David Rose has a useful summary of the state of research into the emergence of persistent criminal behavior in the latest issue of Prospect magazine. It’s looking increasingly like genetics has an awful lot to do with it. The implications for criminal justice, rehabilitation programs and liberties in general are pretty profound. Just to link it to the current debate, we have this:

Research into parent training programmes is now relatively advanced in Britain and the US. In December 2005, its value was given the official imprimatur of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice). The Institute of Psychiatry’s Stephen Scott, one of the co-authors of the Nice evaluation and a doyen in the field, summarises the state of knowledge as to what constitutes effective parent training. Parents, he says, make a much bigger difference than teachers in the development of children’s social skills, and by the same token—as the Dunedin and other studies indicate—poor parenting has a devastating impact. What seem to work, according to several studies by Scott and others, are rigorous behavioural approaches, administered in groups over a period of about three months. For some parents, the basic elements of this training—the setting of boundaries and consistent rules, the swift application of appropriate disciplinary sanctions and the giving of praise when things go well—are second nature. For others, it is clear, they are not.
Training, says Scott, is not effective in all cases: about a fifth of the children whose parents are trained will fail to improve significantly. But there is reason to believe that many families and children can be rescued from a vicious spiral, and placed in a virtuous one: “After the intervention, parents were giving their children far more praise to encourage desirable behaviour and more effective commands to obtain compliance,” says Scott in one paper. Their relationships were significantly better.

As the essay highlights, sociological criminologists are prone to dismiss the recent work as mere determinism. That’s obviously not quite the case. It’s also disappointing that the discipline appears determined to ignore some pretty rigorous science.