Both history of juvenile detention and trait anger (Norlander & Eckhardt, 2005) have been shown to significantly correlate to externalizing behavior and violence variables in several previous studies (Laubacher et al, 2014; Norlander & Eckhardt, 2005). Intercorrelations among the main study variables and demographic variables, including age, race, educational level, and income, were also conducted.…”

“…Factors that may increase the likelihood that an individual who engaged in juvenile delinquency will be violent in adulthood also include low parental control and monitoring (Scholte, 1999). Interestingly, a longitudinal study found that characteristics of juvenile delinquency (e.g., versatility, frequency, and severity) predicted adult violent and sexual offending over and above socioeconomic and psychiatric characteristics (Laubacher et al, 2014). However, this study limited its scope of psychiatric characteristics to (a) anxiety, depressive, compulsive-obsessive, and/or sexual neurosis; (b) enuresis; (c), mania and melancholia; (d) schizophrenia; (e) asocial personality and/or antisocial, criminal tendencies; and (f) substance dependence.…”