This paper builds on our previous systematic review of prospective longitudinal studies and examines the early risk factors associated with life-course persistent offending (LCP), adolescence-limited (AL) and late-onset (LO) offending.
This article is a companion paper to the preceding article by Jolliffe, Farrington, Piquero, MacLeod, and Van de Weijer (2017), which describes a systematic review of information in prospective longitudinal studies about the prevalence of life-course-persistent (LCP), adolescence-limited (AL), and late-onset (LO) offenders.
Only four of the 14 studies examined risk or protective factors associated with the offending types. 4 These were as follows, along with their definitions of LCP, AL and LO offenders:
This systematic review of prospective longitudinal studies found that there has been a surprising lack of attention to criminal career duration in research on LCP, AL, and LO offending types.
This research was funded by the Ministry of Justice in London. Funding for the SSDP portion of this study was provided by National Institute on Drug Abuse Grants R01DA009679 and R01DA024411.
1 A recent issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice, edited by Ttofi, Farrington, Piquero, and DeLisi (2016), was devoted to protective factors against offending and violence in several prospective longitudinal studies.
The life course offenders are the ones who are likely to commit crimes early in their teens and continue after reaching the age of twenty while adolescent offenders only commit crimes in ...
The reason they stop committing crimes is that the motivation to do it decreases as well as the availability of other alternatives more than delinquency. On the other hand, the LCP offenders start exhibiting antisocial behaviors at an early age which continue later on in their lives.
The reason is that the AL offenders need peer pressure to commit a crime while LCP offenders can do it alone hen ce they are likely to start coaching the young offenders.
For Moffitt ( 1993 ), adolescent-limited offenders' delinquent criminal activity is a result of two factors: social mimicry and the maturity gap.
The peak age of onset of offending is between 8 and 14, and the peak age of desistance from offending is between 20 and 29. An early age of onset predicts a relatively long criminal career duration. There is marked continuity in offending and antisocial behavior from childhood to the teenage years and to adulthood.
Specifically, the segment of the population predicted by Moffitt to be chronically aggressive—called life-course persistent offenders —has been found to account for a disproportionate number of serious crimes. What remains less certain, however, is whether this same group of offenders are also responsible for perpetrating acts of forced sex. The authors examined the tendency for life-course persisters to sexually assault using a nationally representative sample of individuals. Our findings suggest that life-course persisters are disproportionately more likely to be sexually coercive compared to other individuals.
The Add Health is a prospective longitudinal study that features a nationally representative sample of adolescents selected from middle and high school during the 1995 academic year. The first wave of data collection took place within schools and included information collected from approximately 90,000 students. Following the completion of the in-school portion of Wave 1, a subsample of participants were then selected (along with their primary caregivers) and asked to participate in the in-home portion of Wave 1 interviews. The in-home interviews included a variety of items related to parent–child relationships, behavioral outcomes, aspects of the respondent’s temperament, and involvement in acts of delinquency.
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This chapter reviews 10 years of research into a developmental taxonomy of antisocial behavior that proposed two primary hypothetical prototypes: life-course-persistent versus adolescence-limited offenders.
An impressive body of research doc- uments an overlap between persistent forms of antisocial behav- ior and other conditions of childhood such as learning disabili- ties and hyperactivity (cf. Moffitt, 1990a).
Steinberg (1981, 1987) has shown that pubertal maturation precedes emotional distance and less authoritarian parent- ing. There is much evidence for the activational effects of pubertal hor- mones on problem behavior and on escalation of parent-child conflict (Buchanan, Eccles, & Becker, 1992).