Citation

Walters GD. Law Hum. Behav. 2014; 38(2): 139-150.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, American Psychological Association)

DOI

10.1037/lhb0000050

PMID

24127892

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine whether comorbid offending and substance misuse in previously adjudicated delinquents correlated better with measures of concurrent antisocial cognition and personality and subsequent criminality and substance misuse than offending or substance misuse alone. A sample of 1,177 youths was divided into four groups based on self-reported crime and substance misuse data from Wave 4 (ages 16-21) of the Pathways to Desistance study (Mulvey, 2012): a no-crime and substance-misuse (NCS) group, a crime-only (CO) group, a substance-misuse-only (SO) group, and a crime and substance-misuse (C&S) group. As predicted, youths in the C&S group earned significantly higher scores on concurrent measures of neuroticism, grandiosity/manipulation, callousness/unemotionality, impulsivity/irresponsibility, and moral disengagement, and significantly lower scores on measures of agreeableness, conscientiousness, impulse control, suppression of aggression, and consideration of others than did youths in the other three groups. Prospective analyses revealed that C&S participants engaged in more subsequent crime and experienced more substance-related social problems than participants in the other three groups and reported significantly more substance-related dependency symptoms and episodes of alcohol/drug treatment than participants in the NCS and CO groups. Hence, previously adjudicated youths who experienced problems with crime and substances in late adolescence/early adulthood were at increased risk for concurrent antisocial cognition and personality problems and subsequent crime and substance-misuse problems compared with participants in the other three groups. The prospective effects were found to be partially mediated by antisocial cognition in the form of moral disengagement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Language: en