Week 2

Reading 1

Baskin-Sommers Environment and Criminal Behavior.pdf

How is racism evident regarding pre-trial release?

Black and Hispanic individuals are more likely to be incarcerated while awaiting trial. They are also more likely to be denied bail.

How is racism evident regarding incarceration lengths?

Black individuals are more likely than whites to receive longer sentences

How is racism evident regarding juvenile and drug-related arrests?

Black youth are arrested far out of proportion to their share of all youth in the US. - White people make up 72% of the US population and make up 62% of arrests - Hispanic people make up 25% of the population and 23% of the arrests - Black pekoe make up 15% of the population and 35% of the arrests Black people are arrested for drug crimes more than 2x their percent in the population (3.37x for marijuana)

What does research show us about how a toddler's problem behaviors may affect the parents' disciplinary strategies as well as subsequent interactions with adults and peers?

Children characterized by a difficult temperament in infancy are more likely to resist their mothers' efforts to control them in early childhood. Mothers of difficult boys experience more problems in their efforts to socialize their children. Over time these mothers reduce their efforts to actively guide and direct their children's behavior and become increasingly less involved in the teaching process. One study observed conduct-disordered and nonproblem boys interacting with mothers of conduct-disordered and nonproblem sons in unrelated pairs. The conduct-disordered boys evoked more negative reactions from both types of mothers than did normal boys, but the two types of mothers did not differ from each other in their negative reactions. It may well be that early behavioral difficulties contribute to the development of persistent antisocial behavior by evoking responses from the interpersonal social environment, responses that exacerbate the child's tendencies. But researchers have not yet tested for interactions between child behavior and parental deviance or poor parenting, perhaps because very disadvantaged families are seldom studied with such designs.

Explain the continuity of Adolescence-Limited Antisocial Behavior.

Compared with the life-course-persistent type, adolescence limited delinquents show relatively little continuity in their antisocial behavior. Across age, change in delinquent involvement is often abrupt, especially during the periods of onset and stopping. For example, in a longitudinal study of a representative sample of boys, 12% of the youngsters were classified as new delinquents at age 13; they had no prior history of antisocial behavior from age 5 to age 11. Between age 11 and age 13, they changed from below the sample average to I. 5 standard deviations above average on self-reported delinquency. By age 15, another 20% of this sample of boys had joined the newcomers to delinquency despite having no prior history of antisocial behavior. Barely into mid-adolescence, the prevalence rate of markedly antisocial boys had swollen from 5% at age 11 to 32% at age I5. When interviewed at age 18, only 7% of the boys denied all delinquent activities. By their mid-20s, at least three fourths of these new offenders are expected to cease all offending. These observations about temporal instability and cross-situational inconsistency are more than merely descriptive. They have implications for a theory of the etiology of adolescence limited delinquency. The flexibility of most delinquents' behavior suggests that their engagement in deviant life-styles may be under the control of reinforcement and punishment contingencies.

What types of crimes should adolescence-limited offenders typically engage in? According to theory

Crimes that symbolize adult privilege or that demonstrate autonomy from parental control: vandalism, public order offenses, substance abuse, "status" crimes such as running away, and theft.

What are the two kinds of consequences in the life course that the 3 types of person-environment interactions can produce?

Cumulative consequences and contemporary consequences. Early individual differences may set in motion a downhill snowball of cumulative continuities. In addition, individual differences may themselves persist from infancy to adulthood, continuing to influence adolescent and adult behavior in a proximal contemporary fashion. Contemporary continuity arises if the life-course-persistent person continues to carry into adulthood the same underlying constellation of traits that got him into trouble as a child, such as high activity level, irritability, poor self-control, and low cognitive ability.

When official rates of crime are plotted against age, when do the rates for both prevalence and incidence of offending appear highest?

During adolescence. The rates peak sharply at about age 17 and drop precipitously in young adulthood. The majority of criminal offenders are teenagers; by the early 20s, the number of active offenders decreases by over 50%, and by age 28, almost 85% of former delinquents stop offending. It is now known that the steep decline in antisocial behavior between ages 11 and 30 is mirrored by a steep incline in antisocial behavior between ages 7 and 17

What is the best predictor of long-term recidivistic offending?

Early arrests

Until recently, scholars still disagreed about whether the adolescent peak represented a change in prevalence or a change in incidence: Does adolescence bring an increment in the number of people who are willing to offend or does the small and constant number of offenders simply generate more criminal acts while they are adolescent?

Empirical evidence suggests that adolescence brings an increment in the number of people who are willing to offend.

What is the link between community violence, harmfulness learning, and trust

Exposure to violence disrupts the ability to form impressions that dissociate between different types of agents; and the ability to adjust trust behavior towards different agents. Disruptions in the ability to form distinguishable impressions resulting from higher exposure to community violence, translates into maladaptive trust behavior, which in turn leads to a greater number of direct violations in prison. People who experience more community violence can learn associations between choice and behavior. Their impressions of "good" and "bad" agents are more similar than would be expected if the learned information was being used. Trust and real-world behavior is affected by these disruptions in impression formation

What are the stats on people getting stuck in the poorest neighbourhoods if they are black compared to white?

For kids born between 1955 and 1970, 33% of black people live in the medium poverty zone and 29% live in the highest poverty zones. For white people, 3% live in the medium poverty zone and 1% live in the highest poverty zones. For kids born between 1985 and 2000, 35% of black people live in the medium poverty zone and 31% live in the highest poverty zones. For white people, 5% live in the medium poverty zone and 1% live in the highest poverty zones.

What is the prognosis for the life-course-persistent person?

For offenders who persist past the age of 25, they exhibit very high rates of: 1. Drug and alcohol addiction; 2. Unsatisfactory employment; 3. Unpaid debts; 4. Homelessness; 5. Drunk driving; 6. Violent assault; 7. Multiple and unstable relationships; 8. Spouse battery; 9. Abandoned, neglected, or abused children; and 10. Psychiatric illness

What are negative reinforcers of delinquency?

For teens who become adolescence-limited delinquents, antisocial behavior is an effective means of knifing-off childhood apron strings and of proving that they can act independently to conquer new challenges. Hypothetical reinforcers for delinquency include damaging the quality of intimacy and communication with parents, provoking responses from adults in positions of authority, finding ways to look older (such as by smoking cigarettes, being tattooed, playing the big spender with ill-gotten gains), and tempting fate (risking pregnancy, driving while intoxicated, or shoplifting under the noses of clerks). None of these putative reinforcers may seem very pleasurable to the middle-aged academic, but each of the aforementioned consequences is a precious resource to the teenager and can serve to reinforce delinquency. Every curfew violated, car stolen, drug taken, and baby conceived may be a statement of personal independence and a reinforcer for delinquent involvement.

What are habituation and associative learning?

Habituation is a type of non-associative learning. With habituation, your response to a stimulus that is repeatedly present over time is gradually reduced Associative learning is a type of classical conditioning. With this, cues are repeatedly paired to produce a new learned (acquired) response. I.e., a conditioned stimulus (CS) is repeatedly paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (UCS) to elicit a controlled response.

Why do adolescence-limited delinquents desist from delinquency?

Healthy youths respond adaptively to changing contingencies. If motivational and learning mechanisms initiate and maintain their delinquency, then, likewise, changing contingencies can extinguish it. - lack of motivation to behave delinquently - shifting contingencies In contrast with amplifying theories, the present maturity-gap theory does anticipate desistence. With the inevitable progression of chronological age, more legitimate and tangible adult roles become available to teens. Adolescence-limited delinquents gradually experience a loss of motivation for delinquency as they exit the maturity gap. Moreover, when aging delinquents attain some of the privileges they coveted as teens, the consequences of illegal behavior shift from rewarding to punishing, in their perception. An adult arrest record will limit their job opportunities, drug abuse keeps them from getting to work on time, drunk driving is costly, and bar fights lead to accusations of unfit parenthood. Adolescence-limited delinquents have something to lose by persisting in their antisocial behavior beyond the teen years. There is some evidence that many young adult offenders weigh the relative rewards from illegal and conventional activities when they contemplate future offending.

Why do adolescence-limited delinquents come to realize that they have something to lose, whereas life-course-persistent delinquents remain undeterred?

Here, two positions are advanced: Unlike their life-course-persistent counterparts, adolescence-limited delinquents are relatively exempt from the forces of (a) cumulative and (b) contemporary continuity. A) Without a lifelong history of antisocial behavior, the forces of cumulative continuity have had fewer years to gather the momentum of a downhill snowball. Before taking up delinquency, adolescence-limited offenders had ample years to develop an accomplished repertoire of prosocial behaviors and basic academic skills. These social skills and academic achievements make them eligible for postsecondary education, good marriages, and desirable jobs. But although the forces of cumulative continuity build up less momentum over the course of their relatively short crime careers, many adolescence-limited youths will fall prey to many of the same snares that maintain continuity among life-course persistent persons. A drug habit, an incarceration, interrupted education, or a teen pregnancy are snares that require extra effort and time from which to escape. Thus, this theory predicts that variability in age at desistence from crime should be accounted for by the cumulative number and type of ensnaring life events that entangle persons in a deviant life-style. B) Personality disorder and cognitive deficits play no part in the delinquency of adolescence-limited offenders. As a result, they are exempt from the sources of contemporary continuity that plague their life-course-persistent counterparts. In general, these young adults have adequate social skills, they have a record of average or better academic achievement, their mental health is sturdy, they still possess the capacity to forge close attachment relationships, and they retain the good intelligence they had when they entered adolescence.

What is the link between exposure to community violence and habituation?

Higher levels of exposure to violence is associated with a lower likelihood (OR=.69) of habituating. Individuals with higher levels of exposure to violence and who do not habituate to tones have the greatest number of violent crimes as adults. People who experience more community violence tend not to habituate (hyper-aroused) to neutral information.

How do cumulative consequences and contemporary consequences affect job stability?

Hot-tempered boys who came from middle class homes suffered a progressive deterioration of socio-economic status as they moved through the life course. By age 40, their occupational status was indistinguishable from that of men born into the working class. A majority of them held jobs of lower occupational status than those held by their fathers at a comparable age. Did these men fail occupationally because their earlier ill-temperedness started them down a particular path (cumulative consequences) or because their current ill temperedness handicapped them in the world of work (contemporary consequences)? Cumulative consequences were implied by the effect of childhood temper on occupational status at midlife: Tantrums predicted lower educational attainment, and educational attainment, in turn, predicted lower occupational status. Contemporary consequences were implied by the strong direct link between ill-temperedness and occupational stability. Men with childhood tantrums continued to be hot-tempered in adulthood, where it got them into trouble in the world of work. They had more erratic work lives, changing jobs more frequently and experiencing more unemployment between ages 18 and 40. Ill-temperedness also had a contemporary effect on marital stability. Almost half (46%) of the men with histories of childhood tantrums had divorced by age 40 compared with only 22% of other men.

Describe the case example of how living in a poor and segregated neighborhood changes everything about your life.

In 1940, a white developer wanted to build a neighborhood in Detroit The Federal Housing Administration said no because the development was too close to an "inharmonious" racial group. The developer decided to build a 6 foot wall between the black and white neighborhoods. The Federal Housing Administration gave him the loan

Explain Zimbardo's experiment in 1969 with cars.

In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist from Stanford University, ran an interesting field study. He abandoned two cars in two very different places: one in a mostly poor, crime-ridden section of New York City, and the other in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif. Both cars were left without license plates and parked with their hoods up. After just 10 minutes, passersby in New York City began vandalizing the car. First they stripped it for parts. Then the random destruction began. Windows were smashed. The car was destroyed. But in Palo Alto, the other car remained untouched for more than a week. Finally, Zimbardo did something unusual: He took a sledgehammer and gave the California car a smash. After that, passersby quickly ripped it apart, just as they'd done in New York. This field study was a simple demonstration of how something that is clearly neglected can quickly become a target for vandals. But it eventually morphed into something far more than that. It became the basis for one of the most influential theories of crime and policing in America: "broken windows."

What are some statistics on rates of exposure to community violence?

In a nationally representative sample, 30% of youth reported being exposed to violence in their communities. In poor urban communities, rates are elevated with about 80-100% of residents reporting exposure. Black youth in low-income areas of Chicago report exposure to at least one violent event per day

When do the majority of boys become antisocial?

In adolescence.

How is racism evident regarding people's right to vote?

In many states, certain felons lose their right to vote. 1 out of 13 Black individual has lost their right to vote compared to 1 out of 56 non-Black citizens

How can the 5-10 year gap between childhood and adulthood lead adolescents to act out?

In most American states, teens are not allowed to work or get a driver's license before age 16, marry or vote before age 18, or buy alcohol before age 21, and they are admonished to delay having children and establishing their own private dwellings until their education is completed at age 22, sometimes more than IO years after they attain sexual maturity. They remain financially and socially dependent on their families of origin and are allowed few decisions of any real import. Yet they want desperately to establish intimate bonds with the opposite sex, to accrue material belongings, to make their own decisions, and to be regarded as consequential by adults. Contemporary adolescents are thus trapped in a maturity gap, chronological hostages of a time warp between biological age and social age. Between ages 10 and 15, a dramatic shift in youngsters' self-perceptions of autonomy and self-reliance takes place. At the time of biological maturity, salient pubertal changes make the remoteness of ascribed social maturity painfully apparent to teens. This new awareness coincides with their promotion into a high school society that is numerically dominated by older youth. Thus, just as teens begin to feel the discomfort of the maturity gap, they enter a social reference group that has endured the gap for 3 to 4 years and has already perfected some delinquent ways of coping with it. Indeed, several researchers have noted that this life-course transition into high school society may place teens at risk for antisocial behavior. In particular, exposure to peer models, when coupled with puberty, is an important determinant of adolescence-onset cases of delinquency

What are commitment costs?

In the criminological subfield of perceptual deterrence research, commitment costs are defined as a person's judgment that past accomplishments will be jeopardized or that future goals will be foreclosed. These costs include informal sanctions (disapproval by family, community, or employer) as well as formal sanctions (arrest or conviction penalty).

Are interventions for lifetime-persistent antisocial behaviour effectively?

Interventions with life-course-persistent persons have met with dismal results. Now-classic research on learning shows conclusively that efforts to extinguish undesirable behavior will fail unless alternative behaviors are available that will attract reinforcement. My analysis of increasingly restricted behavioral options suggests the hypothesis that opportunities for change will often be actively transformed by life-course-persistents into opportunities for continuity: Residential treatment programs provide a chance to learn from criminal peers, a new job furnishes the chance to steal, and new romance provides a partner for abuse. This analysis of life-course-persistent antisocial be havior anticipates disappointing outcomes when such antisocial persons are thrust into new situations that purportedly offer the chance "to tum over a new leaf." The well-documented resistance of antisocial personality disorder to treatments of all kinds seems to suggest that the life course-persistent style is fixed sometime before age 18

Exposure to violence is a ______ of negative outcomes of the individual and community. Explain this

Is a predictor of negative outcomes. Exposure to violence, particularly in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, is a robust predictor of later violence. One mechanism may be how people learn (through seeing violence [modeling] and/or basic mechanisms [nonassoiciative, associative])

What did the experimental task manipulating scarcity and decision-making (conducted by Chang, Jara-Ettinger & Baskin-Sommers, 2022) demonstrate about illegal behaviour?

It demonstrated that resorting to illegal activity may stem from an environment that fosters or necessitates this behavior, particularly when resources are scarce. Residents living in neighborhoods marked by concentrated disadvantage (i.e., poverty, joblessness, residential segregation) contend with resource scarcity. Theories indicate that competition for resources from an insufficient pool within the context of concentrated disadvantage may be one factor that promotes social norm violations. A limited body of experimental research has explored the impact of concentrated disadvantage on decision-making about obtaining resources, and in other research, the potential connection between concentrated disadvantage and engagement in social norm violation. Participants (N = 112) completed patch-foraging tasks in resource-rich and resource-depleted (i.e., scarce) environments. Participants then completed a social norm foraging task where they could trespass and forage on their neighbor's land, which was resource-rich compared to their own. Computational modeling was used to evaluate explore-exploit decision-making in the resource-rich and resource- depleted environments. The frequency of crossing and foraging was used to capture social norm violations. Results indicated that individuals who experience higher levels of concentrated disadvantage in the real-world made fewer resource-maximizing decisions in resource-rich and resource-depleted environments. Model fits revealed that the performance difference in the resource-rich and resource-depleted environments for individuals higher on concentrated disadvantage was due to difficulty in discriminating between competing choice options and not due to a general bias toward exploring or exploiting. Finally, when foraging in a relatively depleted environment compared to the enriched environment of their neighbor, the majority of participants, regardless of experienced real-world concentrated disadvantage, engaged in social norm violations. Overall, resource scarcity, whether in the real world or experimental context, affects cognition and behavior.

How is the stability of antisocial behavior closely linked to its extremity?

It has been repeatedly shown that the most persistent 5% or 6% of offenders are responsible for about 50% of known crimes. In one study, 6% of offenders accounted for more than half of the crimes committed by the sample; relative to other offenders, these high-rate offenders began their criminal careers earlier and continued them for more years. The relationship between stability and extremity is found in samples of children as well. In one study of 3rd grade boys, the most aggressive 5% of the boys constituted the most persistent group as well; 39% of them ranked above the 95th percentile on aggression 10 years later, and 100% of them were still above the median. Other research shows that the stability of youngsters' antisocial behavior across time is linked with stability across situations and that both forms of stability are characteristic of a relatively small group of persons with extremely antisocial behavior.

What are 6 ways that growing up in an impoverished neighborhood can impact someone?

It has been shown to impact: 1. Brain development 2. IQ 3. Physical and mental health 4. Increases occurrence of harsh, abusive, parenting 5. Reduce happiness and hopefulness 6. Increases the risk of violence and crime

Explain Sociological Theory

It involves Social Disorganization and Social Capital. Neighborhood ecological characteristics (place) impact the likelihood that a person will become involved in illegal activities. Disrupted or weakened systems of formal and informal social controls are necessary for prosocial socialization. - Poverty, ethnic heterogeneity and residential instability undermine personal ties. But with the disorganization, there is organization of violence. Violence is part of a cluster of values that make up the lifestyle, the socialization process, and the interpersonal relationships of individuals living in similar conditions. Social values of the mainstream cannot always be applied to subcultures

What is Heterotypic continuity?

It refers to continuity of an inferred trait or attribute that is presumed to underlie diverse phenotypic behaviors. As Kagan and Moss (1962) suggested, a specific behavior in childhood might not be predictive of phenotypically similar behavior later in adulthood, but it may still be associated with behaviors that are conceptually consistent with the earlier behavior

What is the link between exposure to community violence and associative learning?

Level of exposure to violence is not related to acquiring learned associations. But they can learn associations between neutral and distressing information. Sustained arousal in those who experience more community violence influences severe violent behavior. Exposure to violence does not impact the ability to accurately develop beliefs about harmfulness (associative learning).

What are the strongest prospective predictors of persistent antisocial behavior?

Measures of individual and family characteristics. These measures include health, gender, temperament, cognitive abilities, school achievement, personality traits, mental disorders (e.g., hyperactivity), family attachment bonds, child-rearing practices, parent and sibling deviance, and socioeconomic status, but not age.

Does ramping up on small crime lead to overall crime reduction and clean up the streets? Explain Giuliani's efforts?

No, this was evidence in NYC with Mayor Giuliani in 1993. Many attribute New York's crime reduction to the specific "get-tough" policies carried out by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration. The most prominent of his policy changes was the aggressive policing of lower-level crimes, a policy which has been dubbed the "broken windows" approach to law enforcement. He sent hundreds of cops to subways to crack down in turn style jumpers and taggers. They found that going after petty crime lead police to more violent crimes (1 in 10 people stopped for jumping over turn styles has an illegal weapon on them or were wanted for something else). The murder rate plummeted and crime reduced. Everything was going well if you were on the Upper East Side... but less well in other boroughs

Can researchers and practitioners effectively assign delinquent adolescents to meaningful sub-types of antisocial behaviour patterns on the basis of cross-sectional "snapshots" of their antisocial behavior during adolescence?

No. Researchers attempted to discriminate, at the time of first arrest, individual future career offenders from adolescence-limited offenders. Discrimination could not be improved beyond chance by entering the kinds of information typically available to officials: type of current offense, age, sex, race, class, involvement with delinquent peers, and attitudes toward deviance. Addition of measures of the extremity of self-reported delinquency and emotional problems improved prediction only 7% beyond chance. The stability of antisocial behavior implies its extremity but that extremity does not imply stability. Measures of the frequency or seriousness of adolescent offending will not discriminate very well between life-course-persistent and adolescence limited delinquents.

Is adolescence-limited antisocial behavior pathological?

No. Its prevalence is so great that it is normative rather than abnormal. It is flexible and adaptable rather than rigid and stable; most delinquent careers are of relatively short duration because the consequences of crime, although reinforcing for youths caught inside the maturity gap, become punishing to youths as soon as they age out of it. Instead of a biological basis in the nervous system, the origins of adolescence-limited delinquency lie in youngsters' best efforts to cope with the widening gap between biological and social maturity. Nothing suggests that there are links between mental disorders and short-term adolescent delinquency.

Can Giuliani's efforts be credited for reducing crime?

Not really. Crime was already going down in NYC prior to Broken Windows (Particularly in violent crime (and in other cities without Broken Windows)). Harcourt (2006) reviewed the original broken windows study and concluded that it failed to consider regression to the mean (what goes up a lot tends to go down a lot, bigger spike leads to bigger decline later).

What is life-course-persistent antisocial behaviour?

Persistent, stable antisocial behavior, which is found among a relatively small number of males whose behavior problems are also quite extreme. It is defined by the continuity of antisocial behavior. Across the life course, these individuals exhibit changing manifestations of antisocial behavior: biting and hitting at age 4, shoplifting and truancy at age I0, selling drugs and stealing cars at age 16, robbery and rape at age 22, and fraud and child abuse at age 30; the underlying disposition remains the same, but its expression changes and form with new social opportunities arising at different points in development. This pattern of continuity across age is matched also by cross-situational consistency: Life-course-persistent antisocial persons lie at home, steal from shops, cheat at school, fight in bars, and embezzle at work. This theory of life-course persistent antisocial behavior predicts continuity across the entire life course but allows that the underlying disposition will change its manifestation when age and social circumstances alter opportunities. Criminal psychopaths decrease their number of arrestable offenses at about age 40, but the constellation of antisocial personality traits they exhibit persists until 69.

What is the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary exposure?

Primary exposure refers to direct victimization, secondary exposure refers to violence that is seen or heard directly, and tertiary exposure refers to violence that is communicated to an individual.

How is racism evident regarding prosecution charges?

Prosecutors are 2x likely to file charges carrying mandatory minimums for Black individuals than White individuals accused of the same crimes

What are known negative consequences of ETV and violent victimization?

Psychological symptoms related to stress and trauma and with negative outcomes related to physical and mental health, problem behaviors, academic performance and educational attainment, and cognitive development.

Give some stats on rates of antisocial behavior in children and adolescents.

Regardless of their age, under I0% of males warrant an "official" antisocial designation. For example, about 5% of preschool boys are considered by their parents or caretakers to be "very difficult to manage". The prevalence of conduct disorder among elementary-school-aged boys has been found to be between 4-9%. About 6% of boys are first arrested by police as preteens. The rate of conviction for a violent offense in young adult males is between 3% and 6% About 4% of male adolescents self-report sustained careers of serious violence (three or more violent offenses per year for 5 years). The prevalence of men with antisocial personality disorder is estimated at about 4% to 5%. The longitudinal data suggest that the remarkable constancy of prevalence rates reflects the reoccurrence of the same life-course-persistent individuals in different antisocial categories at different ages.

Are delinquent peer networks stable in adolsecence?

Researchers from the Carolina Longitudinal Study have carefully documented that boys with an aggressive history do par ticipate in peer networks in adolescence but that the networks are not very stable. Consistent with a social mimicry hypothesis, delinquent groups have frequent membership turnover. In addition, the interchanges between network members are characterized by much reciprocal antisocial behavior. Reiss and Farrington (1991) have shown that the most experienced high-rate young offenders tend to recruit different co-offenders for each offense. Life-course-persistents serve as core members of revolving networks, by virtue of being role models or trainers for new recruits. They exploit peers as drug customers, as fences, as lookouts, or as sexual partners. Such interactions among life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited delinquents may represent a symbiosis of mutual exploitation. Alternatively, life-course-persistent offenders need not even be aware of all of the adolescence-limited youngsters who imitate their style. Unlike adolescence-limited offenders, who appear to need peer support for crime, life-course-persistent offenders are willing to offend alone

Explain Hertzig's test (1983) of the proposed relationship between neurological damage and difficult behavior in infancy.

She studied a sample of 66 low-birth-weight infants from intact middle-class families. Symptoms of brain dysfunction detected during neurological examinations were significantly related to an index of difficult temperament taken at ages 1, 2, and 3. The parents of the children with neurological impairment and difficult temperament more often sought help from child psychiatrists as their children grew up, and the most frequent presenting complaints were immaturity, overactivity, temper tantrums, poor attention, and poor school performance. Each of these childhood problems has been linked by research to later antisocial outcomes. The impairments of the children with neural damage were not massive; their mean IQ score was 96 (only 4 points below the population mean). Hertzig's study showed that even subtle neurological deficits can influence an infant's temperament and behavior, the difficulty of rearing the infant, and behavioral problems in later childhood.

How are people living in poverty at a disadvantage for many concentrated problems?

Social problems cluster together. Poverty is clustered with the following disadvantages: - Welfare receipt - Unemployment - Female headed households - Racial composition - Density of children - Incarcerations rates

What does research show on the links between conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and arrests.

Some research shows that there are virtually no subjects with adult antisocial personality disorder who did not also have conduct disorder as children. There is notable continuity from disobedient and aggressive behavior at age 3 to later childhood conduct disorder and arrest by police in the early teen years. Other research pinpoints a first arrest between ages 7 and 11 as particularly important for predicting long-term adult offending. A conviction for violence in the early 20s is characteristic of almost all men who become diagnosed with antisocial (psychopathic) personality disorder. The topography of their behavior may change with changing opportunities, but the underlying disposition persists throughout the life course.

How can becoming ensnared by consequences of antisocial behavior increase the risk that antisocial youngsters will make irrevocable decisions that close the doors of opportunity?

Teenaged parenthood, addiction to drugs or alcohol, school dropout, disabling or disfiguring injuries, patchy work histories, and time spent incarcerated are snares that diminish the probabilities of later success by eliminating opportunities for breaking the chain of cumulative continuity. Similarly, labels accrued early in life can foreclose later opportunities; an early arrest record or a "bad" reputation may rule out lucrative jobs, higher education, or an advantageous marriage

What is adolescence-limited antisocial behaviour?

Temporary and situational antisocial behavior, which is quite common among adolescents.

What did Farrington ( 1983) show in his study of offense rates over age?

That the adolescent peak reflects a temporary increase in the number of people involved in antisocial behavior, not a temporary acceleration in the offense rates of individuals.

Why do adolescence-limited delinquents begin delinquency?

That their delinquency is "social mimicry" of the antisocial style of life-course-persistent youths. The concept of social mimicry is borrowed from ethology. Social mimicry occurs when two animal species share a single niche and one of the species has cornered the market on a re source that is needed to promote fitness. In such circumstances, the "mimic" species adopts the social behavior of the more successful species to obtain access to the valuable resource. It may also allow some species to safely pass among a more successful group and thus share access to desired resources. If social mimicry is to explain why adolescence-limited delinquents begin to mimic the antisocial behavior of their life course-persistent peers, then, logically, delinquency must be a social behavior that allows access to some desirable resource. I suggest that the resource is mature status, with its consequent power and privilege.

Reading 3

The Long Reach of Violence: A Broader Perspective on Data, Theory, and Evidence on the Prevalence and Consequences of Exposure to Violence - Patrick Sharkey

Explain Mayor Blumber's "stop and frisk" policy in NYC and the criticisms of it?

The NYPD has conducted millions of stop-and-frisks in New York City over the last two decades. The majority of those stopped are people of color, and a vastly disproportionate number are Black. There is no evidence that ramping up stops makes New Yorkers safer. But we do know that many of these stops have been unlawful and that some have led to violent police misconduct. Once a civilian is stopped, the NYPD may "frisk" the external clothing of an individual if the officer has a reason to believe the person stopped has a weapon that poses a threat to the officer's safety or "search" the individual or their belongings if the officer has probable cause to believe that the individual is engaged in criminal activity. A stop may also involve an officer using physical "force" against the civilian. Civilians who are stopped may be given a summons (a violation, like a ticket) or arrested if the police find evidence of wrongdoing. This process gets more information to the police (e.g., new informants, getting people's fingerprints on record etc.). For 250,000 stops for "furtive" movements, only 1/15th of 1% turned up a gun

Explain the research findings of the longitudinal investigation of a representative cohort of 1,037 New Zealand children born in 1972-1973.

The base rates of persistent and temporary antisocial behavior problems were compared. Five % of the boys in the sample met the criteria for antisocial behavioral problems. As a group, their mean antisocial ratings were more than a standard deviation above the norm for boys at every age. In contrast, two thirds of the remaining boys were rated above average on antisocial checklists but at only one or two ages during their lifetime, illustrating that stability cannot be inferred from cross-sectional measures of extremity. The stability in antisocial behaviour at every age could be attributed to the 5% of boys whose antisocial be havior was both extreme and consistent. For example, when these boys were excluded from calculations, the 8-year stability coefficient for teacher ratings was reduced from .28 (R2 .078) to .16 (R2 = .025), indicating that 5% of the sample accounted for 68% of the sample's stability. If antisocial behavior had been a stable characteristic throughout the sample, with most boys retaining their relative standing in the group across time, then excluding the top 5% of the sample should not have affected the stability coefficient. In the whole sample, about 1/3 joined the 5% of boys who had shown stable and pervasive antisocial behavior since preschool. As a group, these adolescent newcomers to antisocial ways had not formerly exceeded the normative levels of antisocial behavior for boys at ages 3, 5, 7, 9, or I I. Despite their lack of prior experience, by age 15, the newcomers equaled their preschool-onset antisocial peers in the variety of laws they had broken, the frequency with which they broke them, and the number of times they appeared in juvenile court. At age 15, both the childhood-persistent and adolescent-onset groups had members who scored more than 5 standard deviations above the mean on self-report delinquency, and by age 19, both groups had some members with more than 50 convictions for crimes in the New Zealand courts.

Explain the broken window idea.

The broken windows theory stems from an article written in 1982 by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Their theory states that signs of disorder will lead to more disorder. A building with a broken window that has been left unrepaired will give the appearance that no one cares and no one is in charge. It is a sign of a neglected community. Neglected communities are a place where crime can thrive. If police could fix the small problems the big ones would go away too For example, if they cracked down on subway fare beaters, smoking pot in public, and graffiti artists. It says that most problems are problems of disorder. Signs of a disorder will lead to more disorder.

Explain what is involved with the social transformation of the inner city?

The city shifts from producing goods to a more service-based industry. This increases polarization of the labor market. Eventually, there is a relocation of manufacturing away from the city and middle and upper income families leave.

What is linked to the kind of antisocial behavior that begins in child hood?

The evidence is strong that neuropsychological deficits are linked to the kind of antisocial behavior that begins in childhood and is sustained for lengthy periods. Poor verbal and executive functions are associated with antisocial behavior, if it is extreme and persistent. ADHD and conduct disorder: Adolescent New Zealand boys who exhibited symptoms of both conduct disorder and attention-deficit disorder with hyperactivity scored very poorly on neuropsychological tests of verbal and executive functions and had histories of extreme antisocial behavior that persisted from age 3 to age I5. Their neuropsychological deficits were as long standing as their antisocial behavior; at ages 3 and 5 these boys had scored more than a standard deviation below the age norm for boys on the Bayley and McCarthy tests of motor coordination and on the Stanford-Binet test of cognitive performance. Impulsivity: Boys who were very delinquent from ages IO to 13 scored significantly higher on impulsivity than both their nondelinquent and temporarily delinquent age-mates. Overall, neuropsychological dysfunctions that manifest themselves as poor scores on tests of language and self-control-and as the inattentive, overactive, and impulsive symptoms of ADDH-are linked with the early childhood emergence of aggressive antisocial behavior and with its subsequent persistence.

What is Neuropsychological variation?

The extent to which anatomical structures and physiological processes within the nervous system influence psychological characteristics such as temperament, behavioral development, cognitive abilities, or all three. For example, individual variation in brain function may engender differences between children in activity level, emotional reactivity, or self-regulation (temperament); speech, motor coordination, or impulse control (behavioral development); and attention, language, learning, memory, or reasoning (cognitive abilities).

Is the life-course-persistent antisocial syndrome a psychopathology?

The life-course-persistent antisocial syndrome has many characteristics that, taken together, suggest psychopathology. For example, the syndrome is statistically unusual; much research converges to suggest that it is characteristic of about 5% of males, which is consistent with a simple statistical definition of abnormality. The theoretical syndrome is also characterized by tenacious stability across time and in diverse circumstances. This high probability response style is relied on even in situations where it is clearly inappropriate or disadvantageous, especially if there is a very limited repertoire of alternative conventional behaviors. Therefore, it is maladaptive in the sense that it fails to change in response to changing circumstances. It also has a biological basis in subtle dysfunctions of the nervous system

What is homicidal victimization?

The most extreme form of violent victimization. The homicide rate has fallen between 43% and 50% from 1991 through 2015. Homicide is uncommon among children, but rates of homicide victimization rise rapidly in the late teenage years. In 2015, the homicide victimization rate for children under 18 was 1.48 per 100,000 according to data from the UCR. Homicide victimization rates vary sharply by gender and race/ethnicity. Based on UCR data, the homicide rate for males as of 2015 was 6.52 per 100,000, compared to 1.68 per 100,000 females. The homicide rate for African Americans (Hispanic and non-Hispanic) was 15.2 per 100,000, the rate for all Hispanics was 3.47 per 100,000, and the rate for whites (Hispanic and non-Hispanic) was 2.29 per 100,000.

Are there comorbidities associated with life-course-persistent antisocial syndrome?

The syndrome is associated with other mental disorders. There is good evidence that such "comorbidity" is associated with long-term continuity. An impressive body of research documents an overlap between persistent forms of antisocial behavior and other conditions of childhood such as learning disabilities and hyperactivity. One study of mental disorders among 19,000 adults found that over 90% of the cases with antisocial personality disorder had at least one additional psychiatric diagnosis. The comorbid conditions that disproportionately affected antisocial adults were mania, schizophrenia, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and anxiety disorders.

Because the adolescence-limited delinquency is theorized to be a by-product of modernization, how does secular change play a factor?

The theory predicts that, in contemporary preindustrial nations and in earlier historical periods, the age-crime curve should lack the characteristic sharp peak between the ages of 15-18. Empirical data support this prediction. Research shows that the steepness of the age-crime curve is indeed greatest during recent times and among modern nations. But the shift toward more peaked distributions is greater for some types of offenses than for others. The shifts are comparatively small for the person crimes and for those property offenses primarily involving older offenders (e.g., fraud and forgery}, while the shifts are moderate to substantial for the youth-oriented, low-yield property offenses (e.g., robbery and burglary}, public order offenses, and the substance-abuse offenses. For life-course persistent offenders (with mild neuropsychological impairment, poor self-control, pathological interpersonal relationships, weak connections to other people, and a lifelong antisocial personality configuration), the behavior should account for violence against persons as well as for crimes committed in late life. But for adolescence-limited offenders, the crimes they commit should account primarily for crimes that serve to meet adolescents' lust for acknowledgment and privilege: theft, vandalism, public order, and substance abuse.

What 2 main distinctions does Sharkey make about exposure to different types of violence?

There are 3 types of violent exposure: 1. Exposure to violent interactions - Encompasses victimization and direct witnessing of violence, (the typical objects of study in the literature on ETV). 2. Exposure to violent environments - Residential environments that have high levels of violence, regardless of whether an individual witnesses it in person or hears about it 3. Exposure to violent situations - Specific locations and times when violence is more likely, regardless of whether a violent interaction takes place

How do infants with low-birth-weight/premature negatively influence the behaviour of their caretakers?

They arrive before parents are prepared, their crying patterns are rated as more disturbing and irritating, and parents report that they are less satisfying to feed, less pleasant to hold, and more demanding to care for than healthy babies. Many parents of preterm infants hold unrealistic expectations about their children's attainment of developmental milestones, and these may contribute to later dysfunctional parent-child relationships

What types of crimes should persistent antisocial offenders typically engage in? According to theory

They engage in a wider variety of offenses, including types of crimes that are often committed by lone offenders. Thus, in addition to the aforementioned crime types, they should commit more of the victim-oriented offenses, such as violence and fraud.

What are evocative interactions?

They occur when a child's behavior evokes distinctive responses from others

What are reactive interactions?

They occur when different youngsters exposed to the same environment experience it, interpret it, and react to it in accordance with their particular style. For example, in interpersonal situations where cues are ambiguous, aggressive children are likely to mistakenly attribute harmful intent to others and then act accordingly.

What are proactive interactions?

They occur when people select or create environments that support their styles. For example, antisocial individuals appear to be likely to affiliate selectively with antisocial others, even when selecting a mate. Some evidence points to nonrandom mating along personality traits related to antisocial behavior, and there are significant spouse correlations on conviction for crimes.

What were negative outcomes of efforts to reduce crime with the broken window theory?

They were unfairly targeting commmunities of color. There was an increase in police misconduct.

How does social mimicry lead to a shift during early adolescence by persistent antisocial youth from peripheral to more influential positions in the peer social structure?

This shift should occur as aspects of the antisocial style become more interesting to other teens. In terms of its epidemiology, delinquent participation shifts from being primarily an individual psychopathology in childhood to a normative group social behavior during adolescence and then back to psychopathology in adulthood. Consider that the behavior problems of the few pioneering antisocial children in an age cohort must develop on an individual basis; such early childhood pioneers lack the influence of delinquent peers (excepting family members). However, near adolescence, a few boys join the life-course-persistent ones, then a few more, until a critical mass is reached when almost all adolescents are involved in some delinquency with age peers. El liott and Menard (in press) have analyzed change in peer group membership from age 11 to age 24 in a national probability sample. Their data show a gradual population drift from membership in nondelinquent peer groups to membership in delinquent peer groups up to age 17; the trend reverses thereafter. Knowledge of friends' delinquent behavior was 2.5 to 5 times more important for self-delinquency than friends' attitudes about delinquency. The data on peer effects are best interpreted in terms of imitation or vicarious reinforcement.

What is the restricted behavioral repertoir theory?

This theory of life course-persistent antisocial behavior asserts that the causal sequence begins very early and the formative years are dominated by chains of cumulative and contemporary continuity. As a consequence, little opportunity is afforded for the life-course persistent antisocial individual to learn a behavioral repertoire of prosocial alternatives. Thus, one overlooked and pernicious source of continuity in antisocial behavior is simply a lack of recourse to any other options. Aggressive children whose behavioral repertoires consist almost solely of antisocial behaviors are less likely to change over years than are aggressive children whose repertoires comprise some prosocial behaviors as well. Life-course-persistent persons miss out on opportunities to acquire and practice prosocial alternatives at each stage of development. Children with poor self-control and aggressive behavior are often rejected by peers and adults. Such children are robbed of chances to practice conventional social skills

How is people's engagement in deviant life-styles possibly under the control of reinforcement and punishment contingencies?

Unlike their life-course-persistent peers, whose behavior was described as inflexible and refractory to changing circumstances, adolescence-limited delinquents are likely to engage in antisocial behavior in situations where such responses seem profitable to them, but they are also able to abandon antisocial behavior when prosocial styles are more rewarding. They maintain control over their antisocial responses and use antisocial behavior only in situations where it may serve an instrumental function. Thus, principles of learning theory will be important for this theory of the cause of adolescence-limited delinquency.

What does Sharkey propose about exposure to violence (ETV) and communities?

Violence happens to people, but it also happens to places. By implication, the study of ETV should be carried out not only at the level of individuals and families but also at the level of streets and intersections, communities, schools, and cities. Violence is experienced by some purely because of where they live, but it is much more common among those who select into networks of people more likely to engage in violence and into settings and situations where violence is more common.

What are trends overall for violent victimization.

Violence rates are decreasing in the US. Violence is more prevalent for adolescents than children. Men are victimized more than women. More many types of victimization, rates are higher for African Americans. An initial conclusion is that violence remains a common feature of life throughout much of the United States. Survey data indicate that almost three out of every ten 14-17-year-olds have witnessed some form of physical violence among parents within the home, more than half of children report being the victims of an assault and 9% are assaulted with a weapon at some point during childhood. Young men continue to be victims of extreme violence (homicides and nonfatal firearm hospitalization) at much higher rates than young women, and racial and ethnic disparities in exposure to these forms of extreme violence remain severe.

What are trends in violent crime victimization?

Violent crime includes murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, robbery, rape, and aggravated assault. Similar to the homicide rate, the violent crime rate in the UCR has fallen by roughly 50% since 1991. Data from the NCVS show that the rate of serious victimization (robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault/rape) has fallen by 77% from 29.1 per 1,000 in 1993 to 6.8 per 1,000 in 2015. The rate of serious violent victimization is slightly higher for young people age 12-18 but has also fallen further. In 1993, the serious violent victimization rate was 63 per 1,000 12-18-year-olds and had dropped to just 8 per 1,000 in 2015, a decline of 87%. In the early 1990s, there were substantial racial and ethnic gaps in serious victimization, but these gaps have narrowed over time. The rate of serious victimization for non-Hispanic African Americans in 2015 was 8.4 per 1,000, compared to 7.1 per 1,000 for Hispanics and 6.0 per 1,000 for non-Hispanic whites. The gender gap in serious violent victimization has also mostly disappeared over time. In 1993, the rate of serious violent victimization was 31% higher for males than females. Rates of serious victimization for both men and women have plummeted, and from 2013 to 2015 there has been no consistent gender difference in serious victimization rates.

How can environments affect children with cognitive and temperamental disadvantages, particularly for vulnerable individuals?

Vulnerable infants are disproportionately found in environments that will not be ameliorative because many sources of neural maldevelopment co-occur with family disadvantage or deviance. Because some characteristics of parents and children tend to be correlated, parents of children who are at risk for antisocial behavior often inadvertently provide their children with criminogenic environments. The intergenerational transmission of severe antisocial behavior has been carefully documented in a study of three generations. In that study of 600 subjects, the stability of individuals' aggressive behavior from age 8 to age 30 was exceeded by the stability of aggression across the generations: from grandparent to parent to child. Parents and children resemble each other on temperament and personality. Parents of children who are difficult to manage often lack the necessary psychological and physical resources to cope constructively with a difficult child. For example, temperamental traits such as activity level and irritability are known to be partly heritable. This suggests that children whose hyperactivity and angry outbursts might be curbed by firm discipline will tend to have parents who are inconsistent disciplinarians; the parents tend to be impatient and irritable too. The converse is also true: Empirical evidence has been found for a relationship between variations in parents' warmth and infants' easiness. Parents and children also resemble each other on cognitive ability. The known heritability of measured intelligence implies that children who are most in need of remedial cognitive stimulation will have parents who may be least able to provide it. Parents' cognitive abilities set limits on their own educational and occupational attainment. As one consequence, families whose members have below-average cognitive capacities will often be least able financially to obtain professional interventions or optimal remedial schooling for their at-risk children. Vulnerable children are often subject to adverse homes and neighborhoods because their parents are vulnerable to problems too. A home environment wherein prenatal care is haphazard, drugs are used during pregnancy, and infants' nutritional needs ar

How is racism evident regarding how people with criminal records get hired?

White men with a criminal record have a better chance of getting a positive response in a job search than black men without a criminal record. The penalty of a criminal record disproportionately affects formerly incarcerated black men and women.

What are the strongest prospective predictors of adolescence-limited delinquency?

Youths with little risk from personal or environmental disadvantage encounter motivation for crime for the first time when they enter adolescence. For them, an emerging appreciation of desirable adult privileges is met with an awareness that those privileges are yet forbidden. After observing their antisocial peers' effective solution to the modern dilemma of the maturity gap, youths mimic that delinquent solution. Perversely, the consequences of delinquency reinforce and sustain their efforts, but only until aging into adulthood brings a subjective shift in the valence of the consequences of crime. Then such offenders readily desist from crime, substituting the prosocial skills they practiced before they entered adolescence. This narrative suggests a direct contrast with the predictions made for persistent antisocial behavior. Individual differences should play little or no role in the prediction of short-term adolescent offending careers. Instead, the strongest prospective predictors of short-term offending should be knowledge of peer delinquency, attitudes toward adulthood and autonomy, cultural and historical context, and age.

What are 5 social and cultural mechanisms proposed by Sampson and colleagues?

1. Collective efficacy/Social cohesion - Community control of behavior 2. Affluence and exchange - Residential stability - Intergenerational exchange 3. Internal and external perceptions - beliefs and stigmas 4. Deviance - Legal cynicism - Justifications based on necessity 5. Victimization and perceived disorder/violence - Exposure to violence

What are potential sources of neuropsychological variation that are linked to problem behavior?

1. Disruption in the ontogenesis of the fetal brain. - Minor physical anomalies, which are thought to be observable markers for hidden anomalies in neural development, have been found at elevated rates among violent offenders and subjects with antisocial personality traits. - Could be caused by maternal drug abuse, poor prenatal nutrition, or pre or postnatal exposure to toxic agents. 2. Brain insult suffered because of complications during delivery (has been empirically linked to later violence and antisocial behavior) 3. Heritable sources - Parents and children share structural and functional similarities within their nervous systems. 4. Disruptions in neural development after birth. - neural development may be disrupted by neonatal deprivation of nutrition, stimulation, and even affection - Some point to child abuse and neglect as possible sources of brain injury in the histories of delinquents with neuropsychological impairment 5. Deficits in neuropsychological abilities

What are the 3 types of person-environment interactions that may help to explain how the life-course-persistent individual's problem behavior might promote its own continuity and pervasiveness?

1. Evocative interactions 2. Reactive interactions 3. Proactive interactions

What are 2 sources of continuity that can narrow options for people to change?

1. Failing to learn conventional prosocial alternatives to antisocial behavior. 2. Becoming ensnared in a deviant life-style by crime's consequences

What types of victimization are there?

1. Homicidal victimization 2. Violent crime victimization 3. Nonfatal firearm victimization 4. Witness violence 5. Family violence

What are examples of personality coherence?

1. It is known that childhood aggression, physical adventurousness, and nonconformity were related to adult sexual behavior. 2. Men who were rated by their peers as aggressive in late childhood were more likely to commit serious criminal acts, abuse their spouses, and drive while intoxicated as adults. 3. Women who were rated by their peers as aggressive in late childhood were more likely to punish their offspring severely. 4. The developmental antecedents of erratic work histories may be found in phenotypically dissimilar attributes of difficult temperament in childhood 5. Stealing, alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity, reckless driving, and violence were linked across the life course

What 7 areas/parts of the criminal justice system demonstrate apparent racism?

1. Juvenile and drug-related arrests 2. Pre-trial release 3. Prosecution charges 4. Length of Incarceration 5. Sentencing to Life Without Parole 6. Hiring People with Criminal Records 7. Eliminating the Right to Vote

What 4 traits characterize the theory of adolescence-limited delinquency?

1. Modal onset in early adolescence, 2. Recovery by young adulthood, 3. Widespread prevalence, 4. Lack of continuity.

What 5 things can exposure to community violence effect long-term?

1. Physical health 2. Mental health 3. Academic achievement 4. Neuropsychological effects 5. Violent behaviour

What might explain the link between exposure to community violence and violent behavior?

1. Social learning and violence models can cause community violence to result in violent behavior. 2. Community violence can lead to de-sensitization and reduced arousal, which can lead to violent behavior. 3. Community violence can lead to hypo-sensitization and increased arousal, which can lead to violent behavior.

Why does the prevalence rate of offenders increase in adolescence? Give some possibilities

1. That some phenomenon unique to adolescent development causes many new adolescent offenders to temporarily join the few stable antisocial individuals in their delinquent ways

What are 4 proposed predictors of not engaging in adolescent-onset delinquency?

1. The motivating maturity gap is not present - Some youths may skip the maturity gap because of late puberty or early initiation into adult roles. Some youths who refrain from antisocial behavior may, for some reason, not sense the maturity gap and therefore lack the hypothesized motivation for experimenting with crime. Perhaps such teens experience very late puberty so that the gap between biological and social adulthood is not signaled to them early in adolescence. For example, Caspi and Moffitt (1991) have shown that girls who do not menstruate by age I5 tend not to become involved in delinquency. 2. They lack antisocial role models. - They may find few opportunities for mimicking life-course-persistent delinquent models. Some nondelinquent teens may lack structural opportunities for modeling antisocial peers. Adolescent crime rates are generally lower in rural areas than in inner-city areas. Teens in urban areas are surrounded by a greater density of age peers (and have readier unsupervised access to them through public transportation and meeting venues such as parks and shopping malls) than are teens in relatively isolated rural areas. For instance, Sampson and Groves (1989) determined that the strongest community-level correlate of local rates of robbery and violence was the presence of "unsupervised groups of teenagers hanging out and making a nuisance" 3. School structures may also constrain access to life course-persistent models. - Caspi et al. (1993) found that early puberty was associated with delinquency in girls but only if they had access to boys through attending coed high schools. Girls who were enrolled in girls' schools did not engage in delinquency. 4. Youths may be excluded from opportunities to mimic antisocial peers because of some personal characteristics that make them unattractive to other teens or that leave them reluctant to seek entry to newly popular delinquent groups In summary, this theory of adolescence-limited delinquency suggests that adolescents who commit no antisocial behavior at all have either (a) delayed puberty, (b) access to roles that are respected by adults, (c) environments that limit opportunities for learning about delinquency, (d) personal charact

What are the two sorts of neuropsychological deficits that are empirically associated with antisocial behavior?

1. Verbal functions - The verbal deficits of antisocial children are pervasive, affecting receptive listening and reading, problem solving, expressive speech and writing, and memory. 2. Executive functions - Produce what is sometimes referred to as a comportmental learning disability including symptoms such as inattention and impulsivity. These cognitive deficits and antisocial behavior share variance that is independent of social class, race, test motivation, and academic attainment.

How is racism evident regarding sentencing to life without parole?

65% of prisoners serving Life without Parole for nonviolent offenses are Black. - White people make up 61% of the US population but only make up 32% of the people serving life without parole - Black people make up 13% of the population but also make up 48% of people serving life without parole

What is a taxon in psychology?

A category into which related disorders are placed. A taxon carries a network of meaning beyond a behavioral description; it includes implications for etiology, course, prognosis, treatment, and relations with other taxa.

When does a classification become a taxonomy?

A classification becomes a taxonomy if it gives rise to assertions about origins and outcomes by weaving a nomological net of relationships between the taxa and their correlates.

Environmental factors are a _______ condition for criminal behavior. Explain this

A necessary condition. Factors such as concentrated disadvantage create environmental contexts that promote criminal behavior. Not all people from disadvantaged neighborhoods engage in criminal behavior (e.g., having collective efficacy can be protective)

What is Adolescence-Limited Antisocial Behavior?

Adolescence-Limited Delinquency is marked by discontinuity. Discontinuity is the hallmark of teenaged delinquents who have no notable history of antisocial behavior in childhood and little future for such behavior in adulthood. Several studies have shown that about one third of males are arrested during their lifetime for a serious criminal offense, whereas fully four fifths of males have police contact for some minor infringement. Most of these police contacts are made during the adolescent years. Adolescence-limited delinquents may also have sporadic, crime-free periods in the midst of their brief crime "careers." They lack consistency in their antisocial behavior across situations. For example, they may shoplift in stores and use drugs with friends but continue to obey the rules at school.

Reading 2

Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Taxonomy. By Terrie Moffitt

What are the two oft-cited rules of thumb asserted by Robins ( 1978) that seem to simultaneously assert and deny the life-course stability of antisocial behavior?

Adult antisocial behaviour virtually requires childhood antisocial behaviour [yet] most antisocial youths do not become antisocial adults" (p. 611). Research has shown that antisocial behavior is remarkably stable across time and circumstance for some persons but decidedly unstable for most other people.