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Can Rose's paradox be useful in delinquency prevention?

Christoffersen, MN; Joshi, H; (2015) Can Rose's paradox be useful in delinquency prevention? Longitudinal and Life Course Studies , 6 (4) pp. 397-419. 10.14301/llcs.v6i4.274. Green open access

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Abstract

Geoffrey Rose’s prevention paradox obtains when the majority of cases with an adverse outcome come from a population of low or moderate risk, and only a few from a minority ‘high risk’ group. Preventive treatment is then better targeted widely than on the ‘high risk’ minority. This study tests whether the prevention paradox applies to the initiation of criminal behaviour, as recorded in longitudinal administrative data from Denmark. Children born in 1984 are followed from birth to early adulthood. A discrete-time Cox model allows for changing covariates over time. The initiation of criminal behaviour is defined as getting a police record between the ages of 15 and 22 as a result of a criminal matter. This outcome was predicted, more accurately than by chance, by a combination of over twenty risk factors, reflecting the major crime reduction paradigms. However, it seems impossible to identify a minor group (<5%) in the population from whom criminals are exclusively recruited. Our example illustrates how the applicability of Rose’s prevention strategy, population based, rather than targeted, depends on how narrowly ’high-risk group’ is defined, for a given distribution of estimated risk, and allows for the possible complementarity of population and targeted measures.

Type: Article
Title: Can Rose's paradox be useful in delinquency prevention?
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.14301/llcs.v6i4.274
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.14301/llcs.v6i4.274
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Authors 2015. This is an Open Access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.
Keywords: Birth Cohort, Criminal Behaviour, Juvenile Delinquency, Prevention, Life Course, Childhood Risk Factors, Register data
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1475856
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