Learning difficulties: a retrospective study of their co morbidity and continuity as indicators of adult criminal behaviour in 18-70-year-old prisoners.
Early learning trouble was the strongest childhood signal that an adult prisoner had later broken the law.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Knight et al. (2013) looked back at the school histories of 117 Greek prisoners.
They asked what childhood problems were most linked to later crime.
The team recorded learning trouble, family issues, behavior disorders, and mood problems.
What they found
Learning problems in school stood out as the clearest early sign of adult offending.
Family, behavior, and mood issues also mattered, but learning issues carried the most weight.
How this fits with other research
Festinger et al. (1996) used the same survey tool with adults who have intellectual disability.
They showed that you must check both the person and a caregiver to get the full picture.
McGrother et al. (1996) found high unmet needs and carer stress in community adults with learning disability.
Together these papers trace a line: early learning trouble can lead to poor support, then to prison.
Why it matters
If a child you test shows slow reading or math, do not wait. Flag it, write it in the report, and push for extra teaching. That simple note could steer a kid away from the justice system years later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The development of learning difficulties is associated with problems in external (executive) and extensive behaviour in a co-occurrence with psycho-emotional problems beginning from pre-school, school age, and adolescence up to adulthood. Through the current survey, we aim to emphasise the early role of learning difficulties during the school age and adolescence of prisoners and their effects on the onset of offending behaviours in adulthood, such as criminal behaviour. Altogether, we studied 117 Greek adult prisoners from 18 to 70 years old who were accused of different types or degrees of offences. Through statistical analyses, the following factors were observed with high statistical significance as early indicators of criminal behaviour in the adult lives of the prisoners: (i) learning difficulties, (ii) family problems, (iii) behaviour disorders, (iv) developmental disorders, and (v) psycho-emotional disorders. As a result, the learning difficulties were assumed to be the most decisive factor in the developmental progression of prisoners because they manifested early in the prisoners' lives, weakened the prisoners to be competitive and robust, provoked a bad self-image and low self-esteem, and, in the frame of a weak or negative family and educational environment, they accompanied antisocial behaviour and psycho-emotional disorders even from adolescence, which continued into adulthood.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.08.033