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Accumulating (Dis)advantage: Do Social Bonds Mediate the Relationship Between Multiple Childhood Adversities and Persistent Offending?

Abstract

Purpose

The current study examines how cumulative adversity in childhood is related to both frequency of offending and criminal career length in adulthood. Specifically we examine (1) whether multiple adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) predict criminal career length and frequency of offending, and (2) if the formation of adult bonds mediates the relationship between adversity in childhood with persistent and chronic offending in adulthood.

Methods

Analyses use data on a population of several hundred individuals who have committed numerous violent offenses and have criminal careers of up to 56 years in length (N = 401). Path analysis was used to estimate the total, indirect, and direct effects of the accumulation of multiple adversities on two key dimensions of a criminal career: career length and frequency of offending.

Results

Results indicate the pathway to frequent offending differs from the pathway to criminal career length. Prosocial bonds did not mediate the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and criminal career length; instead, there was a significant direct effect of ACEs on career length. On the other hand, ACEs were negatively and indirectly related to frequency of offending through the particular bond of employment.

Conclusions

Results suggest that early years are important for initiating trajectories of disadvantage; at the same time our results also demonstrate a role for interventions across the life course. Early interventions that attempt to diminish the impact of negative beginnings as well as interventions that facilitate efforts to build social capital during adulthood may have the ability to redirect trajectories.

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Notes

  1. In some cases, the end date was recorded as the end of the study period (December 31, 2014) because a handful of offenders (approximately 5%) received a Dangerous Offender (DO) designation or were sentenced to life in prison. A DO designation may be accompanied by an indeterminate sentence length whereby offenders are subject to reassessment to determine if their risk level has diminished enough to ensure they do not present an imminent risk to the safety of the public should they be released [52]. A life imprisonment sentence is accompanied with no chance of parole for 10 to 25 years; if offenders are granted parole while serving life sentences, they are under supervision for the rest of their lives (Parole Board of [53]). Consequently, in both cases, it was impossible to know when these offenders might be released from prison. In order to maintain consistency, it was decided that the end date of the study period was the best way to deal with these measurement issues.

  2. Given the inconsistent nature of the information from the police files, not all the measures that have been included in more recent studies employing the ACE measure (see [16, 26,27,28]) were available here. For example, information on the experience of physical and emotional neglect as well as prevalence of household mental illness was not uniformly available across all subjects, so these measures were not included.

  3. Of note, the ACE score is an index, not a scale, of exposure to adverse experiences in childhood; therefore, traditional measures of reliability do not apply here.

  4. In preliminary analyses, we considered prosocial bonds as a latent variable, but not all of the items loaded well, so we kept the variables as separate measures of prosocial ties to institutions of informal social control.

  5. Due to concerns over disclosure, we were required to measure age this way.

  6. It is common to include both a variable for onset age and one that accounts for prior offending behavior (see, for example, [15])

  7. While it was not possible to include the time-varying nature of substance abuse issues, case file information often noted that it was a continuous problem for many of the individuals within this population/consistent theme throughout their adult years.

  8. This did not appear to introduce bias into these analyses as alternative analyses using a negative binomial model were run in Stata. The overall pattern of results using the negative binomial model was similar to the results using the natural log of frequency of offending in Mplus. There are limitations to both Stata and Mplus therefore both have been used to ensure that additional error was not introduced into the analyses.

  9. Given the similarities between the focal independent variable and the mediators, figures of the significant relationships will not be included for this portion of the analysis.

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Humphrey, T., Van Brunschot, E.G. Accumulating (Dis)advantage: Do Social Bonds Mediate the Relationship Between Multiple Childhood Adversities and Persistent Offending?. J Dev Life Course Criminology 4, 297–321 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-018-0083-z

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