The origins of serious offending

75. Most serious crimes are committed by multiple recidivist adult male offenders - the 'hard core' criminals. Several longitudinal studies of children growing to adulthood indicate that tomorrow's hard core can be found among the children of today's socially and economically disadvantaged families.⁹ Young people who are at risk of becoming serious adult offenders are recognisable with increasing certainty as newborns, as school entrants, as young offenders, and as early adult offenders as they proceed along what is now a well-understood developmental path. Terrie Moffitt¹⁰ notes that:

    ...a substantial body of longitudinal research consiststenly points to a very small group of males who display high rates of antisocial behaviour across time and in diverse situations. The professional nomenclature may change but their faces remain the same as they drift through successive systems aimed at curbing their deviance: schools, juvenile justice programmes psychiatric-treatment centers, and prisons.

76. The Australian National Anticrime's programme has identified prevention as a major direction for policy. Their recent report Pathways to prevention supports Terrie Moffit's view above. It Floras:11

    ...we take the view that the roots of criminal offending are complex and cumulative, and that they are embedded in social as weft as personal histories. To uncover the risk factors that are the facilitating conditions for entry into a criminal career requires a life course perspective that views each potential young offender as someone who is developing over the life course and in specific social settings.

77. This report puts forward the view that potentially the most effective way to reduce serious crime rates in the longer term - and hence to reduce the use of imprisonment - is to take a life course approach to crime prevention. This involves putting in place a planned and co-ordinated series of progressively more powerful barriers to progress along the trajectory to serious adult offending. This approach to crime prevention, which is advocated by the US Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,¹² is supported by the findings of numerous longitudinal studies, and in particular by the Christchurch Health and Development Study.¹³ It also forms the foundation of the recent Australian National Anticrime's programme Pathways to prevention project.

78. Studies of children growing to adulthood, such as the Christchurch Health and Development Study, identify the key 'risk factors' and unmet needs that sustain progress along the trajectory to adult crime. They indicate the kinds of results that interventions would have to achieve in order to resolve unmet needs and reduce risk of progress toward adult imprisonment. These findings suggest that an effective prevention programme would have to link up policy and practice in social services, education, youth justice and adult justice.

79. Consequently this section of the report considers social services, youth justice, education, and adult justice specifically from the perspective of what could be done in those service delivery areas to improve the chances of high need children and young persons for a life in the mainstream.

80. This report presents a series of four interventions based on the principle of identifying those whose circumstances have placed them on the trajectory to serious adult offending, and interrupting their progress. Each ofthe four interventions involves recognising the presence of key risk factors and needs, and then addressing those risks and needs before the individuals concerned progress to the next stage on the trajectory. The section that follows sets out what is known about the core trajectory to serious adult offending and the key risks and needs to be addressed to prevent progress along it.

The trajectory to serious and chronic adult offending

81. The Christchurch Health and Development Study, among other longitudinal studies, uses the concept of 'trajectories' through childhood and youth to describe the sequence of developments that lead to adult criminal offending. Several trajectories have been proposed, with some that lead to short-term or low-level offending, and one clear, central trajectory that leads to continuing adult offending,14 and eventually to imprisonment.

82. Trajectory theories of the origin of persistent antisocial behaviour and criminal offending have been advanced in recent years from several studies in different parts of the world.¹⁵

83. It is important to note that the central trajectory is not necessarily a conveyer belt to adult crime. Children on the trajectory early in their lives may leave it if their circumstances improve - usually they join related but less serious trajectories that may still involve offending behaviour - while others from related trajectories may join the central trajectory if their circumstances worsen. By the mid-teenage years, however, most are settled in their behaviour patterns. Even if a young person remains on a high-risk trajectory, this does not condemn the adult to criminal offending. A proportion of children who are seriously disadvantaged in social and economic terms grow to become happy and productive adults. Children and youth who have experienced a number of deprivations, unmet needs and damaging life experiences are at risk of adult disorder, which includes offending. They are not condemned to it.

84. Taken together, the longitudinal studies suggest that children who become youth offenders and then progress to adult offending have experienced an unrelenting series of adverse life events. They have accumulated a number of needs for appropriate social, educational, and justice services that have not been met. Some of these adverse events are of their own making - in that they are consequences of their own disordered behaviour- and some are beyond their control. A number of the key life course risk factors have to do with the family of origin, and once established in a family, if not addressed, they may pass from one generation to the next.

85. The most influential risk factors are present at birth and have to do with the mother. The greater the number of maternal risk factors, the greater the chance that her newborn will experience problems that will ultimately affect adult functioning. According to the results of the Christchurch Health and Development Study, each one of the risk factors on the list below increases the probability of antisocial behaviour as a young adult by between four times and ten times. Together they increase risk by hundreds of times. The key maternal risk factors are these, the mother:
    • is young

    • has little education

    • is from a disadvantaged family of origin where she received little care and affection

    • is, or has been, substance dependent

    • is, or has been, substance dependent

    • is socially isolated and without family connections

    • has a number of male partners in a serial fashion.

86. After the first year of life the key risk factors include social isolation of the child, harsh and erratic discipline, changes of father figure, and changes of dwelling place.

87. By primary school entry the child on a trajectory to adult offending will show conduct disorder - which is a pattern of regular breaking of major rules in all settings, school, home and community¹⁶ - and frequent defiance of authority. Schools tend to respond punitively to conduct disorder, so that the child may begin playing truant, or may experience a continuing series of sanctions, which may eventually lead to suspension or expulsion. Parents tend to respond to conduct disordered children either by 'giving up' - washing their hands of any attempt to control behaviour - or by the use of intermittent, stern physical punishment, which may become physical abuse. Both of these responses contribute to the child's worsening behaviour.

88. Conduct disordered children are vulnerable to substance abuse, and most will take up some combination of cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs at the first opportunity. Some will offend in order to obtain money for substance abuse. Children with normal behaviour do not enjoy the company of these aggressive, rule-breaking, defiant children. Consequently, high-risk children tend to link up with others like themselves, and mutually support each other's developing antisocial behaviour.

89. By secondary school age, many conduct disordered children will have begun to show the behavioural disorders they will experience as adults. They may already have committed a number of offences. Their performance at school will be so poor that they have no prospect of obtaining employment qualifications, and suspensions or expulsions among this group are common. High-risk young women are likely to be established substance abusers, may show self-harming behaviour including attempted suicide, and may be at risk of unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and exploitation or abuse.

90. Other research¹⁷ shows that in early adulthood the serious and chronic offender will demonstrate a range of behaviour problems which may include self-harming (self-tattoos, cutting with razor blades, suicide attempts), abuse of partner and children, drug or alcohol dependence, low or zero employment prospects, aggressive and defiant behaviour, and internalising disorders (depression, anxiety). As they age, their behavioural disorders and criminal lifestyle become increasingly entrenched and more difficult to change. Their prospects for rehabilitation become progressively lower, although they never reach zero. If not rehabilitated earlier, lifetime offenders tend to 'burn out" after the age of 40 years and show a retreat from offending against the community at large. As partners and parents, however, they continue to be physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive, and to replicate in their own parenting behaviour the experiences that gave rise to their own childhood problems. Many serious adult offenders will be supported in institutions or on welfare for the greater part of their adult lives, and they can cost taxpayers up to $5.0m.¹⁸