Tracking the Development of Delinquency (Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship)

In 1993 Terrie Moffitt offered a developmental taxonomy of delinquency that proposed three distinct types of juveniles: Life-course-persistent offenders, Adolescence-limited offenders, and Abstainers. Saunders tests Moffitt's theory. Saunders finds that group-based trajectory modeling technique is insufficient in capturing the hypothetical subpopulations specified by Moffitt's theory. Findings were mixed with respect to Moffitt's hypotheses about the development of delinquency and its causes and correlates. Saunders found that the two major risk factors for a life of sustained antisocial involvement can be collected from elementary school teachers, who can therefore identify children who could benefit from additional services.