Citation

DeLisi M. Int. J. Offender Ther. Comp. Criminol. 2013; 57(8): 911-912.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0306624X13493391

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

One of the most important theoretical developments of the last 20 years is Moffitt's (1993) developmental taxonomy, which articulates a three-part typology of individuals. Abstainers are persons who do not engage in antisocial behavior. Adolescence- limited offenders are persons who engage in deviance briefly during their adolescence and life-course-persistent offenders were those who display antisocial conduct across life. In the taxonomy, abstainers and life-course-persistent offenders are pathological in statistical terms and represent about 5% to 10% of a population. Conversely, adolescence-limited offenders are normative in statistical terms and represent the remain- der of a population. The taxonomy can be best understood as a heuristic device to understand highly prosocial individuals, mostly prosocial individuals who dabble in antisocial conduct in various ways, and extremely antisocial individuals who rarely dabble in prosocial conduct. Although the developmental taxonomy has received extensive empirical attention, it is at times taken too literally and held to a pure typological argument that the theory frankly never made (see Moffitt, 2007, on this critique). The basic premise of the taxonomy has been supported by large-scale epidemiological studies (Vaughn, DeLisi, et al., 2011; Vaughn, Fu, et al., 2011), and it is understood that within normative and pathological types of offenders, there is natural variance...