Family relationships, juvenile delinquency, and adult criminality

Home observations during childhood and criminal records 30 years later are used to address questions of relative impact among features of child rearing influencing male criminal outcomes. The results suggest two mechanisms: Maternal behavior appears to influence juvenile delinquency and, through those eflects, adult criminali@. Paternal interaction with the family, however, appears to have a more direct influence on the probability of adult criminal behavior. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE Historically, family interactions have been assumed to influence criminal behavior. Plato, for example, prescribed a regimen for rearing good citizens in the nursery. Aristotle asserted that in order to be virtuous, “we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth ” (Bk.11, Ch. 3:11048). And John Locke wrote his letters on the education of children in the belief that errors “carry their afterwards-incorrigible taint with them, through all the parts and stations of life ” (1693:iv). Twentieth century theorists ranging from the analytic to the behavioral seem to concur with the earlier thinkers in assuming that parental care is critical to socialized behavior. Theorists have suggested that inadequate fam-ilies fail to provide the attachments that could leverage children into social-ized life-styles (e.g., Hirschi, 1969). They note that poor home environments provide a backdrop for children to associate differentially with those who have antisocial definitions of their environments (e.g., Sutherland and Cres-sey, 1974). And they point out that one feature of inadequate child rearing i