Citation

Farrington DP, Hawkins JD. JAMA Netw. Open 2019; 2(3): e190780.

Affiliation

School of Social Work, University of Washington, Seattle.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, American Medical Association)

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.0780

PMID

30924883

Abstract

The Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (CSYS) was the first large-scale well-designed delinquency prevention experiment. Boys were matched on delinquency prediction scores and randomly allocated either to receive a treatment program from 1939 onward or to be in a control group who received no treatment. The treatment program was very intensive, offering regular friendly help from counselors in visits every 2 weeks on average, and it lasted over 5 years on average (from when the boys were approximately ages 10-15 years). However, the treatment program proved to be at best ineffective and at worst damaging. In a follow-up when the participants were approximately aged 45 years, McCord concluded that the program had undesirable effects on criminal behavior, health, and employment. This conclusion, and this experiment, had a major impact on criminology in showing that well-intentioned attempts to help children could backfire.

The article by Welsh and colleagues is a highly commendable effort to follow 253 pairs of CSYS participants (those who were still in the program in 1942) in death records up to approximately 89 years after they were born, to investigate the association of the program with mortality. To the extent that the program had undesirable effects on criminal behavior and health, the authors predicted that it would have an undesirable association with mortality. However, they found no significant associations of the program with their various measures of mortality.

A great deal of research shows that convicted offenders tend to die earlier than nonoffenders. Welsh and colleagues reviewed several studies of this and have recently found in the CSYS that life course–persistent offenders tended to die 7 to 8 years earlier than either adolescence-limited offenders or nonoffenders. Interestingly, the group differences in the risk of death were not apparent in their research until after age 50 years. In more recent cohorts ...

Language: en