Examining the Overlap Among Career Criminals, Low Self-Control, and Neuropsychological Functioning in a Sample of Adolescent Arrestees

There has been considerable interest in understanding the causes, behavioral patterns, and consequences associated with career criminals. Much of the early research on career criminals was atheoretical, but with the advancement of life-course and developmental research more and more research on career criminals was guided by theoretical explanations. Even so, there remains much that is unknown about whether criminological theories are useful in explaining career criminals. The current study partially addressed this gap in the literature by examining whether concepts drawn from Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) theory and Moffitt’s (1993) taxonomy were able to explain age of criminal onset and the duration of the criminal career and whether career criminal measures were associated with the odds of being convicted and incarcerated when accounting for measures from these criminological theories. Arrestees drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) were analyzed. The results of some of the models revealed that low self-control and neuropsychological functioning were related to age of criminal onset, but not the duration of the criminal career. Moreover, measures of self-control, neuropsychological functioning, and age of criminal onset were unrelated to the odds of being convicted and incarcerated.