title: Adolescence-limited versus life-course-persistent criminal behaviour in adolescent psychiatric inpatients.
abstract: A nation-wide sample of 1072 Norwegian adolescent psychiatric inpatients were followed up 15-33 (mean 23.8) years after hospitalisation, by record linkage to the National Register of Criminality. Defining criminal behaviour as entry into the criminal registry, 481 patients (45%) had an adolescent criminal debut, entering the registry before the age of 21. Of these, 130 (27%) had no criminal record after the age of 21 and were consequently considered as adolescence-limited criminal offenders, as opposed to the remaining 351 (73%) individuals who continued their criminal behaviour beyond the age of 21 and were considered as life-course-persistent criminal offenders. On the basis of hospital records, all patients were rediagnosed according to DSM-IV and scored on factors hypothesised to have predictive power as to persistence of criminal behaviour. We found that 79.6% of the male, and 58.8% of the female adolescent delinquents went on to life-course-persistent criminality. In females, intravenous use of illegal drugs, and being discharged from the hospital elsewhere than to the family home, were strong and independent predictors of life-course-persistent criminal behaviour. In males, the following were significant and independent predictors of life-course-persistent criminality: a high number of conduct disorder criteria fulfilled, comorbidity of psychoactive substance use disorder, and having attended correctional school.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kjelsberg
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D000328:Adult; D003415:Crime; D005260:Female; D006760:Hospitalization; D006778:Hospitals, Psychiatric; D006801:Humans; D007604:Juvenile Delinquency / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D009664:Norway / Q000453:epidemiology; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012042:Registries; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012737:Sex Factors