Adolescence-limited versus life-course-persistent criminal behaviour in adolescent psychiatric inpatients.

A nation-wide sample of 1072 Norwegian adolescent psychiatric inpatients were followed up 15-33 (mean 23.8) years after hospitalisation, by record linkage to the National Register of Criminality. Defining criminal behaviour as entry into the criminal registry, 481 patients (45%) had an adolescent criminal debut, entering the registry before the age of 21. Of these, 130 (27%) had no criminal record after the age of 21 and were consequently considered as adolescence-limited criminal offenders, as opposed to the remaining 351 (73%) individuals who continued their criminal behaviour beyond the age of 21 and were considered as life-course-persistent criminal offenders. On the basis of hospital records, all patients were rediagnosed according to DSM-IV and scored on factors hypothesised to have predictive power as to persistence of criminal behaviour. We found that 79.6% of the male, and 58.8% of the female adolescent delinquents went on to life-course-persistent criminality. In females, intravenous use of illegal drugs, and being discharged from the hospital elsewhere than to the family home, were strong and independent predictors of life-course-persistent criminal behaviour. In males, the following were significant and independent predictors of life-course-persistent criminality: a high number of conduct disorder criteria fulfilled, comorbidity of psychoactive substance use disorder, and having attended correctional school.