Criminal Careers and Early Death: Relationships In the Cambridge Study In Delinquent Development

Guy C M Skinner,Darrick Jolliffe,David P Farrington

doi:10.1093/bjc/azab092

Guy C M Skinner, Darrick Jolliffe + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azab092

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Abstract

Abstract Prior research shows that convicted and incarcerated persons tend to die early, but this research does not investigate the relationships between criminal career features and early death. The aim of this article is to utilize the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development longitudinal sample of males to study this; 54 males who died early (up to age 65) are compared with 332 males who did not emigrate and did not die early. The results show that convicted offenders, early onset offenders, recidivists and chronic offenders tended to die early, but there were relatively weak relationships between early death and life-course-persistent offenders and career duration. It is concluded that much more research on the relationship between early death and criminal career features is needed, and further tests of criminological theories need to take account of the time at risk of offending.

Highlights

A career spent in criminality is usually associated with various problems that accumulate across the life course, with early death being one of the most severe consequences (West and Farrington 1977; Hämäläinen and Pulkkinen 1996; Stattin and Magnusson 1996; Huizinga and Jakob-Chien 1999; Herrenkohl et al 2000; Rönkä et al 2001; Nikolic-Ristanovic 2014).There is strong evidence that links crime and negative life experiences (Vaughn et al 2020)
Professor David Farrington joined Professor West to work on the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) in 1969 and took over the direction of the CSDD in 1982
Death records Death records of the generation 2 (G2) males in the CSDD were collected by Piquero et al (2014), who obtained information about deaths up to 2010, at an average age of 57, from relatives during attempts to interview the G2 men and their female partners and children

Summary

INTRODUCTION

A career spent in criminality is usually associated with various problems that accumulate across the life course, with early death being one of the most severe consequences (West and Farrington 1977; Hämäläinen and Pulkkinen 1996; Stattin and Magnusson 1996; Huizinga and Jakob-Chien 1999; Herrenkohl et al 2000; Rönkä et al 2001; Nikolic-Ristanovic 2014). They went on to cite several pieces of research linked to the immediate period after offenders had been released from custody These include a study in Australia (Graham 2003) which argued that newly liberated offenders can suffer 10 times the rate of premature mortality than the general population, and research in America that showed an increased rate of early death: 2.08 times higher for White ex-prisoners (Rosen et al 2008). Piquero et al (2010; 2011) and Skinner et al (2020) related offending to early death in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD; described below) They found that by age 48 offending trajectories differentially predicted health outcomes, with high-rate chronic offenders at the greatest risk—even when logistic regression modelling ruled out individual or environmental childhood risk factors for offending as a likely common cause of offending and health problems (Piquero et al 2014). We will derive implications from the results for the theories of Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) and Moffitt (1993)

METHODS

Findings

DISCUSSION