Correlates of Adolescent and Young Adult Male Criminal Behavior

Abstract

Social and environmental factors have long been recognized as having etiological importance in the explanation of criminal behavior. In this chapter we will first define criminal behavior and review the literature to provide a comprehensive, but not exhaustive, description of progress to date in this field. Subsequently, we present the results of a series of analyses designed to ferret out the direct or independent, as well as indirect, relationships of selected social and familial variables with the criminal behavior of the male subgroup of the Danish sample.