Is There Intergenerational Transmission of ‘Success’? Results from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD)

• In Event: Successful and Unsuccessful Criminal Offenders: Developmental and Biopsychosocial Processes.

Abstract

Using the CSDD, Farrington et al. (2023) identified 126 ‘successful’ offenders, or those who self-reported engaging in criminal behaviour in adolescence but were not convicted up to age 26. Compared to those with convictions, the results suggested that limiting self-reported offending to relatively infrequent and minor forms of offending increased the likelihood of avoiding detection as did a number of psychosocial factors such as school attainment, having unconvicted parents, low risk-taking, and coming from an intact family. The current study extends this past work by examining whether there was evidence of intergenerational transmission of successful self-reported offending. This was done by identifying those successful offenders in the Generation 3 (“G3”) sample of the CSDD (the 511 male and female biological offspring of the original 411 males) and examining the extent to which these individuals had a father who was a successful offender. The results suggested that similar factors to those identified in previous research were associated with success in the G3 sample, and that there was limited evidence of intergenerational transmission of this success. The limitations and future directions for this research will be considered.

Authors

• Henriette Bergstrom, University of Derby

• Darrick Jolliffe, Royal Holloway, University of London

• David Farrington, University of Cambridge