Mullin, Annabel; (2024) Patterns of offending and desistance from crime in the 1970 British Cohort Study: The role of early socialisation. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Crime in the UK and further afield is a serious problem, and one that receives considerable attention from politicians, policymakers, researchers, and the media. There is evidence that ineffective early family life interactions impact the prevalence of crime rates and that a person’s relationship with agents of the law can encourage different levels of adherence to the law. This study uses crime data over 34 years from the 1970 British Cohort Study to examine risks of self-reported offending, and movement away from offending (desistance), over the life course. This study uses a unique method to operationalise desistance, in a manner that is argued to be internationally comparable: the cessation or diminishment to insignificance of the act of breaking moral rules of conduct stated in law, after age 30, having previously committed these acts. Unusually this study allows desistance to be understood as a process and an end state and also uses an age definition, a way of revealing the shape of an individual’s offending career in terms of social (key life events) and natural (age-crime curve) factors. Critically this work specifically focuses on the gendered nature of crime in the general populous and examines those differences in great detail. Similar to Moffitt’s dual typology, which focuses on ‘adolescent peaks’ and chronic offending, this study identified an Early onset desist group. However, unlike Moffitt’s work this study identifies additional patterns that call into question the continuing emphasis on a dual taxonomy. This study adds to the work that has found five specific offending patterns (six with resist) in self-report data. And although the Early Onset Desist group fits in with other research what is unique to this study is the identification of an unusually late commencement of the Late Bloomer offending group after the age of 30. Using carefully considered measures of early family – parent and sibling – socialisation and legal socialisation this research explores the risks associated with the offending patterns and then uniquely examines them in the specifically designed socialisation interplay theory model. In multinomial regression analysis it shows early and legal socialisation as significant influences, with lifelong impacts and distinct associations with the different offending patterns. These findings add to the evidence from other international studies, suggesting moderate to strong predictions and the predominance of early psychosocial variables over biological ones, apart from smoking in pregnancy.

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