Proactive and reactive criminal thinking, psychological inertia, and the crime continuity conundrum

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to determine whether proactive criminal thinking, reactive criminal thinking, or both are responsible for crime continuity by way of psychological inertia. It was hypothesized that reactive but not proactive criminal thinking would account for psychological inertia, the process by which certain cognitive variables link past crime to future crime. MethodsSelf-report data from 673 (322 male, 351 female) mid- to late adolescent members of the Offending, Crime, and Justice Survey (OCJS) were organized into four waves of a fixed-sample panel design. ResultsA path analysis revealed that while reactive criminal thinking successfully mediated the prior offending–future offending relationship, proactive criminal thinking did not. As predicted, the reason why proactive criminal thinking failed to mediate crime continuity was that prior offending did not correlate significantly with subsequent proactive criminal thinking. ConclusionsThese results suggest that reactive but not proactive criminal thinking is a vital link in the series of cognitive events that give rise to crime continuity. The reason for this is that while reactive criminal thinking was both predicted by and predictive of offending, proactive criminal was only predictive of offending and therefore not a good candidate for psychological inertia.