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This study aims to investigate the potential moderating effect of the average annual ambient temperature in 24 European countries on the relationship between criminal thinking (reactive vs proactive) and juvenile offending (violent vs property).

The average annual ambient temperatures found in 24 European countries were correlated with measures of reactive vs proactive criminal thinking and violent vs property offending in 56,518 students (50.4% female) from the second International Self-Reported Delinquency Study. These data were analyzed using a multilevel model comprising three Level 1 (student) predictors – age, sex and family structure – one Level 2 (country) predictor – ambient temperature – and two outcome measures – a reactive: proactive criminal thinking index (RPI) and a violent: property offending index (VPI).

The RPI and VPI correlated significantly with the Level 1 predictors, and the annual ambient temperatures from these 24 countries (Level 2 predictor) correlated positively with RPI and VPI and moderated the effect of reactive criminal thinking (RCT) on violent offending.

These findings indicate that ambient temperature correlates with violent/aggressive offending after the effects of property/non-aggressive offending have been controlled and suggest that ambient temperature may moderate the relationship between RCT and violent offending by affecting the decision-making process.

The contribution made by this study to the literature is that it illustrates how a macro-level influence in the form of average annual temperature can impact on micro-level processes in the form of criminal thinking and violent behavior.

Although most aetiological theories of crime assume that offenders are a distinct subset of the population, there is evidence that many illegal acts are committed by people who have no convictions and are therefore not regarded as criminals. The question consequently arises as to whether there are aspects of illegal actions that set convicted offenders apart. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To answer this, a 45-item self-report questionnaire was administered to two samples (males 15-29 years): 185 prisoners and 80 young men without convictions.

The results draw attention to a distinguishing psychological dimension of instrumentality operating across the range of offence forms. Convicted offenders are more likely to commit crimes for direct gratification with intent when compared with the sorts of illegal activities that non-convicted respondents report they have done.

Careful matching of convicted criminals and those without convictions is extremely difficult. Future research that explores other non-criminal samples would therefore be of value.

Interventions with people who commit crimes need to carefully distinguish between those who are determined criminals and those whose activities are more likely to be part of an opportunistic culture.

The results challenge conceptualisation of criminals and criminality as something always distinct from those without convictions. It thus has implications for what theories of crime should seek to explain. The significance of instrumentality also give further force to the legal emphasis on men's area.

Homicide is the most severe form of crime and one that imposes the greatest societal costs. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the homicide circumplex, a set of traits, behaviors, psychological and psychiatric features that are associated with greater homicidal ideation, homicidal social cognitive biases, homicide offending and victimization, and psychopathology that is facilitative of homicide.

Using the data from a near population of federal supervised release offenders from the Midwestern USA, ANOVA, multinomial logistic, Poisson and negative binomial regression models were developed.

Greater homicidal ideation is associated with homicide offending, attempted homicide offending and attempted homicide victimization and predicted by gang activity, alias usage, antisocial personality disorder and intermittent explosive disorder. These behavioral disorders, more extensive criminal careers, African American status and gang activity also exhibited significant associations with dimensions of the homicide circumplex.

Developing behavioral profiles of offenders that exhibit homicidal ideation and behaviors are critical for identifying clients at greatest risk for lethal violence. The homicide circumplex is an innovation toward the goal that requires additional empirical validation.

Sex offender registration and notification act (SORNA) offenders are a source of scholarly study across the social, behavioral, forensic and legal sciences with the bulk of literature focusing on the legal standing and deterrent value of sexual offender registries. Less research focuses on the offending careers of current SORNA offenders relative to other types of sexual offenders whose current offense is not SORNA. The purpose of the current study is to examine this issue empirically.

Using cross-sectional data from a census of male federal offenders who ever perpetrated a sexual offense from the central USA between 2016 and 2020, the current study used t-tests, logistic regression and negative binomial regression to compare current SORNA offenders to other federal correctional clients in terms of their lifetime offending history, sexual violence and compliance on federal supervision.

Current SORNA offenders are significantly more severe and versatile in their sexual offending, have more extensive criminal careers and criminal justice system involvement, and exhibit significantly increased odds of revocation on supervised release despite controls for age, race and ethnicity. However, sensitivity models that specified the federal Post-Conviction Risk Assessment reduced the effects of SORNA status to non-significance in all models.

SORNA offenders are potentially a significant offender group with evidence of both and given their versatile and specialized lifetime offending and noncompliance on federal supervision. However, current SORNA status is rendered spurious once a risk assessment is controlled suggesting more research is needed to evaluate whether sex offender registries posit greater crime control benefit.

This paper aims to explore the link between dangerous driving and other criminal behaviour.

Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) five-step process for scoping reviews to identify, summarise and classify identified literature was used. Within the 30-year timeframe (1990–2019), 12 studies met the inclusion criteria.

This review indicates that individuals who commit certain driving offences are more likely to also have a general criminal history. In particular, driving under the influence, driving unlicensed and high-range speeding offences were associated with other forms of criminal behaviour. Seven of the studies mentioned common criminological theories; however, they were not integrated well in the analysis. No studies used explanatory psychosocial theories that investigate social and contextual factors.

Future research in this area would benefit from exploring individual and social influences that contribute to criminal behaviour in both contexts.

There is the potential to develop an information-led policing approach to improve safety on the roads and reduce wider offending behaviour. However, it is critical that road policing officers continue to focus on ensuring the road system is as safe as possible for users.

Criminal behaviour on the roads is often seen as a separate from other types of offending. This paper explores if, and how, these two types of offending are linked.

Sexual sadism is a well-known risk factor for severe forms of sexual violence including sexual homicide and serial sexual homicide. The research is decidedly mixed about the association between sexual sadism and other, nonsexual forms of criminal conduct. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Drawing on data from a census of 225 federal sex offenders from a jurisdiction in the Midwestern USA, the current study examined whether sexual sadism had a spillover effect into nonsexual crimes using correlation, ANOVA, and negative binomial regression models.

Sexual sadism was strongly associated with diverse forms of nonsexual criminal behavior, and sexual sadists had more extensive and versatile criminal careers than sex offenders without a formal diagnosis.

Practitioners should be aware of sexual sadism as a criminogenic risk factor. Sexual sadism is associated with sexual deviance and sexual violence. Sexual sadism also has spillover effects where it is associated with nonsexual offending.

Sexual sadism can be a useful risk factor for other forms of crime and recidivism and has broad application in applied correctional and research settings.

The present study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Ad Health) to evaluate the effects of exposure to violent victimization in childhood on adolescent delinquency and subsequent adult criminality.

Using Longitudinal Latent Class Analysis (LLCA), the present study investigates whether there are distinct and diverse longitudinal delinquency trajectories among those exposed to violence in childhood.

Findings from the current study indicate that there are three distinct trajectories of delinquency and offending from age 14 to 27 for both males and females exposed to violence in childhood. Further, it appears that violent victimization in childhood bridges the gender gap in delinquency between males and females. Thus, childhood violent victimization, and the fact that females are victimized by parents/caregivers and romantic partners at higher rates than males, might be partially responsible in explaining the narrowing of the gender gap between male and female offending in the recent decades. At the same time, childhood violent victimization also seems to impact males and females in somewhat different ways. Practically, all female victims stop offending by their late 20s, whereas a fairly large proportion of males exposed to violent victimization in childhood steadily continue offending.

Although this study was able to identify the diverse impacts of violence exposure on engagement in subsequent delinquency, it did not examine the unique contributions of each type of violence on adolescent outcomes or the chronicity of exposure to each of these types of violent victimization. We were also not able to measure all types of violence experiences in childhood, such as exposure to parents’ or caregivers’ intimate partner violence.

While early prevention would be the most desirable option for both genders for the most optimal outcome, the retrospective intervention and treatment programs should be gender-specific. For males, they should heavily focus on providing alternative ways to cope with anger, impulse control and frustration, as well as teach empathy, cognitive problem solving skills, verbal communication skills, and tangible life and job skills. For females, most successful intervention and treatment programs may focus on helping the girls through a transition from adolescence to adulthood while providing mental health, medical, and family support services.

The paper uses a unique methodological approach to identify distinct and diverse longitudinal delinquency trajectories. The findings demonstrate how more resilient individuals (in terms of externalizing behaviors) can bring down the mean scores of delinquency even though many other individuals can be severely affected by violence exposure in childhood.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how first-time offenders and habitual criminals, while displaying wide differences in offense frequency, appear to follow a similar pattern in committing crime.

A conceptual approach is adopted in this paper.

It is argued that criminal thinking is the common denominator in both patterns, the difference being that habitual criminals have a higher resting level of proactive and reactive criminal thinking than first-time offenders. With an earlier age of onset, the habitual criminal may be more impulsive and reactive than first-time offenders, which partially explains why most low-rate offenders are not identified until adulthood.

Because actual and perceived deterrents to crime correlate weakly, if at all, it is recommended that perceived environmental events and criminal thinking be the primary targets of prevention and intervention programs.

Environmental stimuli, such as events that produce general strain, increase opportunities for crime, reinforce criminal associations, irritate the individual and interfere with the deterrent effect of perceived certainty, can both augment and interact with criminal thinking to increase the likelihood of a criminal act in both first-time offenders and habitual criminals.

The unique aspect of this paper is that it illustrates that certain features of crime and criminality are found across offending levels, whereas other features are more specific to a particular level.

The Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (Tri-PM) was developed in 2010 as an alternative approach to the assessment of psychopathy. The measure aims to capture psychopathic traits on a 3-factor model, which encompass the characteristics established in previous measures, as well as those evidenced within practise. Though support for the tool in academic research is growing, less is known about the scale’s utility within crime forensic settings. Thus, this study aims to explore the relationship between the Tri-PM psychopathy constructs and criminal cognition within a forensic sample.

Seventy-three adult male offenders, convicted for acquisitive or sexual crimes, from a Category B prison within the Northwest of England completed questionnaires measuring their criminal backgrounds, psychopathy traits (Tri-PM; Patrick, 2010) and criminal thinking styles (Psychology Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles; Walters, 2001).

The Tri-PM measurement proved to be a successful predictor of most criminal thinking styles. Moreover, the meanness construct was the strongest predictor of proactive thinking styles, whereas the disinhibition construct was the strongest predictor of reactive thinking styles, and the boldness construct was negatively associated with reactive thinking. Comparisons among offender groups also indicated that acquisitive offenders reported higher scores of psychopathy and criminal thinking.

This study offers valuable insight into the proposed relationship between psychopathy and criminal thinking, using a recent addition to the repertoire of psychopathy measurements, the Tri-PM. This study also offers practical implications for those offering treatment within forensic settings, with significant relationships identified between the highly scoring psychopathy constructs and various criminal thinking styles.

Over the last few decades there has been increased interest in studying the phenomenon of violence among people with intellectual disabilities (ID). Research addressing offending and victimization among this population suffers from generalised androcentrism by extrapolating findings to women, and is also homogenising, ignoring any individual and gendered differences. Existing research also demonstrates a clear focus on vulnerability and increased risk of victimization, but very little attention has been paid to women with ID as perpetrators of crime. Many factors play a role in the process of victimisation and offence, which implies the need to deconstruct the hegemonic vision of violence and examine its different manifestations and nuances. Therefore, this chapter provides a critical and historical review of the role of women with ID as victims and perpetrators of crime, by synthesising the different levels of analysis of the subject using an intersectionality approach. In conclusion, the evidence so far does not elucidate the prevalence or characteristics of these offenders. What we do know is that this group faces interacting, individual, social and environmental difficulties. They report high rates of victimisation and mental health comorbidity. Altogether they reveal an overlapping status of victim and offender.