Successful and Unsuccessful Criminal Offenders: Developmental and Biopsychosocial Processes.

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

In a groundbreaking paper in 2023, David Farrington and colleagues introduced the concept of “successful delinquency” – those who self-report delinquency but are never convicted. Inspired by this novel perspective, this thematic panel brings together four developmental and biopsychosocial researchers to extend this concept into adult offending, highlighting early developmental processes that may help explain these two forms of offending, and illustrating the integration of cross-division perspectives. Henriette Bergstrom follows up Farrington’s original study by examining the intergenerational transmission of successful offending in the Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development, and confirming prior findings on psychosocial risk factors. Adrian Raine presents work from the Mauritius Child Health project, documenting that unsuccessful offenders have higher rates of premature death compared to controls and successful offenders. Olivia Choy similarly documents that only unsuccessful offenders have early malnutrition, a relationship partly explained by poor executive functions. Finally, Yu Gao poses the question of what makes successful offenders successful in the first place, documenting that superior fear conditioning early in childhood in successful offenders results in a heightened ability to detect environmental cues associated with punishment, resulting in escape from law enforcement agencies.

Sub Unit

• Area II. Perspectives on Crime / 2. Developmental and Life Course Perspectives

Individual Presentations

• Is There Intergenerational Transmission of ‘Success’? Results from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) - Henriette Bergstrom, University of Derby; Darrick Jolliffe, Royal Holloway, University of London; David Farrington, University of Cambridge

• Premature Death in Successful and Unsuccessful Criminals. - Adrian Raine, University of Pennsylvania; Olivia Choy, Nanyang Technological University; Jianghong Liu, University of Pennsylvania

• Early Malnutrition Differentiates Unsuccessful from Successful Offenders - Olivia Choy, Nanyang Technological University; Adrian Raine, University of Pennsylvania

• Enhanced Age 3 Fear Conditioning in Successful Adult Criminal Offenders - Yu Gao, Brooklyn College, CUNY; Adrian Raine, University of Pennsylvania; Olivia Choy, Nanyang Technological University

Chair

• Adrian Raine, University of Pennsylvania

Organized by a Division or external group?

This panel is co-hosted by the Division of Biopsychosocial Criminology (DBC) and the Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (DLC)