Browsing by Subject "nuoret rikoksentekijät"

Goals. Small minority of chronic offenders commit disproportional amount of crime in society. However, efficient pre-emptive measures against crime can be seen benefiting everyone in the society. One challenging subgroup is considered to be offenders with high psychopathic traits. Yet psychopathy doesn't seem to be an obstacle for everyone in adjusting and being successful in society – at least when considering socioeconomic status and lack of conflicts with law enforcement. The goal of this study is to explore if parental characteristics and psychopathic traits could jointly be related with different paths to criminal and non-criminal lifestyle. Methods. This thesis employed data drawn from Pathways to Desistance Study. The data was collected between 2000 and 2010 in the United States. Participants were recruited from local court system after they were put on trial for a felony in Pennsylvania and in Arizona. In all 1051 adolescent males participated who were between the ages of 14 and 17 at the time of their crime. 94% of the participants were born in the United States, and together they formed multi-ethnic sample. Binary logistic regression analysis was used to explore the relationships between psychopathic traits, parental characteristics and re-offending after the trial. Also, the moderator effect of psychopathic traits on the relationship between parental characteristics and re-offending was explored. Used parental variables consisted of parental warmth, hostility, knowledge and monitoring of adolescent's spare time, and parents' socioeconomic status. Both aggressive offending and income offending were used as two separate outcome variables. The used crime rates were based on participants' self-reporting approximately two years after their trial. Results and conclusions. Higher level of parental hostility was found to be related to higher probability of offending. Parents' higher knowledge and monitoring of adolescent's spare time was found to be a related to lower probability of offending. Higher psychopathic traits increased the risk of offending. Psychopathic traits also moderated the relationship between parental hostility and offending. Parental hostility was found to be a risk factor for aggressive offending only among participants with low or moderate psychopathic traits but not among participants with high psychopathic traits. However, more research is needed to gain understanding of causality. Nevertheless, the results seem to highlight that among adolescents with high psychopathic traits effectiveness of interventions targeting delinquency is determined by how well their personality and unique characteristics are integrated into intervention strategies.