Transcript

Professor John Muncie

The survey found that about a fifth of their sample of four hundred and eleven had been convicted of criminal offences as juveniles, and over a third of them had been convicted by the time they were thirty-two. But about a half of all those convictions were attributed to only twenty-three what were then young men. That was less than six per cent of the sample. Based on this six per cent of what they call chronic offenders, they seem to share some common childhood characteristics. So this study, the Cambridge Study, argued that they were more likely to be rated as troublesome, impulsive and dishonest at primary school. They tended to come from poorer, larger families and were more likely to have criminal parents. Based on this data the research tried to identify the most salient individual, family and environment predictors, or if you like risk factors for future criminality.