Pittsburgh study profiles young killers and victims
Rolf Loeber and colleagues didn’t anticipate the magnitude of tragedy they would encounter when they began following more than 1,500 Pittsburgh boys from childhood into their adult years to study the developmental pathways that lead children to delinquency and crime.
Over the course of more than two decades, 39 of those boys were murdered. Another 37 were convicted of homicide. And 33 others were arrested on homicide charges, but not convicted.
“That was terribly unexpected. We had no idea that we would have so many killings,” said Loeber, professor of psychiatry, psychology and epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh and principal investigator of the Pittsburgh Youth Study.
The researchers knew the young men from their interviews. They knew the extent to which they had encountered difficulties in life, how they did in school, their family backgrounds, their psychopathology. It was a rare glimpse into the lives of murderers and victims that offered an opportunity to gain from tragedy a better understanding of the circumstances that lead to deadly outcomes and how others might be diverted from those paths and avoid similar fates.
Their findings are detailed in a recent book, Young Homicide Offenders and Victims: Risk Factors, Prediction, and Prevention from Childhood, written by Dr. Loeber and David P. Farrington, O.B.E., professor of psychological criminology at Cambridge University.
The researchers report that it’s not a single circumstance, but a culmination of certain negative life experiences that leads boys to kill or be killed. And the experiences most commonly shared among boys convicted of homicide range from having earlier committed other crimes to having been suspended from school and raised in a broken home.
The Pittsburgh Youth Study is one of three long-term investigations of the roots of delinquency and violence that were started with U.S. Department of Justice Office funding decades ago. The other sites are in Denver, Colo. and Rochester, N.Y.
In Pittsburgh, 1,517 boys ranging in age from 7 to 13 were chosen from a randomly selected group of boys enrolled in the Pittsburgh Public Schools. About 56 percent of the boys in the study were African American. The rest were white.
The boys and their parents or caretakers have been regularly assessed, beginning in each boy’s developmental years and continuing into adulthood. Researchers have done an estimated 50,000 assessments in the course of nearly 25 years, most of which have been face-to-face interviews.
Boys who become serious criminal offenders are not psychopaths who act unpredictably, the study shows. Instead, they tend to follow developmental pathways – very orderly progressions that lead them to delinquency and violence.
The Pittsburgh Youth Study identifies three such pathways. The “authority conflict” pathway begins with stubborn behavior, progresses to defiance and then to authority avoidance, such as truancy. The “covert” pathway begins with a boy committing minor covert acts, such as shoplifting, and gradually moving to more serious delinquent acts, such as car theft.
A third, known as the “overt” pathway, is particularly relevant to young homicide offenders and murder victims. Boys who follow it tend to start with acts of minor aggression, such as bullying, then graduate to gang fighting and physical fighting before committing severe acts of violence, including murder.
Researchers looked at the lives of the boys convicted of murder to learn what experiences and circumstances they shared that would help to predict such tragic outcomes. They looked at dozens of criminal factors — factors that reflect anti-social behavior and “explanatory” factors, such as those related to a boy’s family or neighborhood.
Prior criminal or delinquent acts most strongly predicted a later homicide conviction. Among the boys convicted of murder, for example, 76 percent reported having carried a gun and 62 percent had engaged in gang fights, aggravated assault or robbery. Researchers were surprised to find that several types of property crimes committed up to age 14 also strongly predicted a homicide conviction, which suggested the boys had already become versatile criminal offenders.
Having been suspended from school was the most common behavioral risk factors found among the boys convicted of homicide, 78 percent of whom had been suspended at least once. More than half of boys convicted of murder were also found to have a positive attitude toward delinquency, to have a disruptive behavior disorder and to have committed a prior serious delinquent act.
Growing up in a broken home was also very common. Some 89 percent of boys convicted for murder had that experience. Other experiences the boys were most likely to share included living in a bad neighborhood, and being raised by a young mother, an unemployed mother and in a family poor enough to qualify for welfare.
Out of the more than 50 risk factors and acts of delinquency examined, seven were found to be the best at independently predicting a homicide conviction. They are: a prior simple assault arrest, conspiracy conviction, self-report of having carried a weapon, an attitude that favors delinquency, having a young mother, school suspension and living in a bad neighborhood.
The more of those circumstances a boy experiences, the more likely he is become a convicted homicide offender, the study suggests. For example, having experienced at least four of the risk factors identified 62 percent of the Pittsburgh Youth Study boys who were convicted of murder.
The study also found that boys who became murder victims shared many of same experiences and circumstances as those who were convicted of murder. Boys convicted of homicide, for example, did not grow up more deprived or exposed to more negative life experiences than boys who were murdered. And both had histories of breaking the law.
Among murder victims, 56 percent had prior arrests. The most common crimes they committed included car theft, aggravated assault, receiving stolen property, drug offenses and conspiracy. And 44 percent had a conviction before they turned 14.
Such findings suggest the path to murder among young urban males often includes participating, to some degree, in an underground economy in which conflict and violence is not uncommon. If there is a glimmer of hope in such findings, it’s that finding ways to weaken that underground economy or steer boys clear of it could lower their risks of becoming the perpetrators or victims of murder. In the meantime, as the Pittsburgh Youth Study makes clear, their disputes are too often being resolved by deadly means.