A recent study published in the “Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency,” indicates positive correlations between head injuries in childhood and delinquent behavior later in life.
The study was conducted by Joe Schwartz, assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UNO.
He says his interest in the topic was sparked by a newspaper article that looked at the prevalence of head injuries among the worst offenders at a Denver prison.
The reporter of the story found that 96% of those inmates had experienced some sort of a head injury prior to their current incarceration.
So Schwartz and his colleagues looked at data that had been collected by investigators over a decade. He says the sample included more than 1300 youth in the juvenile justice and criminal justice systems in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
"Those head injuries seem to result in a lower overall level of self-control. So what’s happening is an individual or a youth will sustain a head injury and that will result in a decrease in self-control, which in turn results in an increase in delinquency. So that’s the pattern we identified, the general pattern. But what we find is that those decreases in self-control are relatively short-lived.”
Schwartz says over time, as inmates reach adulthood, those levels of self-control normalize provided they don’t have any additional head injuries.
He says the study results provide valuable evidence and information that could be used to implement more effective treatment and intervention programming.