Latent classes of criminal intent associated with criminal behaviour

Daniel Boduszek, Katie Dhingra, Camille Stander, Maria Ioannou, Derrol Palmer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Background
This study aimed to examine the number of latent classes of criminal intent that exist among prisoners and to look at the associations with recidivism, number of police arrests, type of offending (robbery, violent offences, murder, and multiple offences), and age.

Participants and procedure
Latent class analysis was used to identify homogeneous subgroups of prisoners based on their responses to the 10 questions reflecting criminal intent. Participants were 309 male recidivistic prisoners incarcerated in a maximum security prison. Multinomial logistic regression was used to interpret the nature of the latent classes, or groups, by estimating the association between recidivism and latent classes of criminal intent while controlling for offence type (robbery, violent offences, murder, and multiple offences), number of arrests, and age.

Results
The best fitting latent class model was a three-class solution: ‘High criminal intent’ (49.3%), ‘Intermediate criminal intent’ (41.3%), and ‘Low criminal intent’ (9.4%). The latent classes were differentially related to the external variables (recidivism, violent offences, and age).
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)92-102
Number of pages11
JournalCurrent Issues in Personality Psychology
Volume2
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 Jul 2014

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