FAMILY ORIGINS OF VIOLENT DELINQUENTS*

Family is central to contemporary theories of delinquent and violent behavior. Yet, the processes by which families shape violent behavior in their children are not well understood. In the past, structural views posited that a weak family exposed a child to the evils of the street. More recently, functionalists have suggested that the family plays an active role in socializing youths to violent behaviors through supervision and discipline practices and modeling and reinforcement of antisocial behaviors. Integrated theories presume that socially disorganized families weaken children's conventional bonds and attachments, leading to associations with delinquent peers and in turn antisocial behavior. However, the influence of the family as a socializing environment may shift over time, and some suggest that its influence is overshadowed during adolescence by that of other social domains—schools, neighborhoods, peers, and work. This study describes the family processes and environments of (n = 98) chronically violent delinquents. Interviews with youths and their mothers assessed family social process and environments and the social domains and institutions with which they interact. Analyses of youth reports of family environments and processes yield three family types: “interactionist” families exhibiting a high degree of internal interaction and bonding; “hierarchical” families characterized by parental dominance and the presence of family bond and interaction patterns; and “antisocial” families marked by criminality and family violence. Family variables have weaker explanatory power than do other social influences on violent delinquency. The relative contributions of family supervision practices and school environment varied by crime type. Social influences outside the family appear as stronger contributors to delinquency and violence during adolescence, regardless of early childhood experiences. The results underscore the importance of integrating social policies regarding family, crime, and neighborhood.     

The Influence of High School Activity Portfolios on Risky Behaviors in Emerging Adulthood

Extracurricular participation in adolescence is often linked to the development of a prosocial identity and social relationships. Through these social psychological mechanisms, participation is thought to prevent risky behavior in adolescence and into emerging adulthood. This study examined the relationship between high school activity portfolios and risky behaviors (i.e. binge drinking, drug use, and law violation) among a college sample. Five activity portfolios were identified, including sports-focused, low involvement, highly engaged, and two combination portfolios. There were significant differences between portfolios on social psychological measures (e.g. prosocial beliefs and social responsibility), current extracurricular involvement, and risky behaviors. Regression models indicated that social psychological factors and current involvement partially mediated the association between portfolios and risky behaviors, but portfolio type retained direct effects. Portfolios associated with involvement across several activity domains were more protective for emerging adults, in part by shaping their beliefs, sense of social responsibility, and continuing involvement.     

A TEST OF LATENT TRAIT VERSUS LIFECOURSE PERSPECTIVES ON THE STABILITY OF ADOLESCENT ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR*

Latent trait and life-course theories provide contrasting interpretations of the well-established finding that childhood antisocial behavior often precedes adolescent conduct problems and adult crime. Longitudinal data from 179 boys and their parents were used to test hypotheses derived from the two theoretical perspectives. The findings largely supported the life-course view. Oppositional behavior during late childhood predicted reductions in quality of parenting and school commitment and increased affiliation with deviant peers. These changes, in turn, predicted conduct problems during early adolescence. Although there was a moderately strong bivariate correlation between childhood antisocial behavior and adolescent conduct problems, there was no longer an association between these constructs when the effects of parenting, school, and peers were taken into account. Further, there was evidence that improved parenting, increased school commitment, or reduced affiliation with deviant peers lowered the probability that boys who were oppositional during childhood would graduate to delinquency and drug use during adolescence. Together, these findings suggest that the correlation between childhood and adolescent deviant behavior reflects a developmental process rather than a latent antisocial trait.     

A Social Learning Theory Model of Marital Violence

A social learning theory model of minor and severe marital violence offending and victimization among males and females was tested. Results support social learning as an important perspective in marital violence. However, males and females are impacted differently by their experiences with violence in childhood and adolescence. Prior experiences with violence have a more dramatic impact in the lives of females than males, both during adolescence and adulthood.     

Anxiety,alcohol intoxication,and aggression

Purpose. Research into alcohol‐related aggression has typically focused on perpetrators’ externalizing characteristics. The purpose of this exploratory review is to examine the contribution of anxiety to alcohol‐related aggression. Arguments. Anxiety disorders are associated with externalizing disorders in childhood, but anxiety appears to protect against extreme antisocial behaviours. In contrast, in adolescence and early adulthood, anxiety appears to be associated with increased risk of antisocial behaviour. One possible explanation for this disjunction may be alcohol use, which typically starts in adolescence. Alcohol is an anxiolytic drug, which may appeal to certain young people who are socially anxious but not socially avoidant. Alcohol myopia, the cognitive mechanism whereby alcohol exerts an anxiolytic effect, is also a mechanism by which alcohol serves to increase aggression. Therefore, in anxious antisocial people, drinking to cope with anxiety is likely to increase aggression. Conclusions. Interventions that flow from the research on anxiety, alcohol, and aggression are suggested.     

Early prevention of life-course personal and property violence: a 19-year follow-up of the Montreal Longitudinal-Experimental Study (MLES)

Objectives

This study assessed the impact of a multi-component prevention program on personal and property violence across three developmental periods (early adolescence, mid-adolescence and late adolescence/early adulthood).

Methods

The preventive intervention targeted disruptive kindergarten boys from low socioeconomic status families when they were 7 through 9 years of age. A randomized control trial was conducted to assess the impact of the preventive intervention relative to a control group.

Results

Two different approaches to data analysis were adopted: an intention-to-treat (ITT) approach and an instrumental variable (IV) approach. Results from the ITT analysis showed that the level of property violence for the intervention group was persistently lower across the three developmental periods compared to the control group. However, the intervention group did not differ from the control group on personal violence throughout adolescence and early adulthood. Results from the IV analysis generally confirmed these findings.

Conclusions

The discussion focuses on the differential effects of the prevention program on personal versus property violence.     

ASSESSING NEIGHBORHOOD AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL INFLUENCES ON CHILDHOOD VIOLENCE IN AN AFRICAN‐AMERICAN SAMPLE*

The present study examines the extent to which neighborhood and social psychological influences predict childhood violence among 867 African‐American youth. The results showed that neighborhood affluence was the only neighborhood‐level variable to exert a significant influence on childhood violence. Furthermore, childhood violence was significantly related to social psychological influences, such as adopting a street code, associating with violent peers, parental use of violence, and quality parenting. Overall, the findings suggested that simply living in a violent neighborhood does not produce violent children, but that family, peer, and individual characteristics play a large role in predicting violence in childhood.     

Early Childhood Trauma Impact on Adolescent Brain Development,Decision Making Abilities,and Delinquent Behaviors: Policy Implications for Juveniles Tried in Adult Court Systems

By examining previous literature on the brain’s developmental process during adolescence, this paper aims to determine how early childhood trauma potentially effects decision making in adolescence through exploring self-regulation theory. Through a self-regulation framework, the hope is to determine the connection, if any, between early childhood trauma, delinquent behavior, and involvement in the juvenile justice system. The author insists that not only do adolescents have less culpability due to their brain developmental stage compared to adults, but also early childhood trauma puts adolescents at a greater risk of impaired self-regulation which allows for more probable delinquent behavior. This paper also considers implications for social policy makers and youth advocates concerned with juvenile offenders tried in adult courts and existing racial disparities in the system.     

Aggressive Parental Discipline Experienced in Childhood and Internalizing Problems in Early Adulthood

Parental use of aggressive discipline, specifically corporal punishment (CP) and psychological aggression (PA), has been shown to increase the risk for a number of problem behaviors in children and adolescents. How CP and PA experienced in childhood contribute to adverse developmental outcomes in adulthood remains to be understood. Survey data collected from University of Manitoba students (n?=?1133) was used to assess the effects of childhood experiences of CP and PA on internalizing problems (i.e., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) in early adulthood. Because aggressive disciplinary techniques do not occur in isolation, a number of protective factors were also considered in analyses. Both CP and PA were associated with lower levels of parental warmth/support and responsiveness, and more inconsistency in discipline. However, highly inductive parents tended to use CP and PA more frequently than less inductive parents. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that childhood PA predicted anxiety and lower self-esteem in adulthood, even after the effects of positive parenting were taken into account. These findings suggest that not only do CP and PA tend to occur within environments that are less conducive to positive development, but also predict problematic developmental outcomes in adulthood even after the effects of protective factors are taken into account.     

Does childhood sexual abuse set in motion a cycle of violence against women?: what we know and what we need to learn

This article reviews evidence for the deleterious effects of childhood sexual abuse on female development in both the acute and long-term phases. Taken in aggregate, there is evidence to suggest a persistent cycle of violence perpetrated against women that begins in childhood in the form of sexual abuse, reemerges later in adolescence and early adulthood in the form of physical assault or sexual revictimization, and ultimately places the next generation at considerable risk for victimization. The differential effect of the characteristics of sexual abuse and the wide variation in the onset and developmental course of symptoms are underscored. The need for adequate models elucidating mechanisms behind this continued cycle of violence is discussed.     

The developmental epidemiology of childhood victimization

This article examines developmental trends in the rates of different kinds of victimization across the span of childhood. The Developmental Victimization Survey was a national telephone survey of the victimization experiences of 2,030 children from ages 2 to 17. The overall mean number of victimizations during a single year increased with age, as did the percentage of children with polyvictimizations (4 or more different kinds of victimization). However, some specific types of victimization, physical bullying and sibling assaults, were highest prior to adolescence and then declined. Other types had different developmental patterns by gender. Peer assaults increased in adolescence for boys but not for girls. Child maltreatment and sexual victimization increased in adolescence for girls but not for boys. The complex and diverse patterns of developmental vulnerability to different kinds of victimization at different ages need more exploration and explanation in order to better target prevention and intervention policies.     

Repeated Abuse during Childhood and Adolescence Leading to Suicidal Behavior in an Adolescent: A Case Report

Children in all societies are often neglected, maltreated, abused, intentionally or otherwise by their parents, siblings and in school. One of the most important and preventable long term consequences of childhood abuse is the development of suicidal tendencies in adolescence or adulthood. We report such a case of childhood abuse leading to repeated suicidal attempts in an adolescent. Individual and family therapy, coupled with other specific interventions, has helped the teenager and his family lead a normal life. Thus, proper treatment and counseling will be helpful to cope with difficult family and social situations.     

Morbidity and Mortality Risk Among the “Forgotten Few”: Why Are Girls in the Justice System in Such Poor Health?

The present study assessed the physical health of a population of girls sentenced to custody in a large US State via medical examinations and clinical assessments in adolescence and young adulthood. Findings indicated that injuries, obesity, and sexually transmitted diseases were the norm, with over 50% of the population meeting criteria for each of these health problems. A dose–response relationship was documented between childhood victimization and injuries and injury risk in adolescence and self-harm, HIV risk, physical health symptoms, and hospitalizations in young adulthood. The relationship between childhood victimization and poor adult physical health was fully mediated by health-risk behaviors in adolescence. Clinical and policy implications of the high mortality and morbidity risk among female juvenile offenders are discussed.     

The stability of risk-seeking from adolescence to emerging adulthood

Purpose

The current study examines the stability of the risk-seeking component of self-control using a second-order latent class growth model.

Methods

Longitudinal data from 962 respondents from the NLSY79-Child and Young Adult sample are used to examine the stability of the risk-seeking component of self-control from ages 14 to 23.

Results

Data reveal three trajectories of risk-seeking (low, moderate, and high) that maintain strong relative stability from adolescence through early adulthood. Further, two trajectories of risk-seeking (moderate and high) maintain absolute stability, whereas the low risk-seeking group exhibits statistically significant decreases in risk-seeking over time.

Conclusions

The SOLCGA may provide a stricter test of the stability hypothesis since it accounts for measurement error in the construct prior to estimating the developmental trajectories. The results from the SOLCGA support Gottfredson and Hirschi's hypotheses that self-control will remain stable from adolescence into emerging adulthood.     

A Radical Economic Model of Crime with an Empirical Test in Non-city Zip Codes

This article addresses three main issues. First, the structural explanation of crime rates across zip codes within a US county outside of that county’s major city’s limits. Second, this article addresses whether the traditional social disorganization argument which links measures of disorganized neighborhoods and in particularly deficiencies in informal social control to race, income inequality and poverty provides an adequate explanation of variations in non-city zip code crime rates. Third, this article also examines a radical critique of the kind of structural model posed by social disorganization, and tests an alternative radical economic model of crime at the zip code level. The empirical evidence illustrates the weakness of social disorganization explanations of crime at the zip code level. In contrast to those results, the empirical results for the proposed radical economic model of crime support its use for explaining crime across county zip codes. This type of empirical evidence demonstrates that radical models of crime have utility in explaining how economic structures influence the distribution of crime independently of variable identified in orthodox criminology.     

THE CASCADING EFFECTS OF ADOLESCENT GANG INVOLVEMENT ACROSS THE LIFE COURSE*

The short‐run deleterious effects of gang involvement during adolescence have been well researched. However, surprisingly little empirical attention has been devoted to understanding how gang involvement in adolescence influences life chances and criminal behavior in adulthood. Drawing on the life‐course perspective, this study argues that gang involvement will lead to precocious transitions that, in turn, will have adverse consequences on the fulfillment of adulthood roles and statuses in the economic and family spheres. Moreover, problems fulfilling these conventional roles are hypothesized then to lead to sustained involvement in criminal behavior in adulthood. Using data from a sample of males from the Rochester Youth Development Study, results from structural equation models support the indirect link between gang membership and noncriminal and criminal outcomes in adulthood. Specifically, gang involvement leads to an increase in the number of precocious transitions experienced that result in both economic hardship and family problems in adulthood. These failures in the economic and family realms, in turn, contribute to involvement in street crime and/or arrest in adulthood. Implications for the criminal desistance process are discussed.     

Justice as freedom,fairness, compassion,and utilitarianism: How my life experiences shaped my views of justice

This essay lays out my definition of justice and traces the origins of its conception. I identify and discuss very specific life experiences and how they have affected my understanding of justice. Specific incidents include early childhood experiences, key events in adolescence, and the most important episodes from early adulthood. I examine my own family conditions and early relationships and consider the influences of certain television shows and music in childhood and adolescence. I also discuss the effects of various educational experiences. The culmination of these life experiences was the emergence of a very strong sense of justice, reciprocity, and compassion for others, particularly for the least powerful and most vulnerable in our midst. These experiences in essence pushed me into the field of criminal justice and into the worlds of academia and social justice activism. They also allowed me finally to see my mission in life and to understand how all my life experiences have shaped my sense of justice.     

Developmental factors related to deviant sexual preferences in child molesters

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between developmental factors and deviant sexual preferences in child molesters. In total, 146 adult males having committed a sexual offence against a child were included in the study. Three types of factors were investigated: negative experiences during childhood, behavior problems during adolescence, and sexual criminal activity in adulthood. Negative experiences and behavior problems were assessed through a semistructured interview. The sexual criminal activity was determined using police records. Sexual preferences towards children were assessed using phallometric assessment. Hierarchical regression analyses suggested the presence of two developmental pathways. The psychosocial deficits pathway is related to a sexual interest for nonviolent sexual stimuli involving children. The sexualization pathway is associated with a sexual interest for violent sexual stimuli involving children. These two pathways are discussed in light of previous empirical findings related to the development of deviant sexual preferences in child molesters.     

Culture and Formal Social Control: The Effect of the Code of the Street on Police and Court Decision-making

Objectives. Drawing on several interrelated lines of scholarship, we argue that cultural beliefs at individual and neighborhood levels may affect police and court decisions. We hypothesize that individuals who more strongly adhere to the code of the street or reside in areas where the street code culture is more strongly embraced will be more likely to be arrested and convicted, and that neighborhood-level effects will amplify the effect of street code adherence. Methods. To test these hypotheses, data from the Family and Community Health Study are examined using multilevel modeling. Results. Blacks who more strongly adhered to street code beliefs were more likely to be arrested and convicted; this effect was greater among those who resided in areas where the code of the street belief system was more entrenched. Conclusions. The findings highlight the potential usefulness of a focus on culture for understanding the exercise of formal social control.