Pathways Into Crime

‘Childhood Risk Factors and Risk-focused Prevention’ Farrington (2007)

• Individual and family risk factors for offending and anti-social offending.

• Focuses on UK, US and other Western democracies.

• All about developmental criminology, which is concerned with the development of offending and anti-social behaviour, risk factors at different ages and effects of life events on course of development.

• Interesting to look at characteristics of persistent offending, hyperactivity may start at 2, which may develop into shoplifting in early teens, then robbery in late teens and assault, child abuse and alcohol abuse in later life. Study the sequences over time in order to suggest opportunities for early prevention.

• Offending tends to be part of a syndrome that involves anti-social behaviour from a young age that then develops into persisting in crime at a later age. This leads to a cycle - antisocial child develops into antisocial teenager who develops into antisocial adult, who produces another antisocial child.

• Great deal if interest in early prediction of later offending - but typically prospective prediction (deciding which children will become high-risk adults) is poor, but retrospective prediction is better (easier to decide which high-risk adults were also high-risk children), and this inspires the need for protective measures from a young age.

• Risk factors are considerations which increase the risk of occurrence of offending. The idea of risk-focused prevention is simple. All you have to do is identify the risk factors for offending and implement prevention methods to counteract them. The idea was imported into criminology from medicine by pioneers such as Hawkins and Catalano (1992). Such an approach has been used in tackling diseases for many years for example risk factors for heart disease include smoking, a fatty diet and lack of exercise, and this can be tackled by doing more exercises topping smoking and having less of a low-fat diet.

• A problem is risk factors is that you have to identify which factors are actually contributing to the cause and which are merely markers.

Individual Risk Factors.

Low intelligence and under achieving

• Survey of 120 Stockholm males (Stattin and Klackenberg-Larsson, 1993) found that low intelligence measured at the age of 3 predicted officially recorded offending results at the age of 30. Frequent offenders had an IQ of 8 at the age of 3, and non-offenders had an IQ of 101.

• Cambridge Study (1992) showed that offenders tended to be truants at school, and left school at the earliest age possible. It is suggested that the link between intelligence and delinquency is the inability to manipulate abstract concepts; if they are poor at this they tend to do badly in intelligence tests at school and then commit offences because they are unable to see the consequences or the effects on the victim. Can stem from the type of background - economically deprived, lower-class families tend to talk in the concrete rather than the abstract and have little regard for the future, talking about the present. Much the same pattern with crime.

• Some theories however say that school failure actually leads to crime.

Empathy

• Widespread belief that that low empathy is an important factor related to offending. Assumption that people who can appreciate victim’s feelings are less likely to victimize one. But empirical basis is not very impressive. Inconsistent results, not well validated or widely accepted. There are suggestions that there might be more effective factors.

• Mak (1991) found that in Australia, delinquent females had lower emotional empathy than non-delinquent females, but no significant difference for males.

• Although the evidence is generally quite weak, low empathy may be an important risk factor in delinquency.

Impulsiveness

• The most crucial personality dimension that predicts offending. There are a number of different constructs that help to predict offending which include impulsiveness, hyperactivity, restlessness, clumsiness, sensation-seeking...

• In the Cambridge Study those nominated by teachers and family members as being the most daring or risk-taking tended to become offenders later in life.

Social cognitive skills and cognitive theories

• Researchers suggest that offenders use poor thinking techniques in inter-personal situations (Blackburn, 1993).

• Lack of awareness to other people’s thoughts impairs ability to form relationships and appreciate effects of their behaviour on other people. Poor social skills e.g. Lack of eye contact and fidgeting etc.

• Offenders believe what happens to them as a consequence of their actions depends on luck and chance, they feel like they are controlled by other people’s circumstances rather than factors which are within their own control, so they think there is no point in trying to succeed.

Crime runs in families

• Criminal parents tend to have delinquent children. In Cambridge Study:

• 63% children with convicted fathers were themselves convicted.

• 6% families accounted for half of all convictions.

• Reasons for these patterns may include intergenerational continuities in exposure to risk factors. May also be down to genetic factors.

• Most of the 411 sample had criminal families – particularly fathers and brothers.

Large family size

• A strong and reliable predictor of delinquency. (Ellis, 1998) Many possible reasons for this, including the fact that the larger the amount of siblings that you have, the less parental attention you get. Household tends to become overcrowded, leading to irritation and conflict.

Child-rearing methods

• Supervision/monitoring of children, warmth/coldness of relationships and parental involvement with children. Poor parental supervision isis usually the strongest and most reliable predictor of offending (Smith and Stern, 1997). Parents who let the children roam the streets tend to have delinquent children.

• Physical punishment is also a predictor (Newsom et al, 1989 - punishment of...

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